Internships

Internship units offer an opportunity for direct work experience in a range of organisations, businesses and institutions undertaking or requiring applied cultural research or analysis: from education, legal, policy, media or popular culture research to consumer or community ethnography. They are open to postgraduate students on the Master of Cultural Studies and the Graduate Diploma in Cultural Studies, and also the Master of Arts by research, the Doctor of Arts and Doctor of Social Sciences. Candidates will undertake an internship of 20 days/140 hours subject to availability of an appropriate placement and approval of its intellectual relevance and viability.

Aims

The Internship is intended to complement the on-campus aspect of postgraduate Cultural Studies by highlighting the relevance of critical cultural issues to application in a range of institutional contexts. Students will also gain valuable experience of workplace skills, such as teamwork and project management.

On the successful completion of this subject students will be able to:

• Demonstrate familiarity with the applied significance of themes in cultural studies as they pertain in a particular organizational context.
• Identify critical and methodological issues arising from cultural research and respond to them reflexively and constructively.
• Critique and develop a research problem that arises from their personal experience of applied cultural research.

Arranging placement

Our Internship Officer (see below) is able to offer guidance in finding placements. The placement may entail involvement in a specific project or taking a general role in a workplace that undertakes cultural work, broadly defined (from multiculturalism to media, gender to NGOs and the cultural sector). The Department has links with organisations in the following areas:

• women's policy
• community cultural development
• public health promotion
• advocacy for migrant, Indigenous and refugee communities
• arts and cultural policy
• public broadcasting
• social research
• market research
• community theatre

Students are welcome to suggest their own internship field or host organization, which can also, where relevant, be one where the candidate already works.

The placement may be undertaken either full-time over four weeks or part-time, locally, or outside Sydney (when a student has no other on-campus study commitments and has adequate access to resources and means of communication). The mode chosen must be compatible with the student’s other postgraduate study. Full-time placements during semester are not permitted for full-time students. Placements can be taken outside of semester.

The Units