Masters Compare - Find your perfect masters course.
Masters Compare - Find your perfect masters course.
Study Details: 1 year 3 months full time (45 weeks across a four-term model)
MA Internet Equalities explores how power relations and structures of oppression are organised, embedded, and perpetuated by the internet across full stack technologies. ‘Stacks’ refer to the tangible layers of technology in its physical architecture – such as data and archives, infrastructure, tools, and code – but also to the essential, less tangible dimensions. These include the ways that the mediating structures through which interdependent digital systems are accessed, experienced and integrated can perpetuate and amplify offline inequalities in online spaces.
These layers shape the entire spectrum of knowledge creation and dissemination, impacting who is included in or excluded from digital systems; often reinforcing uneven and unequal conditions in distribution, capabilities, literacy, resources, reception, access and use.
In your practice-based or practice-led final project, you will address an internet inequality, exploring how the internet can be reimagined and whom it can serve in alternative digital futures that prioritise equity, inclusivity, and justice at every layer of the technology stack.
The course offers a choice of units to prepare you for diverse career pathways across sectors:
We are committed to ensuring that your skills are set within an ethical framework and are working to embed UAL’s Principles for Climate, Social and Racial Justice.
Sufficient prior knowledge and experience of and/or potential in a specialist subject area to be able to successfully complete the programme of study and have an academic or professional background in a relevant subject.
To show a willingness to work as a team player, good language skills in reading, writing and speaking, the ability to work independently and be self- motivated.
Critical knowledge of and enthusiasm for the subject area and capacity for research-led study at the intersection of technology, art, design, and ethics.
We welcome non-standard applications from a diversity of applicants and subject fields and applications that make a strong case for how the course could be applied to the ambitions of the applicant in the pursuit of more equitable technology, will be prioritised.
Students from this course will be well positioned to enter industry as practitioners who can build more equitable products and businesses, or pursue a research career through PhD progression in this area.
Graduates will be:
Graduates will be well placed to work in the following areas:
Critically explore how inequalities present in offline spaces are mirrored and often amplified within digital environments. Through an intersectional lens, you will investigate the structural, technical, and cultural aspects of internet technologies across all full stack layers – data, archives, infrastructure, tools, access, and experience – and consider how these layers intersect with race, gender, class, and other identities, often perpetuating bias, exclusion, and inequality. By engaging with key readings, real-world case studies with practical design responses, you will develop tools to critically assess and address digital inequalities from an intersectional perspective, positioning design as a powerful medium for change.
This unit complements the Intersectional Internets unit, providing you with practical skills to engage directly with the technical processes behind the digital systems you have critically examined. You will be introduced to the fundamentals of coding not as a single skill but as a layered process across the back-end, middle layer, and front-end, each contributing to the function and structure of the internet. By learning to work with different components of a digital system, you will develop the basic computational knowledge to critically assess and understand the complex architectures that shape internet inequalities. You will gain a foundational understanding of coding principles and practices in the context of free and collaborative development cultures with open-source tools and frameworks. You will have the opportunity to experiment with building small systems and tools to inform your ongoing engagement with equity and accessibility in digital technology.
This unit examines how inequality is structured into computational systems through full stack layers such as data, archives, infrastructure, code, algorithms, and interfaces. Computation is approached not as an isolated technical skill, but as a practice that connects full stack design with social and ethical responsibility. You will develop a systems-level understanding of how these layers function together, and how design and technical decisions across the stack can reproduce or challenge existing forms of inequality – both offline and online – through the use of open, crowdsourced data and technologies to support more equitable system design. Engaging with concepts such as surveillance capitalism, big data, and machine learning, you will study how computational systems are built, how data is collected and processed, and how computational processes influence access, visibility, and participation. By the end of this unit, you will produce a technical prototype and accompanying reflective documentation that demonstrates your ability to analyse, design, and intervene in computational systems with critical awareness.
Start your creative future at University of the Arts London About University of the Arts London (UAL) University of the Arts London (UAL) is hos...
