Why study MA Intercultural Communication and Public Administration at Exeter?
An interdisciplinary programme that will develop your intercultural awareness and competence, and give you an understanding of the theory and practice of intercultural communication, skills highly valued by employers in today’s global world.
Develop an in-depth understanding of the complexities of communication in a globalised world, the ability to apply the acquired discipline specific skills to address challenges and implement positive and sustainable solutions, and the ability to conflate others’ perspectives to navigate complex relationships locally and globally.
We take an international perspective to equip you with the skills and understanding you need to operate effectively in an increasingly global and constantly changing environment
Taught by experts in the field of intercultural communication, discourse analysis, language and globalisation, public administration, politics and international relations
Develop transferable skills, specialist knowledge and professional experience through interdisciplinary teaching
Entry requirements
We will consider applicants with a 2:2 Honours degree or above in a social science* or humanities subject. While we normally only consider applicants who meet this criteria, if you are coming from a different academic background which is equivalent to degree level, or have relevant work experience, we would welcome your application.
The University of Exeter offers a wide range of scholarships to support your education, with £7 million available for international students applying to study with us in the 2026/27 academic year, including our prestigious Exeter Excellence Scholarships. We also provide awards for sport, music and other achievements, as well as regional and partner scholarships with organisations such as Chevening, The Beacon Trust and the British Council. For more information on scholarships and other financial support, please visit our scholarships and bursaries page.
University of Exeter Alumni Scholarship
We are pleased to offer the University of Exeter Alumni Scholarship, a scholarship for University of Exeter alumni beginning a standalone postgraduate programme in 2026/27 with us a scholarship worth 20% of the cost of your first year tuition fees.
Core modules explore key concepts, such as culture, identity, acculturation, prejudice and othering, issues, debates, and critical approaches to intercultural communication from a global perspective that goes beyond Eurocentric or western perspectives.
You will also develop your research competence and critical reflection on the process of planning, designing, implementing, and presenting of research in preparation for your dissertation.
In one of the optional modules, Sustainable Development Goals Challenge, you join a team of international students and address a real-life sustainable development goal challenge. This ground-breaking module will help you gain first-hand experience in intercultural interactions.
The modules below provide examples of what you can expect to learn on this degree course based on recent academic teaching. The precise modules available to you in future years may vary depending on staff availability and research interests, new topics of study, timetabling and student demand.
Please note that the module information displayed here is subject to change.
150 credits of compulsory modules and 30 credits of optional modules
From Compulsory Choice Group 1 - Choose either SMLM088 or SMLM239.
From Public Administration Pathway Compulsory Choice Group - Choose 60 credits
From Optional Choice Group - Choose 30 credits.
Compulsory modules
Code
Module
Credits
Compulsory
Intercultural Communication: Key Concepts and Theories
30
Compulsory Choice
Dissertation
60
Consultancy Project
60
Public Administration Compulsory Choice
Management and Governance: Comparing Public Administration around the World
30
The Politics, Policy and Practice of Sustainable Development
30
Collaborative and Participatory Governance
30
Public Policy Process
30
SMLM087: Intercultural Communication: Key Concepts and Theories
This Intercultural Communication module provides you with an in-depth understanding of the complexities and challenges of communication across cultural boundaries. The module covers a range of contexts, including business, education, and migration. Through interactive lectures and individual fieldwork, you will develop intercultural competence and practical skills for communicating effectively in diverse cultural contexts. The module aims to equip you with the knowledge and skills necessary to navigate the complexities of intercultural communication in a globalised world.
The aim of this module is to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of intercultural communication, its theoretical foundations, and its practical applications in various social and cultural contexts. It will explore the complexities of communication across cultural boundaries, as well as the role of language, power, identity, and discourse in shaping intercultural interactions. You will gain an understanding of concepts such as culture, identity, language, culture shock, acculturation, prejudice and othering, verbal and non-verbal communication. Additionally, you will have the opportunity to collect first-hand data on specific intercultural settings for analysis and discussion.
This module will prepare you for undertaking the most substantial piece of work of your MA. In the first part of the module you will learn to plan and design your research project, to collect data following research approaches and methods in intercultural communication, and critically analyse data. You will have the chance to conduct a small-scale pilot study that will help you refine your dissertation project. In the second part of this module, you will have the opportunity to research a topic of your own choosing and to produce a piece of independent research.
The aims of this module are to help you:
critically examine the available theories of intercultural communication enquiry with a view to a research enquiry;
design an appropriate enquiry and select suitable methods for the enquiry and justify these in theoretical terms;
carry out a small-scale enquiry within the filed intercultural communication at Master's level;
interpret evidence and discuss its relevance to existing enquiry;
develop a critical understanding of the ethical issues associated with intercultural communication enquiry;
acquire communication skills that will allow you to present your research effectively.
The consultancy project, available only to MA Intercultural Communication students, serves as an alternative to the dissertation (SMLM088). The consultancy project enables you to showcase your research skills and critical thinking through practical work while fostering a mutual exchange of knowledge between you and an external partner within the field of Intercultural Communication. You will be responsible for initiating contact with the external partner, with support from the module convenor. In collaboration with the external partner, you will design and undertake a 6 to 10-week consultancy project that applies the knowledge of relevant theories and transferrable skills gained throughout your course.
This module aims to support you in making the most of a work experience in which you will connect theory with practice through experiential learning and design thinking methods. It aims to enhance your current and future employability skills by providing opportunities to apply your knowledge in professional settings. You will conduct relevant research, analyse data, and present your solution/recommendations in the form of a report (which may include a deliverable, e.g. toolkit, educational materials, etc.) and accompanying critical reflection on your work.
POLM220M: Management and Governance: Comparing Public Administration around the World
In this module you will compare public sector and private sector approaches to management challenges such as strategy formulation and implementation, recruiting a workforce, delivering services and ensuring accountability. The public sector faces distinctive pressures due to the political environment it operates in and the particular services it must deliver. Such pressures vary from country to country so you will explore and analyse evidence, examples and cases from different contexts.
You will analyse key managerial and governance tasks with a focus on the specifics of the public sector. You will become familiar with general conceptual frameworks for understanding the organisation and operation of public sectors. You will then explore some of the practical challenges of management in the public sector using research literature, case studies and examples.
POLM222M: The Politics, Policy and Practice of Sustainable Development
This is an advanced postgraduate module in which you will examine the policy and governance problems of sustainable development. On this module you will study distinctive features of environmental policy problems in relation to sustainable development such as the way they spill over jurisdictional borders and have long term consequences that can be difficult for political leaders to address. You will critically analyse the various interpretations of 'sustainable development' and their implications for policy choice. You will conduct in-depth analysis of sustainable development strategies and related environmental policy and reflect on the general lessons that can be learned from them.
This module aims to provide you as professional policy makers and public managers with an advanced introduction to the concept of sustainable development and the policy-making challenges presented by its various features. You will develop an understanding of the trade-off between environmental protection and economic development. The module aims to widen your understanding of sustainable development policy challenges by analysing problems in various decision making contexts. On completing this module you will have a firm grasp of the key debates in sustainable development and will be able to critically assess approaches pursue sustainable development.
POLM237M: Collaborative and Participatory Governance
This module will equip you with the knowledge, understanding and skills to address two important but challenging aspects of contemporary public policy and administration: (i) working across organisational and departmental boundaries; (ii) working with 'publics' and other stakeholders with a stake in specific policy issues (e.g. interest groups, communities). You will be introduced to both the theory and practice of these topics, and learn about navigating and overcoming the challenges of collaborative and participatory governance through case studies, and a mixture of theoretically and empirically oriented research articles. This module will be beneficial if you have experience of working in the public or non-profit sector or if you wish to pursue a career in these sectors. There are no pre-requisites or co-requisites for this module.
Tackling society's most pressing problems often requires practitioners and public managers to work across, and in spite of, organisational boundaries. Moreover, finding solutions to these problems often involves working collaboratively with the communities and publics affected. The module aims to develop your knowledge and understanding of collaborative and participatory modes of governance in public policy and administration.
The module provides skills and knowledge in a social science approach to public policy analysis, grounded in political science but extending to include concepts from economics of efficiency and equity along with behavioural and psychological based concepts. Topics include the 'public' aspect of the policy process (focusing on public ownership, funding and regulation), the policy cycle approach (development, formulation, implementation and analysis/evaluation). Key concepts are introduced including theory of markets, failures, externalities and public goods. Students gain an overview of policy analysis methods including use of qualitative and quantitative evidence, basic cost benefit analysis, and experimental methods for policy analysis. Students learn and critically analyse the methods for public policy analysis and carry out tasks to develop skills for conducting analysis applicable to a range of topic areas and organisations.
This module aims to:
Develop skills and knowledge that are important for policy making relevant both to public organisations and private organisations in sectors where public policy is important.
Develop skills and knowledge about the policy process, policy development, implementation, analysis and evaluation
Develop skills and knowledge about the role of evidence, values and analysis in public policy and become familiar with ways to avoid common biases and mistakes in public policy.
Future 17: Sustainable Development Goals Challenge
15
Corporate Language and Communication: When Sharks Work with Dolphins
15
Migration and Multilingualism
15
BEP3172: Future 17: Sustainable Development Goals Challenge
Future17 is designed to develop the skills needed to collaboratively tackle 21st Century global challenges and to work with professionals to create pathways towards innovative solutions to real-world issues that relate to one or more of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Future17 enables students to collaborate with learners from a consortium of global partner universities in international, interdisciplinary and multicultural teams to tackle challenges through projects defined by third-party organisations (businesses, charities, NGOs etc.). Students will first undertake an online induction programme that will develop skills for collaborative, challenge-based and inter-cultural learning, which promotes forms of Design Thinking for tackling global challenges. They will then work with academic and third-party mentors to diagnose a sustainable development challenge and develop an approach for developing one or more solutions. They will be assessed on the basis of a 1500 project report and presentation to a panel including representatives of the third-party organisation that set the challenge and academic staff from the partner universities along with other student groups at a showcase event.
SML3026: Corporate Language and Communication: When Sharks Work with Dolphins
In today's corporate world, language, discourse, and communication play a key role in navigating complex work relations. Struggles with communication in unequal work environments have serious material and symbolic consequences. This module will equip you with an understanding of how linguistic exchanges play a key role in tackling crises, conflict, and everyday inequalities in corporate language. We will examine empirical studies from sociolinguistics, applied linguistics and discourse analysis and explore concepts such as language as practice, interactional sociolinguistics, and (critical) discourse analysis to analyse spoken and written language in real life scenarios including new media to explore, for example, how individuals brand themselves in corporate settings. You do not need any prior knowledge to take this module. It is suitable for non-specialist students and recommended for interdisciplinary pathways.
The module aims to:
Examine key theoretical frameworks such as language in use, language legitimacy, professional communication and competence, linguistic capital, language policing and rapport building in the workplace.
Explore what corporate communication is and how you could develop ability to respond to today's competitive work environments where hierarchies intersecting with gender, ethnicity and race play a key role in linguistic delegitimization, language policing, linguistic violence, and socio-cultural problems.
Develop tactics to navigate through linguistic injustices in the workplace with theoretical frameworks such as corporate discourse, corporate culture, language in interaction, corporate identity, labour surveillance, language ideology, language in society, humour at work, and gendered discourse in a range of contexts pertaining to today's workplace.
Develop communicative competence, transform workplace inequalities, and provide with some tactics and strategies for employability.
Around two-thirds of the world's migrant population is multilingual and due to migration a high level of linguistic diversity is now the norm in our society. In this module, you will explore the link between migration and languages, learn how migrant communities use and maintain their languages, as well as their attitudes and ideologies, through a wide variety of real-life case studies. You will learn how individual migrants or immigrant communities use their languages, how and why some languages are maintained, how the use of languages among migrants varies according to several factors such as different communicative situations, the migratory trajectory, speakers' attitudes towards the languages and shared ideologies.
You will be introduced to sociolinguistic concepts and means of analysis for the study of multilingualism in the context of migration. This module is interdisciplinary with no pre-requisites and will benefit students across language streams. If you need the module to count for credits towards a specific language, you must engage with material relevant to that language in your assessment.
You will be taught by experts in the field of intercultural communication, discourse analysis, language and globalisation, multilingualism and migration. You will learn collaboratively with other students and the wider postgraduate research community.
Research in Modern Languages and Cultures is characterised by world-leading and internationally excellent research centres, which span a wide range of sub-disciplinary fields including:
Associate Professor of Migration and Multilingualism
Dr Susana Afonso
Associate Professor in Language, Cognition and Society
Dr Birgül Yilmaz
Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Communication
Professor Francesco Goglia
Associate Professor of Migration and Multilingualism
Professor Goglia’s teaching reflects his research interests in multilingualism. He’s always keen to share his findings with his students and encourage them to share their experiences of multilingualism both in seminar discussions and assessments.
In 2021, he was awarded a Community-Engaged Incubator: Students as Teachers of Multilingualism: a Bi-Directional Project between the University of Exeter and Rokeby School, a secondary school in the borough of Newham in East London. This pilot project tested an innovative method of community-engaged learning on multilingualism and linguistic diversity, in which both student cohorts were engaged in online teaching and learning activities.
He's also a member of the Society of Italian Studies Equality, Diversity and Inclusion working group, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Associate Professor in Language, Cognition and Society
Susana Afonso is Associate Professor of Language, Cognition and Society. Her research specialism is in Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar. She has conducted a number of studies on language variation from a Cognitive Sociolinguistics perspective, in particular in relation to Portuguese as a global language. She also engages in interdisciplinary collaboration with researchers in Education in non-formal contexts, investigating the how the use of language in science museums between museum educators and audience may enable co-production of meanings or maintain well-established power dynamics.
Dr Birgül Yılmaz is a Senior Lecturer in Intercultural Communication. She leads the core module of SMLM087 and SMLM088 on the MA in Intercultural Communication and creates optional modules based on her over a decade long ethnographic fieldwork gained internationally.
Dr Yılmaz is a Critical Sociolinguist and Applied Linguist, specialising in the areas of sociolinguistics of forced migration, humanitarianism, ethnography, critical/ discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, and linguistic practice in institutional and precarious settings such as refugee camps. Her teaching is social justice oriented and builds awareness on everyday intercultural communicative inequalities.
She is a member of the International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication (IALIC), the British Association for Applied Linguistics (BAAL), the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL), and the Linguistic Ethnography Forum (LEF).
You will be equipped with skills highly valued by employers such as communication in multicultural environments, understanding the complexities of communication in a globalised world, analytical and presentation skills, critical thinking and research-oriented skills, including planning skills and time management.
Careers
Professionals with the ability to work in diverse cultural and linguistic settings are required in a range of organisations. We have a long history of teaching public administration and public policy to postgraduates at Exeter. Students have gone on to careers in regional governments, ministries, embassies and other organisations around the world. Career paths include NGOs, international development, multilingual schools, and universities. Alternatively, you may undertake PhD research and an academic career.
The majority of students are based at our Streatham Campus in Exeter. The campus is one of the most beautiful in the country and offers a unique environment in which to study, with lakes, parkland, woodland and gardens as well as modern and historical buildings.
Located on the eastern edge of the city centre, St Luke's is home to Sport and Health Sciences, the Medical School, the Academy of Nursing, the Department of Allied Health Professions, and PGCE students.
Our Penryn Campus is located near Falmouth in Cornwall. It is consistently ranked highly for satisfaction: students report having a highly personal experience that is intellectually stretching but great fun, providing plenty of opportunities to quickly get to know everyone.
