About the Graduate Programme
The Joint Graduate Programme in Communication & Culture is a unique partnership. Together, Ryerson and York offer a critical mass of faculty needed to advance the study of communication and culture.
Drawn from a number of disciplines, the distinguished faculty collectively represent a breadth of perspectives and professional experience in communications, the social sciences, humanities, media, and fine arts. All professors have strong records of achievement in scholarship and/or professional activity and many are internationally known.
Through this partnership, you are able to capitalize on courses, facilities, and other resources available at both campuses. In particular, you profit from:
York's tradition of innovative, interdisciplinary graduate programmes - ones that break new ground for learning and are as internationally well recognized as is the university's strong history of theory-building, research, and professional training.
Ryerson's record of applied education, and its extensive industry links in film, photography, multimedia and information technologies, radio, television, and new media.
The Programme, leading to MA and PhD degrees, is unique in Ontario in combining academic and professional work, with the objective of promoting the application of theory and research to contemporary issues and practices in communication and culture.
The Programme brings together perspectives from the social sciences, humanities and fine arts, and communication-and media-related professions, and aims to encourage innovative thinking, research, and practice. The curriculum reflects the view that advanced work in this field requires not only a thorough grounding in theory and method but also a grasp of the practices, processes, and technologies in contemporary communication and cultural production.

About the Graduate Programme
The MFA Program in Documentary Media is unique in Canada and one of a very limited number of such programs offered worldwide.

The focus of the MFA program is on producing documentary-based, innovative work in film, photography and new media. The core concept is documentary - the interdisciplinary nature of the program allows students to explore a variety of available options in terms of production and distribution, culminating in a single professional work, be it a film, book, exhibition, or online exploration of a subject.

All media production today is being redefined by new relationships to digital technology - and this is as true of documentary media as it is of anything else. Both film and photography have long-established connections to non-fiction narrative; the program strives to maintain a connection to tradition while encouraging innovative approaches to the making of documentaries such as non-liner narrative and experimentation. The MFA program is ideally situated to explore the relationship between existing documentary media forms and new, interactive and hybrid digital forms of storing and presenting visual information.

The Master of Fine Arts in Documentary Media is a full-time, two-year program that provides students with a solid basis for completing documentary work at a professional level.

About the Graduate Programme
The joint graduate program provides an integrated program of academic study and professional education that will equip students to meet current responsibilities and future demands in photographic preservation and in  managing and preserving photographic collections. Its faculty includes photographic historians, scientists, practitioners, curators and other museum professionals.

The  program is the only one of its kind in the world. Its curriculum is specifically designed to deepen students' understanding of  the history of the photographic medium, particularly its social, cultural, and instrumental uses, and the purposes and functions of photographs and photographic collections.

The intensive, two-year graduate program assumes that a photographic preservation specialist or collections manager must be acquainted with the materials of photography, with its history, the social and cultural conditions of its production, and the critical and theoretical conceptions that inform its reception.

Thirteen half-year courses, an internship, and a professional practice project are designed to provide students  with a graduate program in which historical knowledge, practical experience, and professional education are fully integrated. Course offerings in the graduate program include seminars in photographic materials and history, and issues of curatorial practice and practicums taught by preservation and conservation specialists. Students are required to
complete an internship in a professional setting between their first and second years.

Upon satisfactory completion of course work and other requirements of the graduate program, students are awarded the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in photographic preservation and collections management.