British Studies hailed a success at the University of the Highlands and Islands
Register for free to read more of the latest local news. It's easy and will only take a moment.
A MASTERS degree course called British Studies is said to be flourishing at the University of the Highlands and Islands.
Programme leader Jim MacPherson believes the flurry of recent referendum activity is driving student interest.
The high ranking academic said the course was attracting an increasing numbers of students from the Highlands and all over the UK, as well as Europe and the United States.
He said the purpose of the course was to "question the idea of Britishness, rather than uphold it".
And he believes that the subject will become even more relevant if Scotland votes for independence in a future referendum.
He said: "The two recent referenda have certainly piqued people’s interest.
"One of the key functions of the programme is to use the academic study of the past to make sense of the contemporary world.
"So, while students come from a diverse range of backgrounds, they should all come to the end of the course having engaged critically with the idea of Britishness, and having recognised the diversity and changeability of British identities."
Students on the one-year course, which can also be studied part-time, get to explore "Britishness" from four disciplinary perspectives: History, Literature, Archaeology and Philosophy, from the Roman period to the present day.
Prof MacPherson said: "The MLitt British Studies is an attractive course for people from the region because it helps them to understand how the Highlands and Islands have evolved over the last couple of centuries, especially in identity terms. One of the key advantages is that it’s not just about exploring a singular British identity – the course gets students to think about multiple British identities (which change over time) and, indeed, of identities more broadly within Britain.
"This means that we spend a lot of the course talking about the great diversity of ethnic, gender, class, regional and national identities that we find throughout the British Isles.
Prof MacPherson said that was what made the programme unique – there is no other British Studies course in the world like it.
And he is certain that it will become increasingly relevant if people vote for independence. First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has called for a second referendum. Prof MacPherson said: "Britain, as the unitary state of the United Kingdom, has been slowly fracturing since the devolution campaigns of the 1970s. Debate about Scotland’s place within Britain and the union, however, has been with us since the seventeenth century. "And, if Scotland becomes independent, knowing how Scottish and British identities have changed over time will help us to understand how a post-independence Scotland can function, especially in relation to the rest of the UK and the EU."
In his module ‘British Identities’ last autumn, students spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the 2016 European referendum, placing it in the context of the evolution of political ideas since the eighteenth century.
Prof MacPherson said: "We looked at how the idea of the UK’s membership of European institutions was largely a response to the post-war decline and demise of the British Empire.
"What we, as a class, found difficult grappling with was how some Brexit arguments have begun to focus on the idea of reviving older and long-lost economic and trading links with the old countries of the Empire and Commonwealth – in particularly, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
"We concluded, then, how an imperial nostalgia has, in some cases, survived the collapse of the British Empire as a coherent political and ideological institution – and, perhaps, is getting stronger, to the extent to which it now seriously influences public policy."
