The University of Edinburgh - Edinburgh Futures Institute
MSc in Narrative Futures: Art, Data, Society
Edinburgh, United Kingdom
MSc
DURATION
1 year
LANGUAGES
English
PACE
Full time
APPLICATION DEADLINE
30 Jul 2026
EARLIEST START DATE
14 Sep 2026
TUITION FEES
GBP 32,000 *
STUDY FORMAT
On-Campus
* for international students | 18900 GBP for UK citizens
Key Summary
Stories are powerful tools for change. Narratives shape how we understand the world and respond to its challenges, which is why skills in analysing, creating, and interpreting stories are in greater demand than ever.
This programme will prepare you to apply critical and creative thinking to real-world challenges in order to better engage with the stories that influence our collective futures.
Over the course of the programme, you will develop your ability to understand data for informed decision-making, evaluate complex interdisciplinary scenarios, craft more compelling and impactful stories, enhance community inclusion, and refine your scholarly research.
Who is this programme for?
If you want to investigate how narratives shape our lived realities and how they can offer alternative ways of imagining the future, then this programme is for you. Whether your background or ambitions are creative, technical, governmental or academic, you will be able to apply the insights gained during your studies.
What you will learn
The programme offers all the benefits of interdisciplinarity while maintaining a strong emphasis on integration by bringing together three broad areas of inquiry: art, data and society.
You will learn how narratives are being transformed:
- in a variety of artistic domains, from creative writing to game design
- in different spheres of social life, from digital markets to religious or environmental discourses
- at the frontier of technological developments in areas such as artificial intelligence and data analysis
For your final project, you will apply your conceptual understanding of storytelling dynamics to produce a new narrative artefact of your own or to critically analyse an existing narrative medium or practice.
This forward-looking programme combines hands-on creative and data skills development with research-led theoretical inquiry to help you master the narratives through which human beings perceive and recreate the world.
If you are a University of Edinburgh graduate, you will be eligible for a 10% discount on your tuition fees for this programme. You may also be eligible if you were a visiting undergraduate student.
You can apply for scholarships from a variety of institutions, including:
- the University of Edinburgh
- government agencies
- research councils
- charitable trusts
- external bodies like private companies
What you will study
Students on this MSc programme will study a range of courses to complete 180 credits, including:
- core courses specific to your programme
- a choice of option courses
- a project
Core courses
Your core courses provide essential knowledge and skills specific to your area of study and provide strong foundations for the rest of your degree.
In your core courses, you will explore areas such as:
- the principles of narrative construction and interpretation in a variety of media, and applying those critical and practical principles to the creation of your own narrative artefact
- the uses and abuses of the storytelling instinct in different spheres of social life, and analysis of the origins and effects of influential cultural narratives.
Option courses
Alongside your core courses, you’ll shape your degree by choosing from a wide range of EFI option courses, taught by academic staff from across the University.
Our portfolio evolves each year in response to emerging trends, topics, and new research. You can choose from courses on themes such as:
- how the climate crisis is connected to health
- the inter-relationship of place, people and nature in urban regeneration
- critical perspectives on how new technologies are changing society
- data, programming and research skills that build on your core expertise
- how new and rapidly changing technologies and data sources are transforming the future of democracy
- what the future of education might look like
- how narratives drive the way we understand the world
- service design and service management in a data-driven society
- current challenges and futures for the creative industries
The project
Your final project brings together everything you have learned, giving you the opportunity to apply your learning in depth to a domain, issue or concern which drives you. Your final project can be:
- based on your own personal or professional interests
- defined by your employer
- sponsored by one of the Futures Institute’s industry, government, or community partners
- aligned to one of our research programmes
You will submit your final project as a written piece of work or combine text with other forms – for example:
- video
- visualisation
- a digital artefact
- performance
- code
You will begin to identify your project topic relatively early in the programme, and work on it in parallel with the taught courses. We expect you to take an interdisciplinary approach to your project to connect with the creative, data and future-orientated nature of EFI.
On this programme, you will develop:
- an understanding of the principles of story creation and interpretation across a range of traditional and digital creative media
- knowledge of the uses and abuses of narrative in various spheres of social life
- creative practice and data skills relevant to the analysis and development of new and existing narratives
- research skills and your critical capacity to put different academic disciplines into dialogue and to generate syncretic insights into the present functions and future possibilities of storytelling.
Narrative skills are in greater demand than ever before, and not just in the traditional ‘cultural industries’ such as creative writing, the performance arts, and visual entertainment. Other examples include:
- Advertisers and fundraisers rely on storytelling to reach their target markets.
- The tourism and heritage sectors need to know how to tell the story of local places to global audiences.
- Communications, branding, and design consultancies must build narratives for new products and companies.
- Community groups, social enterprises, charities, and arts organisations wishing to influence policy or raise funds must tell convincing stories in different ways to different demographics.
- Political activists, journalists, public advocates and science popularisers, medical clinicians, video game designers and computer scientists exploring new frontiers in artificial intelligence all require insights into the processes and structures of narrative, its politics and ethics.
This programme will provide you with a good intellectual basis for professional development in a wide range of sectors, as well as for further academic study in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
The core elements of the programme address the data and higher-order skills we know are important for the future of work, confident and critical citizenship, and a thriving, just society.