Starting as an MA student

Having had a year off after my BA degree, I am ready to re-enter the student realm.  I want to take my thinking to another level, and find the structure of formal education suits me.  Education is very often the solution to all my problems - it keeps me meaningfully occupied, thinking about things other than myself, and generally keeps me well, firing on all cylinders.

I am studying MA By Project at London Metropolitan University.  This is a research degree within Fine Art, Architecture and Design which facilitates students to conduct a robust research programme on a project of their choice.  In my class we have seven students: two architecture, two jewellers and three fine art.  We are diverse - from the UK (London, Brighton, Norfolk and Braintree), Portugal, and Italy; and range in age from (an incredibly young looking) 20-something, to 62.  I am towards the top end of the age range! It looks like a good bunch of people.

I am interested in people and social history.  I love looking at portraits. I have a fascination for objects, especially with a patina of use.  I enjoy going to museums and thinking about how the narrative of an exhibition has been compiled.  I prefer looking at the stories of the ordinary person, rather than the great and the good, or the rich and powerful.  My BA project was about My Mother's Work where I considered the aspects of domestic life that are frequently overlooked, and applied imagery from this field to domestic objects like tea towels, coats, roller towels, jam jar covers and unfinished knitting.  This led me to consider what other groups of people who made a contribution to society but who could be also overlooked and under-valued.  I came up with lots of groups - cleaners, waste recycling workers, lorry drivers, Australian indigenous people, food processing workers.  I then read the London Met website and found they had had a project for the last few years about the Huguenots.  They were the first group to use the term refugee, as they were a persecuted minority in France who sought refuge in the UK on the grounds of faith (Huguenots were Protestants).  I am very interested in migrants: how we value them; what jobs they do; what recognition they get; what makes them successful (or not).

So, having been accepted for the MA, and identified a research field, my husband, Jim, and I spent a month cycling around France for our summer holiday.  This was to see whether there was any history of the Huguenots to be found in France, while on tour.  As it happens, we found nothing.  We were not  actively seeking historical places to visit, but it appeared as if France had wiped the Huguenot Protestant from its public memory.  History is written by the victors, and in this case, the Protestant refugees have not been a focus of attention. They were not the victors in France.

I hope I can work up a research proposal from my interest in the Huguenots as migrants.