UCD's Creative and Cultural Industries BA celebrated its inaugural graduating class with its first Student Capstone Showcase event on the Belfield campus.
Combining project-based work with in-depth industry career mentorship, the four-year course aims to prepare students for careers in the cultural and creative industries.
UCD President Orla Feely launched the showcase, saying that "Ireland's creative industries are core to who we are as a nation."
President Feely went on to observe that creative industries are a "major economic force" employing over 80,000 people and contributing €5 billion annually across "many art forms including dance, film, writing and music", adding that "this can only be sustained if talent is forthcoming to keep this vibrant, alive and successful, and that's part of what this BA initiative is about."
Addressing the students about their projects, Professor Feely said that "what we are seeing on display here is really important at this time when we are hearing so much about artificial intelligence and what it will do, potentially negatively to erode human cognition and judgement and ethics and intuition, so to see something like this work, which is bringing out those really human skills - it is so important that this continues to be reflected in our education at this time."
This new BA programme was developed as part of the Higher Education Authority's Human Capital Initiative and delivered through the Creative Futures Academy, which launched in 2022, a collaboration between UCD, NCAD and IADT.
This event marked the fourth year of the BA Humanities, which had its first intake in 2022; it now enrols more than 150 students across four years of study.
Fourth-year student Orlaith Nic Gabhann said that she chose the course because "I wanted to do something practical, that was hands-on, but I didn't want to do something exclusively making the whole time.
"I still wanted part of that traditional university experience," she said, adding that "this course has a nice balance."
The students' final-year projects were introduced by Dafe Pessu Orugbo, an award-winning multidisciplinary artist and UCD Teaching Fellow on the Creative & Cultural Industries programme. He has spent the last year coaching student projects and preparing them to transition to industry.
Some of the subjects explored by the 28 fourth-year students included "Can You Tell Which One Is AI?" from Klaudie Guthova, where she investigated "perceived trust and authenticity towards AI-generated marketing content."
Student Haiyue Jing presented A Way To Survive, an ethnographic film project documenting first-generation working women in Southwest China, tracing their journeys of migration, memory and transformation through lived stories and intergenerational dialogue (short film).
Elsewhere, Stephen Wong organised Beyond the Gig: A Gig for Gaza, a live music and market event which raised over €1,500 and featured other students showing their crafts.
Kate Fitzgerald wrote a dissertation titled "What is the place of Axis throughout Ballymun?", exploring the impact of the Axis theatre and arts space on the local community.
For Annabell Morris, the focus of her project was "creative avoidance in young adults through art-making workshops," with the title I Can't Draw.
Christina Ashley chose the theme of "reimagining value beyond the fast fashion profit structure" while Alannah Fassenfeld wrote her thesis on "Constructing Self-Presentation Across TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Young Adults Aged 18–24."
Professor Emily Mark-Fitzgerald, programme head of the BA course, said that the origins of the BA course grew from the "success of courses, particularly the MA in Culture Policy and Arts Management over the years which placed a lot of people in the cultural sector".
"We were experiencing a change in students where they were bringing amazing technical and creative skills," Professor Mark-Fitzgerald said, explaining how "they were walking through the door with these skills, and they just needed a structure that would allow them to develop across a spine of modules."
Many students from this class have been on internships at organisations including Disney+, LADbible Ireland, BOYS+GIRLS, Ardgillan Castle, RTÉ, Element Pictures, TBWA, MoLI and Aiken Productions.
Emily Mark-FitzGerald congratulated the students for their work, wishing them well on their next steps, saying that "right from day one, we have had this integration of what it's going to be like for them when they finish and that has been threaded all the way through the four years."
