Become a change maker
Study Flinders' Bachelor of Arts
Why study a Bachelor of Arts?
Flinders’ Bachelor of Arts is for the change makers.
Those who look to the future. Who understand that to thrive in tomorrow’s workplace, you must learn to be flexible, to navigate the digital age, to think both critically and creatively, and to develop the skills and knowledge to adapt and take advantage of new opportunities.
That’s what we teach you. To think. To analyse. To be adaptable. To communicate. To be creative.
To develop world-changing, future-proof skills in a world that’s changing fast. And that’s just the beginning.
Flinders’ Bachelor of Arts includes a suite of topics to prepare you for a wide range of career opportunities.
Join a world of leaders
The range of careers available for Bachelor of Arts graduates is amazing. Bachelor of Arts graduates are leaders, founders and entrepreneurs. Change makers. People like Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba or Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. CEOs and former CEOs of companies like YouTube, Disney and Starbucks. Creative minds like Martin Scorcese, Amy Poehler, Emma Watson and Jon Stewart.
Bachelor of Arts graduates include former Premier of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian. Former PMs Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Malcom Turnbull. Former President of the United States, Bill Clinton.
Graduate career-ready
Now is not the time to sit back and wait to see what’s coming. Now is the time to start your journey, wherever it may lead.
Flinders Bachelor of Arts produces graduates who have the ability to ask the right questions, think for themselves, explain what they think, and turn those ideas into actions. Precisely the qualities in demand by employers across the world.
Flinders’ links to industry will give you the opportunity to access practical experience that prepares you for the workforce.
The career you end up pursuing may not even exist today, but the critical and creative thinking, communications and research skills, and the flexibility and adaptability you’ll develop during your studies at Flinders will allow you to take charge of your future, and become a true changemaker.
Design your dream degree
An Arts degree is a flexible and varied way to explore your passions. Women's and gender studies combined with politics and Indonesian? Sure. Drama combined with visual arts and psychology. Why not?
A Bachelor of Arts will give you the skills you need to respond to social, cultural and economic issues in a rapidly evolving workplace. An Arts degree allows you to connect diverse knowledge in unique ways and develop specialised abilities to help you stand out from the pack. By picking and choosing from a range of disciplines, you can unlock more career options and pursue your interests.
New Bachelor of Arts specialisations
Focus on a specific area and gain a unique set of interdisciplinary skills not available in the generalist BA, while still having the flexibility to study any major and minor.
BA (Health in Community Contexts)
You'll be introduced to health as a social challenge in order to build knowledge and skills that facilitate the employment in policy and community contexts.
Health remains one of the fastest areas of employment with opportunities well beyond the medical and clinical fields.
This specialisation explores health as a social challenge in order to build knowledge and skills that facilitate the employment in policy and community contexts.
BA (Professional Futures)
You'll be provided with the fundamental knowledge and workplace skills development to pursue the career of your choice.
This specialisation will help you to identify your professional purpose and identity, giving you skills to manage your future career.
Majors
The following study areas can be taken as a major or minor.
Applied linguistics is concerned with the practical issues of language such as learning and teaching, policy, multilingualism, cross-cultural communication, maintaining languages, and language difficulties.
Delve into the world’s rich cultural history, uncovering the links between past, present and future societies. Unearth and analyse artefacts with a major that prepares you for a wide range of jobs in museums, government, community organisations and the cultural heritage management industry.
Creative writing develops the creative, practical, critical and collaborative skills necessary to pursue a career in the communication, arts and related creative industries.
Criminology explores who commits crime, and critiques how the criminal justice system responds to crime.
Geography and environmental studies explores dynamic relationships between people, our cultures, and the natural and built environments that shape us.
Indigenous and Australian studies is a sociocultural analysis of a changing nation and its people, drawing on humanities, education and social sciences to give a broad perspective of Australian culture and society.
Studying Indonesian is a vital key to understanding our region. In addition to your new language skills, you’ll learn how Indonesia works and the ways people think, feel and live together.
Innovation and enterprise provides you with the skills to enhance your creativity, understand and embrace innovation, and think like an entrepreneur.
International relations studies global issues such as diplomacy, foreign policy, the military, human rights, economies, trade and international organisations.
Law and society equips you with practical legal and analytical skills valuable in many industries including social work, policing, legal services, research and policy positions.
Games of thrones, cultural encounters, social upheavals – find out how medieval and early modern civilisations changed the world.
The study of Modern Greek language and culture provides the key to understanding the importance of the Hellenic tradition in western intellectual development.
Philosophy deals with some of the big questions about the world, society and ourselves, and encourages thought and discussion by presenting a range of possible answers.
Psychology is the study of human behaviour and experience including how we learn and develop, personality and self-esteem, thinking processes, and psychological problems.
Screen and media involves the study and analysis of a wide range of screen-based media including film, television, computer games and online media.
Visual arts provides the technical, aesthetic, and cultural skills to understand and work in the arts and cultural sectors, and related fields.
Women’s studies addresses the broad question of how gender operates, both in contemporary life and historically, in Australia and in other cultures.
The following areas are available as minors in the BA:
- Information technology
- International affairs
- Mathematics
- Sciences.
Add a language to your degree
Dreaming of being fluent in another language or even teaching it? With bilingualism being highly sought after by employers, now is exactly the right time to start learning. Broaden your horizons and increase your employability by learning a language.
The Void Motion Capture & VR Lab
The largest facility of its type in South Australia, The Void is Flinders University’s motion capture and virtual production stage. It’s an exciting and advanced facility that brings together filmmakers, actors, dancers, gamers, technicians and more in an environment where everyone is experimenting and exploring, and that brings much more possibility for creating your story in a virtual world.
The Void is accessible to students across the university.
Connect to industry and develop skills that employers demand
Gain the skills employers are looking for with the Flinders Work Integrated Learning Program. You’ll be matched with an industry provider tailored to your area of interest. You’ll gain essential real-world experience to launch your career, long before you graduate.
Our industry partners include:
- Adelaide Film Festival
- Barossa Tourism
- City of Adelaide
- Adelaide Caberet Festival
- City of Marion
- Adelaide Fringe
- Beyond
- Adelaide Expo Hire
- Adelaide Festival Centre
- State Emergency Service
- Adelaide United Football Club
- Keito Event Management
- Gabriela Mistral Latin American School
- New Venture Institute
- Roof climb Adelaide
- SA Government
- South Australian Cricket Association
- State Theatre Company South Australia
- Tour Down Under
- ...and more
Face tomorrow’s challenges head on
Flinders’ unique stream of career-ready topics will allow you to explore real-world issues, happening right now. A Bachelor of Arts degree will prepare you for a career in almost any field, and Flinders Bachelor of Arts has a richly diverse suite of subject areas, as well as a uniquely-focused set of core topics that will help you prepare for the challenging social transformations that the world is going through right now.
Global Challenge Topics
These topics are designed to challenge and broaden your thinking about real-world issues, and encourage you to explore solutions to some of the biggest problems.
War, famine, drought, disease, economic crises and natural disasters have disrupted and radically altered all societies including our own. They also seem set to continue to do so.
You’ll explore case studies from the ancient world to the present to understand the future. You’ll study how societies have dealt with major crises and catastrophes in the past, such as: the destruction of states from the Romans to the Mongols, Indigenous population collapse under iimperial expansion, the Black Death in Asia and Europe, The Spanish Flu, and the Global Great Depression, to name a few. This will equip you with the knowledge to assess which social and political strategies could work, or will fail, in the future.
This topic examines the global challenge of human caused climate change. You’ll explore: allocating the burdens of climate action between developed, developing and underdeveloped nations; our responsibilities to future generations; understanding the place of human beings in relation to the rest of the natural world; our psychological attitudes towards climate change; the critical assessment of various notion of progress and related notions of human mastery over the natural world.
This Grand Challenge presents an opportunity to rethink the concept and measurement of societal progress to reflect these emerging challenges, and to contribute to a second paradigm shift involving sustainable development.
You’ll explore the inroads into creating a bridge between the human-centred development paradigm and the ambitions of the United Nations: Global Sustainable Development Goals for a more sustainable world, not just environmentally but also socially, financially and in other ways.
How will we survive the 21st century? Human beings are facing major challenges and we need to imagine how they can be met.
You’ll explore climate change and environmental destruction, the massive inequalities between people and nations, social and economic systems that are rooted in exploitation, cities that are for many unhealthy and unsafe, sharp tensions between individual freedoms and state surveillance and the everyday challenges of maintaining physical, mental and spiritual health.
The birth of the modern age in the West placed the human at the centre of all understanding, as both the agent of inquiry and the object of study. And yet, history shows that the status of the human is anything but transparent.
Some suggest we are entering the age of the ‘post-human’, as these various challenges show the limitations of the category. You’ll consider the human not as the source and summit of our understanding, but as a contested concept that is embedded in a context that is natural, cultural, and political – in a word, global. With life on the planet increasingly at stake, the future of humanity depends on modes of understanding that are essentially pluralistic.
Employability stream
These core topics from first to third year are designed to make you career-ready long before you graduate.
- Communication
- Critical thinking
- Digital and academic literacy
- Pre-professional identity
- Industry placements
Transferable skills are in demand
According to the World Economic Forum* the top three skills for jobs in 2025 will be:
- Social intelligence and new media literacy
- Critical thinking
- Lifelong learning
- Adaptability
The Flinders Bachelor of Arts has been developed to equip you with these core employability skills, to prepare you for jobs of the future… jobs we don’t even know will exist yet.
*5 things we know about the jobs of the future, World Economic Forum, 2020
Why study a Bachelor of Arts
- Flexible degrees encompassing the best of humanities, social sciences and sciences
- Choose from a range of majors and minors to design your dream degree
- Study what you’re passionate about, and become a leader in that field
- Develop the skills employers demand and prepare for a range of careers
- Flexibility to take a major and minor, double major or extended major
- High achievers program provides mentoring and prepares you for research higher degrees
- Combine science with traditional arts majors in our science and arts degrees
- BA can be used as a pathway to a Master of Teaching
- Academy and Emmy-winning director, writer, producer Scott Hicks is a Flinders BA graduate
- Logie and AFI-winning writer, producer, director Noni Hazlehurst is a Flinders BA graduate
“
Flinders was the perfect choice for me as it really allowed me to pursue my interests and study in a friendly and productive environment. Flinders stands out to me from other universities because of the diversity in topics they offer as well as the tightknit and welcoming community within the college.”
Yianni Cartledge, Bachelor of Arts (History)/Bachelor of Education
When I started my BA, I didn’t know what I wanted to do career-wise, but I knew that going to university would lead me down a solid path and that it would set me up for future opportunities which is exactly what it did.
The degree prepared me for a more specific qualification, and I believe it also demonstrated that I have resilience, commitment and the capacity for delayed gratification and grit. I later went on to study HR.
I met two of my best friends on my first day at Flinders and really enjoyed the experience.
My university studies opened my eyes to a much bigger world. It challenged my preconceptions and inspired a far greater sense of inquiry… My first two undergraduate years studying full-time in 1977-78 taught me how to think critically, how to research, how to formulate hypothesis and, applying principles of the scientific method, how to attempt to synthesise original approaches to life.
I was very fortunate to come into contact with lecturers who appreciated, encouraged and recognised me as a highly motivated, driven and self-directed new immigrant, young mother and a family bread-winner.... I learnt how to research and learn fast, find and access all necessary resources, take advantage of networks and opportunities and dare to take risks... I learnt to be very agile, flexible, nimble and a good negotiator which proved very useful in my future personal and professional life.
I am excited to help people in their most vulnerable state, become healthier and happier people every day. Mental health is one of the pillars for happiness and if I can contribute to improving someone’s life, that sounds like the career for me.
Flinders was the right choice for me as it was local, friendly and supportive. It has a wide range of extra-curricular activities and resources that make being a Flinders student fun and engaging.
Flinders has helped me becoming future ready through their practical and applicable learning styles, and through the Horizon personal development program, aimed at helping me become a better professional when I graduate.
Studying at Flinders is a great experience with endless opportunities in whichever field you’re interested in. You can study abroad, find internships, make new friends, join social and sporting clubs, and have the flexibility in your learning to still pursue your passions outside of study. Being a student at Flinders will be the best time of your life.
Flinders took me from a ratbag 20 something to a confident, rational human being. I learned how to think, and was provided with a robust foundation upon which I was able to build my career. It was a solid base which over 40 years later I still I constantly reference and augment... In the year following graduation, I was head-hunted by the South Australian Film Corporation which had just been formed by Premier Donald Dunstan and film producer Gil Brearley in 1972.
Much of my success is directly attributable to the time I spent at Flinders and I realise how fortunate I was to have had the opportunity to study there at that time.
In the BA for High Achievers I am majoring in Drama and International Relations. The degree allows me to study the subjects I am interested in and surrounds me with mentors, teachers, and peers who support and challenge me to achieve my best. The High Achievers degree has provided me with a close cohort of friends who share similar interests. As a part of my degree, I will be going on exchange to Canada to further my studies.
Combine your degree
Combining your degree is a great way to pursue multiple passions and broaden your career opportunities. A combined degree gives you an advantage for employment in competitive and rapidly changing workplaces, both in Australia and overseas.
The Bachelor of Arts can be combined with the following degrees:
- Bachelor of International Relations and Political Science
- Bachelor of Laws
- Bachelor of Laws (Honours)
- Bachelor of Laws and Legal Practice
- Bachelor of Laws and Legal Practice (Honours)
- Bachelor of Tourism and Events
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