Announcing a New Interdisciplinary Major:
Study of Culture and Society (SCS)
The Study of Culture and Society (SCS) is a new interdisciplinary major focusing on the study of cultural practices, social institutions, and knowledge. The major focuses on contemporary critical social and cultural theories, as well as modes of cultural research and criticism, including textual and discourse analysis, ethnography, interviewing, media critique, and other practices. The orientation of the major is reflexive, and places strong emphasis on students developing a sense of themselves as situated knowers. Courses in the major will stress the recognition of the contested and changing character of cultural categories, the relationship between knowledge and power, and the influence of social location and identity on the creation of knowledge.
The major requires two core courses: SCS 110, ÒCulture, Knowledge, PowerÓ and SCS 120, ÒModes of Cultural Inquiry,Ó (see descriptions, below) which will introduce students to current questions, debates, theories, and methodological practices in cultural research. Students will also take two courses in each of three topic areas: Cultural Difference and Diversity, Public Culture, and Gender and Sexuality. Students will then specialize in one of these topic areas, taking an additional two courses in their chosen area. The major is designed to require students to gain breadth in each of these areas as well as focusing more intensively on one area in their studies.
1 entry level course 3
SCS 110 Culture, Knowledge, Power 3
SCS 120 Modes of Cultural Inquiry 3
2 courses in each of three areas 18
Cultural Difference and Diversity
Public Culture
Gender and Sexuality
2 additional courses in one area: 6
Senior Capstone 4
Total 37
October 27, 2004. For details, contact Janet Wirth-Cauchon, Howard 130; 271-4586
I. Cultural Difference and Diversity
Courses in this area focus on
the nature and reproduction of social and cultural differences including those
of race, ethnicity, class, and nation.
Courses draw on analytical frameworks such as cultural anthropology, cultural
geography, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory to study cultural
difference and diversity, globalization, local-global relations, and
cross-cultural and transcultural categories, processes, identities, and
communities. Attention is paid to
the operations of power expressed through these differences, as well as the
complex intersections of multiple categories of difference.
SCSG: 192 Cultural
Geography of Islam
SCSR 114: Rhetorics
of Race
SCSS 130: Contemporary
Chinese Society
SCSS 156: Representing
Race: Life History Research
SCSS 167: Sociology
of the African American Experience
SCS/WS145 Gender
and Culture in Islam
SCS/WS 145 Speaking
with Many Voices: A Sampling of
Native American Cultures
*Additional courses to be
added.
II. Public Culture
Courses
in the Public Culture unit focus on how societies create, maintain, and depend
on the concept of Òthe public.Ó
The range of concerns includes public speech, public media, public
spaces, public opinion, public policy, the public interest, and similar forms
of thought and action. The public
is understood to be a distinctive cultural form that emerged in the modern
world, has important connections to classical thought, and is in a continuous
process of discursive reconstitution.
The study of public culture emphasizes the actual arts,
practices, and performances that are central to creating publics locally,
nationally, and globally, and also how public identities shape individual
experience and collective action.
In addition, the study of public culture is understood to be necessarily
reflexive in at least two ways: Òthe publicÓ is a contested category, and
particular forms of public representation can inhibit understanding of their
own position or effects. While
reflecting on publics and their problems, courses in public culture equip
students to act on behalf of specific principles and policies that can sustain
or improve actual democratic practices.
SCSR
144 Photojournalism and Public Culture
SCSR
128 Public Deliberation
SCSR
134 Argument Culture
III. Gender and Sexuality
This area consists of
multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary courses that focus on gender and
sexuality as categories for analysis. This area explores, challenges and
theorizes topics such as cultural assumptions of the body as the locus of sex,
gender, and sexuality, sex and gender binaries, the erotic as power, and gender
and sex performance. The courses offer various critical perspectives in their
examination of gender and sexuality, in relation to the subjects being studied
and those studying the issues.
Students concentrating in this area will gain theoretical perspectives
to analyze the diversity of gender and sexual identities and relations, as well
as conceptual tools to study the relationships among gender, sexuality and
power.
FYS 14/SCSS 14 Men
and Masculinities in Recent American Film
WS 90/Eng 86 Reading
and Writing Sexuality
WS 17/SCSS 10 Gender
and Culture
WS 173/SCSS 174 Being
and Power: Feminist Theories of
Subjectivity
WS195/HONR 151 Science,
Cyborgs, and Monsters
The last two decades of the twentieth century
witnessed a variety of challenges to conventional disciplinary thought and
practice in the humanities and the human and social sciences of western
scholarship. Many of these
involved a critical rethinking of usual understandings of culture, knowledge,
and power, at the least. This
course aims to introduce students to themes, questions, and ways of reading,
writing, and speaking that may be loosely referred to as Òpost-Ò thought,
analysis, and criticism that that has constituted a major part of this
challenge. Influences from French
post-structuralism, cultural Marxism, feminism, psychoanalytic criticism,
postcolonial studies, queer theory, critical race theory, and science/knowledge
studies will be reviewed. Students
will be asked to consider the emergence of these critical perspectives and
practices relative to established and dominant ways of thinking and
writing/speaking defined by existing disciplinary knowledges inside as well as
outside the academy. Prereq.: One
entry-level course; At least 30 hours of prior course credit/sophomore
standing.
The following themes/perspectives will be central in
the course described above:
The Importance of Discursive Practice: Students
should be helped to understand the argument that language, discourse,
subjectivity, and reality are intimately entwined.
Reality as Socially Constructed: Students
should be able to make sense of the claim that social, cultural reality is
ÒconstructedÓ as is knowledge about it.
That is, ideas, things, understandings, practices, including nature, the
Ònatural,Ó and ÒfactsÓ have histories and that we lose much if we do not try to
locate them as linked inextricably to those histories/historical
stories/practicesÑallowing for some rather drastic variation in just what
stories those histories can tell.
Reflexivity and Knowledge: Students would learn about the importance of
reflexivity in knowledge-making, of giving careful attention to how knowers are
positioned inside the cultures they study and are implicated in as well as
shaped by the kinds of cultural knowledge produced. Students would be
encouraged to develop sensitivity to the power relations of cultural research,
and to cultivate an ongoing self-critical awareness of their own positioning,
the language they use, and the conditions under which knowledge about culture
is produced. As part of this they would be helped to develop awareness of how
knowing is inevitably partial, contingent, open to further questioning and
change. At the same time, we would encourage students to actively take up these
tools of critical analysis; that is, we would seek to avoid a nihilistic
position of endless deconstruction of all positions and arguments.
Understanding Power: Students
should be introduced to a way to understand ÒpowerÓ that sees it as profoundly
relational, interactive, and contingent.
Perhaps this could be called a ÒprocessuralÓ conception of power rather
than a commodity- or property-like conception.
Difference: This
first core course should make cultural difference a thematic priority, raising
studentsÕ awareness that culture is not unified but rather is contested, along
complex lines of gender, racial, national, class, and other social and cultural
boundaries. Themes related to this include the ways social differences shape
perspective (situated knowledge); thinking from the margins; the intersection
of race and gender; the role of representation in the reproduction of
difference; the ways identities are defined relationally; critiques of essentialism,
and so on.
Theory as Resource for Activism: It is hoped that students would learn to see the
value of cultural analysis and cultural theory itself, as a resource for making
critical interventions into the experiences and social forms of their daily lives.
Ethics of Activism: Students
are encouraged to see their own learning and scholarly work as intimately
linked to living, acting, being, doing in the world in particular and variously
ÒinterestedÓ ways, including the forms of political activism and participation
they might pursue. All of these
would be open to critical reflection and review.
How does a writerÕs social
position affect the production of that writing? The course aims to incorporate a practice of reflexivity in
cultural analysis. A focus on centrality of language and practices of
representation in cultural analysis in the course will give participants an
opportunity to experience these dilemmas first-hand as they engage in the practices
of analysis, reading, and writing. Participants will deploy these practices to
discuss empirical or written materials; practices may include discourse
analysis, textual analysis, various forms of ethnography, interviewing, and
other methods of research and criticism.
The course will address the
ethical and epistemological debates in cultural analysis. Our questions will include both theory
and practice. In acknowledging
that any representation of the social world is constructed by the author, how
might an author undertake the ethical and epistemological issues inherent in
speaking for others? How should an
author construct knowledge about people, cultures, and texts within a given
terrain of power relationships?
How might we interrogate the notions of objectivity and positivism, and
how do these concepts become constructed as the elements of Ògood
research?Ó What alternative
positions might one take in evaluating representations of the social world? As we work through these issues,
the class will also examine the complexities of cultural relativism vs.
universalism and, the problematics as well as strategic uses of essentialism.
This semester, the course
will explore these themes through a consideration of global flows of people as
tourists, migrants, and workers, as well as fantasies and objects of
desire. This focus will allow us
to explore issues of power, inquiry, social location and representation through
a series of readings, written projects, out-of-classroom experiences and
conversations.Prereq: One entry-level course and at least 30 credit hours of
prior course credit/sophomore standing.