Study of Culture and Society (SCS)

The Study of Culture and Society (SCS) is an 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, “Culture, Knowledge, Power” and SCS 120, “Modes of Cultural Inquiry,” (see descriptions, below) which introduce students to current questions, debates, theories, and methodological practices in cultural research. Students also take two courses in each of three topic areas: Cultural Difference and Diversity, Public Culture, and Gender and Sexuality. Students 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.

Major Requirements

SCS 110 Culture, Knowledge, Power 3

SCS 120 Modes of Cultural Inquiry 3

21 credits distributed across three areas 21

15 of the 21 area credits should be taken from SCS department

faculty.

Cultural Difference and Diversity

Public Culture

Gender and Sexuality

2 additional courses in one area: 6

Senior Capstone (SCS 199) 4

Total 37

Description of Areas

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.

Courses Fulfilling the Cultural Diffrence and Diversity Requirement

SCSA 150 Postcolonial South Asia

SCSG 192 Cultural Geography of Islam

SCSR 114 Rhetorics of Race

SCSS 72 Global Social Change

SCSS 130 Contemporary Chinese Society

SCSS 156 Representing Race: Life History Research

SCSS 167 Sociology of the African American Experience

SCS 146 Gender and Culture in Islam

SCS 143 Speaking with Many Voices: A Sampling of Native American Cultures

ENG 168 Storytelling as Social Practice

II. Public Culture

Courses in the Public Culture unit focus on how societies create, maintain, and depend on the concept of “the public.” 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: “the public” 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.

Courses fulfilling the Public Culture Requirement

SCSR 144 Photojournalism and Public Culture

SCSR 128 Public Deliberation

SCSR 134 Argument Culture

SCSR 134 Rhetorics of Class

SCSR 134 Rhetorics of Science and Technology

SCS 150 War and Memory

SCS 150 Performing Lives

ART 108 American Art History

ART 110 Art Since 1945

III. Gender and Sexuality

Description

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.

Courses Fulfilling the Gender and Sexuality Requirement

SCS 146/WS 146 Gender and Culture in Islam

SCSS 174/WS 174 Feminist Theories of Subjectivity

SCS 150/WS195 Science, Cyborgs, Monsters

SCSA 101 Feminist Anthropology: Gender, Culture, and Power

ENG 86/WS 90 Reading and Writing Sexuality