CULP

The Culture and Politics Mission Statement

CULP is an intellectually rigorous program that enables students to engage with questions of culture, knowledge, and power. Students will gain a complex understanding of these terms, their histories, and effects. We approach politics as mediated by cultural practices, and culture as suffused with power. Power is embedded in institutions and the social order, and conditions individual and collective action.

Since no single approach encompasses the relation between culture and politics, the CULP major stresses fluency in different theories, definitions, and genres of culture. Different analytical tools from a variety of fields allow students to practice critical self-reflection, understand the politics of interpretation, and enhance their theoretical sophistication.

CULP fosters an environment for critical inquiry, creative engagement, and collaborative learning. All majors take the foundational course, Theorizing Culture and Politics, and then go on to choose their own five-course sequence around their individually chosen concentration, in addition to three courses each from the social sciences and the humanities. The high degree of flexibility afforded to students requires them to become independent agents of knowledge capable of designing their own program of studies according to their individual interests and talents.

Goals of the Major

The CULP major is designed to provide students with a complex understanding of the relationship between culture, knowledge, and power. It aims to provide students with theoretical frameworks and analytical skills that enhance cross-cultural tolerance, social justice, and ethical leadership, in order to make a difference in a world marked by power hierarchies and cultural conflicts. Students learn to apply analytical tools from multiple fields as they practice critical reflection on self and society, and enhance their analytic sophistication through collaborative problem solving.

The CULP major offers great individual flexibility. Students build a rigorous foundation for their studies through an in-depth gateway course that stresses fluency in a variety of theories, definitions, and genres of culture. Students then go on to assemble their own course sequence around individually chosen concentrations, in consultation with their mentor or dean. All students are expected to master the analytical methods and skills necessary to become thoughtful, rigorous readers and writers of scholarship on cultural power relations in the international arena.

CULP students are actively involved in publishing their own scholarship, linking up with such Georgetown programs as the Center for Justice and Peace and the Mortara Center for events and speakers; student groups such as the Critical Theory Society; and utilizing the rich cultural and social resources of Washington, DC.

Objectives of the Major

The contemporary world is characterized by extensive cultural contacts that enhance connections, but also pose new challenges to acting responsibly and sensitively to the unfamiliar. Cultural competence and diplomacy are central to the peaceful functioning of a global system marked by deep, historically grown inequalities. Preparing students to treat opposing viewpoints and experiences with respect, CULP fosters a sophisticated and informed understanding of cultural diversity and the politics of identity. To prepare students for unforeseen conflicts and opportunities, they will be educated to do the following:

• Identify, compare, and synthesize the key concepts and scholarly research in cultural and social theory across multiple disciplines—including history, anthropology, sociology, geography, literature, music, performing arts, film and new media, visual studies—that address the connections between power, culture, and identity.
• Explicate, evaluate, and critique cross-cultural political issues, dynamics, and events in clear, concise writing.
• Recognize multiple perspectives and dimensions of cultural interactions, and apply critical frameworks to competing claims to rights and recognition.
• Develop the substantive, analytical and ethical skills necessary to question stereotypical, polarizing, and essentialist views of difference, as a precondition for the peaceful resolution of conflicts in the domestic and international realm.
• Understand and apply an expansive concept of culture that empowers ordinary people, organizations, and institutions as agents of change.

Students in the Honors program will further develop these abilities and their research and writing skills, and will produce theses comparable in quality and depth to many Master’s theses.