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.