Graduate Program in Culture and Society

Master of Arts (MA)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

The Graduate Program in the Faculty of Communication and Culture offers a variety of advanced interdisciplinary degree programs in Culture and Society. These degree programs investigate major cultural and social issues organized around three broad and interrelated areas of faculty expertise: Heritage and Identity, Development Studies, and Social and Global Justice.  The program is based on the assumption that interdisciplinarity is an holistic approach to teaching and research, one that integrates knowledge and methods from two or more academic disciplines to explore complex issues, to solve multi-faceted problems, and to interrogate existing knowledge in the interests of developing new ways of understanding.  Students may situate their program of study within well-defined areas of interdisciplinary knowledge (e.g., Canadian Studies, Development Studies, Law and Society Studies, Museum and Heritage Studies, Women's Studies, Science, Technology and Society), or within the framework of interdisciplinary studies of culture and society more broadly construed. 

Both paths will provide a problem-based approach to studying culture and society that emphasizes the value of viewing complex issues and interrelated cultural and social dynamics from a variety of perspectives, and of combining theory and practice, while at the same time enabling students to build a unique program of study around intersecting fields of interest.  This approach assumes (a) that ‘culture' is best understood broadly as complex and dynamic, a lived experience in which a specific group of people continually construct a shared reality via their language, arts, rhetorical practices, technologies, beliefs, values, customs and institutions, and (b) that the objects of analysis are thus multiple, but such analysis should aim to reveal the connections between the material aspects of culture and society and the representational, and to promote self-reflection and intercultural understanding.  Thus students will consider multiple intersections of society and culture from a variety of vantage points, including some that are rooted in traditional disciplines as well as others that have arisen in a more interdisciplinary climate such as cultural studies and critical discourse analysis, thereby encouraging students to be part of a productive realignment of specialized fields of study. Students will explore the ways in which cultural forms of knowledge and expression shape and are shaped by particular social contexts.  Specific problems in culture and society will provide the basis for course work.

If you would like more information, email us at gradprog@ucalgary.ca

Faculty research expertise 
Graduate courses   
MA program requirements and application process   
PhD program requirements and application process