Liberal Arts and Science: Culture and History Major
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Regardless of the majors they choose, all students participate in the Core Program, a characteristic feature of the Freiburg LAS degree. Focusing on current global challenges, it merges the students’ training in personal skills, research methods, and general epistemology into a comprehensive framework that has social applicability, intellectual depth, and personal relevance. In the major, Culture and History, we study the arts, philosophies, religions, languages, and histories of people from around the world and through time. Broadly speaking, this major covers the traditional humanities disciplines in an untraditional, interdisciplinary way. We believe that the study of culture is not just a specialized activity of scholars, but rather something that people do all the time. When, for example, you argue about the meaning of a new slang word, when you discuss the merits of a political party, or when you ask yourself what matters most to you, you are informally studying language, history, or philosophy. In Culture and History, we give rigor to these debates, discussions, and reflections by inquiring into the relationship between particular cultural forms and general human problems, by putting our own identities and commitments under scrutiny, and by opening ourselves to learning about other people and other times. We ask questions, for instance, about specific objects. What makes something an artwork and is it really different from other forms of human creation, like technical ones? When we study an artwork what can we learn about the culture and time period that produced it? What do we learn about ourselves in the process? In what ways do artworks engage in politics? How are the past, the present, and the future bound together by our efforts to understand cultural artifacts from another time or place? We also ask broader questions that link our study of objects to social and political challenges. What are the limits of understanding another culture or another time? Is there a responsible way to criticize aspects of someone else’s culture? How are personal identities enmeshed in communities, cultures, and histories? In what sense are individuals responsible for the histories that define their way of life? In addressing these and related questions, we work in forms of knowledge that are largely interpretive: the processing and reprocessing of cultural artifacts, the framing of strong questions, and the development of coherent lines of analytic and synthetic argumentation. As you study these ways of knowing, you will be challenged to think carefully and precisely about specific works (novels, paintings, films, philosophical treatises, political manifestos, theoretical reflections, and so on) while also asking bigger questions about their meaning. Culture and History will give you a strong foundation in humanistic academic disciplines—history, art history, anthropology, literary studies, philosophy, and religious studies, among others—while allowing you to pursue your own intellectual passions in a context of critical reflection.
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Freiburg im Breisgau
Germany
- Full Time
- On Campus Learning
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- Bachelors
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