Interdisciplinary Studies Field

Field Description In the ISF Research Field on Language, Culture and Identity, students make language itself an object of analysis through an interdisciplinary course of study combining the Social Sciences and Humanities. Courses can be found in Anthropology, Education, Ethnic Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Sociology.  The interdisciplinary study of language treats language as more than a tool of communication. Languages as patterned discourses are cultural products that change over time and that are conditioned (and confounded) by power and difference. In this research field, students study a variety of

Field Description Students interested in Migration Studies find themselves taking course in Anthropology, Demography, Development Studies, Economics, Ethnic Studies, Geography, Global Poverty and Practice, History, Legal Studies, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology. The status of millions of people as non-citizens has raised scholarly interest in population movements before nation-states, in the nature of modern citizenship, and in the meaning of belonging before and after the emergence of modern states. The study of refugee conditions and legal status has also been central to ISF students as part of a broader investigation

Field Description Revolutionary advances in the speed and capacity of information transmission can blind us to thinking that we are living in the first information revolution, but students studying IT and social media need to be aware of the earlier social and technological revolutions of the printed book, the telegraph, the radio, the telephone, and the television, among others.   Students interested in this research field should enroll in History and Information courses to understand both how the social character of information has changed across time and space, as well

Field Description The study of social inequality ranges from anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies to historical investigations of the “Great Divergence” among nation-states in the nineteenth century and the contemporary economics and social results of what scholars call patrimonial capitalism. However framed, the study of inequality is a truly interdisciplinary inquiry that includes empirical sociological and political measures of the dimensions and levels of inequality; interdisciplinary analysis of the varying bases of power in status, political and economic systems; the development of various statistical indices to measure inequality; the inheritance