Interdisciplinary Studies Field

Field Description The ISF Research Field on Visual Culture incorporates the breadth, depth and complexity of visuality in shaping aesthetics and culture, and also society and politics, in history and today. It presents a broad array of visual objects (from painting to cinema, but also the built environment) encompassing the field of art history and the humanities, and extending to disciplines throughout the social sciences, from geography to anthropology.  By “visual culture”, we study at once the visual display of information in all disciplines and especially visual modes of constituting

Field Description UC Berkeley offers a rich and diverse set of undergraduate courses across campus to pursue the multiple intersections of science, technology and society (STS). The ISF Research Field in STS is the only place at Berkeley where undergraduates can pursue a research program in this subject.  Students in this field study not only the social preconditions for scientific investigation but also the social consequences of scientific and technological developments and the ways in which these processes are themselves shaped by society. STS is premised on a specific demarcation

Field Description The interdisciplinary study of law and society is different from a lawyer’s conception of the law in terms of doctrines and disputes of interpretation. The Research Field on Law and Society draws on course offerings in Anthropology, Ethnic Studies, History, Legal Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Rhetoric and Sociology.  Students in this field explore the historical preconditions for the emergence of law and its specialized practices, such as criminal law, and seek to understand the reasons for cross-national variance in legal systems. Students study the law as a system

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