About
Since its founding in 1992, the Social Thought Program at Penn State has served as a network of interdisciplinary research and communication for scholars from various disciplines, all with shared interests in broadly defined social, cultural and political theories. Recognizing the world’s growing connectivity and complexity, informed scholars and citizens now realize that expertise in a single discipline will no longer suffice when interpreting pressing issues facing the global polity. With multifaceted cultural products and political events evolving ever more rapidly, enveloping social institutions within and among nations more swiftly than in the past, new ways of understanding these phenomena must be created. It is in the hope of helping to nurture scholars who can deal in these matters that the Social Thought Program owes its existence.
This interdisciplinary venture in teaching and research—including sociology, philosophy, political science, communication, history, social and political analysis, education, gender studies, aesthetics, literary criticism, family and development studies, and foreign languages—is aimed at graduate students whose academic interests are broad, and is taught by faculty with a sympathetic orientation. The Program offers a “doctoral minor” in Social Thought that augments a student’s principal field of study. It also coordinates public events, informal gatherings, reading groups, and other modes of interaction for young scholars and their faculty colleagues. It therefore aims at theoretical and practical inclusiveness.