The Culture and Politics (CULP) major is designed to provide students with a complex understanding of the relationship between culture, knowledge, and power. It aims to provide students with theoretical frameworks and analytical skills that enhance cross-cultural tolerance, social justice, and ethical leadership, in order to make a difference in a world marked by power hierarchies and cultural conflicts. Students learn to apply analytical tools from multiple fields as they practice critical reflection on self and society and enhance their analytic sophistication through collective problem-solving. Students build their substantive expertise in the politics of culture through an in-depth foundational course that stresses fluency in a variety of theories, definitions, and genres of culture. Students then go on to assemble their own course sequence around their individually chosen topical concentrations. All students are expected to master the analytical methods and skills necessary to become thoughtful, rigorous readers and writers of scholarship on cultural power relations in the international arena.

The globalization of ideas, goods, and communication presents the world with both unprecedented hopes and challenges. How do individuals, states, and organizations cooperate for mutual gain? Conversely, why and how do they compete against each other? The International Politics major (IPOL) offers a multidisciplinary approach to understanding these basic questions with courses in diplomacy, religion, economics, security, media, and gender. IPOL also provides geographically-specific courses to see how different countries and regions address the topics of cooperation and competition.