Culture and Knowledge Area

Faculty and students in the sociology of culture and knowledge program work together to explore how ideologies, identities and ideas, forms of representation, modes of legitimating knowledge and meaning constitute the social at all levels of analysis. This program supports scholarship on the critical edges of cultural analysis, spanning everything from everyday encounters to epochal social transformations -- and the mechanisms that connect them. The faculty differ with respect to theoretical perspective and methodological approach, but share a common interest in the central problems of culture and knowledge. Some study knowledge production, state formation, empires and social transitions of all sorts, across the world and the centuries, while others focus on identity formation throughout the lifecourse , as inflected by health, wealth, race, gender, nation and place. The program sets out from a core course on cultural analysis, introducing students to the key methods and frameworks organizing cultural analysis, and also includes more substantively focused courses with theoretical, methodological and thematic foci associated with the expertise of the faculty involved.