Cultural Encounters
Minor offered

Cultural encounters is a multidisciplinary program for students interested in enhancing their knowledge of cultural interactions and their ability to understand, live and work in a culturally diverse world. It is of value to students in any major. In addition, cultural encounters courses provide helpful preparation for students considering off-campus study. Students interested in completing the minor take a minimum of three cultural encounters courses. They are required to take at least one, preferably two, before participating in a study abroad program or the Fisk University program. Participation in an off-campus program is required for the minor, along with two semesters of study of a foreign language. Upon returning from off-campus study, students take a 300- or 400- level cultural encounters course designed to integrate their experiences and fieldwork off campus into their personal and intellectual development.

Cultural encounters courses:

• Are comparative and raise critical questions about the nature of cultural change and interaction.

• Explore both the complex interaction of traditions and the inequalities that affect cultural interchange.

• Recognize that all societies have diversity arising from ethnicity, race, gender, class and caste and other distinctions. The readings and other course materials reflect that diversity.

• Include texts, broadly construed, produced by the peoples under study.

• Place pedagogical emphasis on the student as knower, as a culture bearer seeking to encounter the unfamiliar object of study. There is a long history in the West of objectification, of “orientalizing “peoples from outside the West. Cultural encounters courses aspire to avoid replicating these forms of knowing. They aspire also to teach students to be self-conscious about their relationships to the objects of study.

Departmental Offerings

Anthropology
255. Environmental Perception and Indigenous Knowledge.
343. Famine.

Economics
228. African Economies.

English
190. Critical Study of Literature.
(Specific sections designated Cultural Encounters.)
344. Ethnic American Women Writers.

Fine Arts
330. The Museum as Cultural Crossroads.

Global Studies
245. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World.

Government
105. Introduction to Comparative Politics.
(Specific sections designated Cultural Encounters.)

History
105. Early East Asian Civilization.
254. The Rise of the New Europe.
377. Colloquium in Asian History.

Music
240. Musics of the World.
342. New Orleans Music and Society.

Philosophy
203. Ethical Theory.
332. Africana Philosophy.

Religious Studies
331. Pilgrimage as a Spiritual Journey.

Associate Professor:

Judith A. DeGroat (Coordinator; History), B.A., M.A., Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Ph.D., Rochester
Associate Professor of History and Coordinator of Gender Studies (Spring 2004)