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All questions concerning the subject/degree:Cultural Analysis - Master's Programme
Orientation and Goals
The Master's programme in Cultural Analysis is research-oriented and follows the tradition of cultural and social sciences as well as gender research, which are well-established at the University of Oldenburg. It deals with the materiality and mediality of contemporary and everyday cultures as well as their historical foundations. Focus areas include the ethnographic understanding of material culture and its entanglement in current problems of transculturality, migration, globalisation, and sustainability.
The programme is designed to enable students to perceive socio-cultural problems across disciplines, to develop questions and to learn to independently work on them using a variety of sometimes unconventional scientific methods – both individually and in a team. The starting points are socially marked, gendered, and ethnicised body images and practices, attires, and worlds of objects – in everyday life as well as in public, national, and transnational institutions. The programme aims to intertwine practical and theoretical ways of understanding, to elucidate the interactions between dimensions of representation and performativity, and ultimately to connect cultural, political, and social analysis.
The programme’s home is the Institute for Material Culture, but it also draws on the cultural-analytical expertise of other cooperating disciplines. Its lecturers come from the fields of Empirical Cultural Studies, Social and Cultural Anthropology and Museum Studies, Art and Media Studies, Sports Sociology and Theory of the Body, Migration Research, Aesthetics, Ecology and Cultural Mediation, Political Science, and Gender Studies. Depending on the project, external partners are involved; there are numerous international co-operations.
The Master's programme is aimed at graduates of cultural and social science courses who enjoy precise observation and thinking and have a pronounced readiness for transdisciplinary scientific work. They should not be afraid of empirical or artistic methods, even if they are new to them in one area or another, have English skills (reading specialist literature), and like to study in a self-organised and project-based manner.