Culture and Politics (CULP)

• Curricular Field Chair: Ayman Shabana
• Curricular Dean: Dean Morgan Fisher

CULP Goals and Objectives: The Purpose of the Major

What do a critical moral judgment, a parliamentary act, an earnest prayer, a patriotic poem, and a romantic movie all have in common?  They are all expressions of a culture, and as such, they are shaped by the power their culture exerts on those who create them and those who perform them.

More overt exercises of power—by police, or the military, or people with formal political authority—are obvious and easy to see.  But the relation between culture and power is often less visible.  Culture imprints itself upon your mind and your body: it shapes the words that come out of your mouth; the way you greet others; the judgments you make about morality, religion, books and movies; the knowledge you take for granted; the way you conceptualize yourself.

The goal of the CULP major is to make visible this power, and to understand the relation between culture, power, and knowledge.   For only when it is visible can we understand the risks of power, and engage in a critique of power, of existing cultures, of the way power dictates behavior, social relations, creative activity.  But this visibility also allows us to see how power makes possible any and all human action in the first place—how without cultural power, there can be no human speech; no cultural products such as art, poetry, film, literature, news, or architecture; no morality or religious practice; nor any other of the elements that define us as humans.

The CULP major aims to produce students who:

• understand how power operates within culture to produce agents with specific identities, social relations, and ways of understanding themselves and the world;
• can understand theory from a variety of different disciplines, from history, sociology and anthropology to philosophy, literature and the performing arts—and understand how power operates in each discipline;
• understand cultural diversity and can think about different cultures in relation to each other;
• can write clearly and persuasively, and can effectively communicate ideas orally;
• are better producers of culture—whether through art, writing, photography, or some other medium of cultural production;
• understand how culture can empower ordinary people as agents of change—for example, how the arts (such as music, literature, and video) can be used to raise awareness; and
• are prepared for a variety of careers—whether at a bank, for the government, for an NGO, as a filmmaker, or graduate school.

Students in the Honors program will further develop these abilities, as well as their research and writing abilities, and will produce theses comparable in quality and depth to many Master’s theses.

CULP Major Requirements (Total of 10 courses)

• CULP 2100 Introduction to Culture and Politics (must be completed by the end of Year 3)
• 4 classes tagged as CULP (must be in at least two different disciplines i.e. course prefixes)
• 5 classes oriented around a self-constructed theme (topical electives)

Sample Courses

GU-Q offers a variety of courses that fulfill the requirements of the CULP major. CULP courses can be identified by searching CULP attributes on each semester’s schedule of classes.

Below are some recently offered courses:

• ANTH 3360: War Ethnography
• ARAB 3340: Arabic Drama
• ENGL 4000: Capitalism and Mysticism
• HIST 4607: Islamic Law and Gender
• THEO 3020: Religion and Violence

Writing in the Culture and Politics Major

Culture and Politics (CULP) is a major of articulations; it develops the understanding, discovery, and creation of connections between Culture and Politics and across disciplinary boundaries, even as it fosters the critical expression of those connections. Grounded, thus, in this double articulation, CULP is grounded, too, in the intensive work on writing throughout its curriculum. This process begins in the one course that all CULP students take, 2100, Theorizing Culture and Politics. Here, they will learn the fundamental elements of writing about and with the theoretical texts that form the basis of CULP, beginning with simple modes of textual and conceptual explication and ending with a more complex, synthetic cultural analysis.

From there, the interdisciplinary nature of the major and the diversity of individual students’ concentrations necessitate a broad attention to writing, for no single course or sequence of courses can provide every student with the instruction he or she needs to develop expertise in the chosen area of study. Each course in the major thus focuses on writing within its field, seeking, depending on its level, to introduce, develop, or hone students’ skills. As they complete the major, students will gain expertise in more than one disciplinary field—and the ability to critically articulate the relations between them. Moreover, should they chose, students will also be able to develop a bilingual facility in writing for the major, for the CULP courses in Arabic pay direct and careful attention to students’ writing.

As they progress in the major, eligible students may elect to pursue an Honors thesis, a project that gives them the opportunity to propose an original research topic engaging culture and politics, then pursue it through a survey of existing literature, the development of an appropriate methodology (qualitative or quantitative), and the construction of a rigorous critical argument. Alternately—or additionally—CULP majors may take the skills they have gained and apply them to a certificate in Arab and Regional Studies, American Studies or Media and Politics.

CULP Topical Area/Concentration

CULP is unique in that it offers students the opportunity to develop an area of study specific to their interests, which is called the CULP topical area. Students are required to identify and take five courses for the CULP topical area as part of the CULP major. Hence, it’s an opportunity to design a component of the curriculum tailored to student interests.  It is expected that this topic may evolve over time as majors explore topics further  in their upper-level coursework.

Examples of past CULP topical areas include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Cultural hybridity in the GCC
• Statehood and identity in the Middle East
• Identity politics, law and marriage
• Women and politics in the media
• Arab/Israeli conflict
• Women and children in conflict zones
• Gender, religion and economic development
• Psychology of addiction

Frequent Questions