Bachelor [Critical Social Thought] From Mount Holyoke College

Students apply critical thought from a wide array of intellectual traditions, including critical ethnic studies, performance studies, disability studies, the history of science, psychoanalysis, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, critical race studies, queer theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory. Critical Social Thought puts less emphasis on the social, cultural, or scientific objects under study than on its distinctive, interdisciplinary methodology in which student-driven inquiry and research combines theoretical and social critique with a concern for addressing pressing social issues.

While acquainting students with a variety of intellectual traditions, this program also requires each of its majors and minors to combine different thinkers and currents of thought to engage with a theme or question of her original design. A few examples of past themes students have chosen to pursue are: the Western canon and its critics, the causes of peace and conflict, postcolonial studies, architecture and the social organization of space, social inequality, ethical values and social change, disenchantment, fractured identities in cross-cultural context.

Each student who majors in critical social thought (CST) shall meet with the program chair and the director of advising, preferably during the first semester of her sophomore year, to discuss her intellectual interests and to select two advisors from the critical social thought faculty who will help her sculpt hercurriculum around a central question of her choice.