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Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought Faculty of Graduate Studies
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The Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought offers both MA and PhD degrees. Since its inception in 1973, the program has advanced the study of social and political ideas, theories, movements, and associated phenomena in an interdisciplinary context. The curriculum, developed in cooperation with participating disciplines across the university, is structured around three flexible and related streams of study:

  1. The History of Social and Political Thought
  2. Black Studies and Theories of Race and Racism
  3. Economy, Consciousness, Aesthetics and Society

Students with diverse interests are encouraged to study and to intervene in more than one stream if their project so dictates. In selecting courses and crafting comprehensive examination lists, students acquire broad knowledge of relevant fields, in addition to pursuing specialized interests. Students take considerable personal initiative as they develop an intellectually coherent program of study that culminates in a Major Research Project or a doctoral dissertation.

Areas of Study:

Courses in the History of Social and Political Thought stream prepare students to develop innovative research programs pertaining to figures, texts, and intellectual traditions that have been decisively influential across fields of traditional importance to the program. Courses in this stream investigate continental philosophy, Marxism, critical theory, queer theory, feminist thought, anti-colonial and post-colonial thought, and forms of cultural theory that touch on social and political matters, broadly conceived.

The Black Studies and Theories of Race and Racism stream prepares students to develop innovative scholarship that investigates and analyzes the distinct contributions of Black intellectual, political, and cultural productions, nationally and internationally. Students investigate and articulate methods for the critical examination of race and racism across disciplines, thereby uncovering the practices of power and domination that undergird such processes as colonialism and slavery, migration and diasporization, globalization, criminalization, and racial profiling, and articulating struggles for liberation and self-determination.

Courses in the Economy, Consciousness, Aesthetics and Society stream prepare students to develop innovative research programs related to central theoretical and practical problems of traditional importance to the program. Students consider methods for investigating consciousness from psychoanalysis, phenomenology, or the linguistic turn, and methods for studying culture from communications, political economy, aesthetics, and art. Theories and practices are generally refracted through social and economic questions of inequality, exclusion, power, and domination, with an emphasis on capitalism.

MA

PhD

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The Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought at York is an exciting environment to pursue innovative, socially engaging, career-ready education. Contact our Graduate Program Assistant to learn more.

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