The ASPECT newsletter is produced by the ASPECT Student Association at Virginia Tech with the support of the ASPECT Program. The purpose of the newsletter is to disseminate information on ASPECT related events and to introduce ASPECT students to the wider academic community. The January 2009 edition is the inaugural issue of the ASPECT newsletter and if you have any questions regarding the newsletter please contact Reed Taylor, president of the ASPECT Student Association, at rtaylor2@vt.edu.

ASPECT: An Interdisciplinary Teaching and Research Ph.D.  Program

The Ph.D. in Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) prepares graduate students to undertake problem-centered, multi- and interdisciplinary analysis informed by social, political, ethical and cultural thought. ASPECT is designed to be of particular interest to those seeking a program of study with a framework wider than that of a specialized department.  It follows an emerging national trend in interdisciplinary studies in offering training in multidisciplinary subject clusters that purposefully integrate both departmentally- based and program specific courses (see curriculum, below).  While the program prepares students to teach the core courses of particular disciplines, their research emphasis is on questions that span concerns articulated in a number of disciplines and whose complexity requires the entire tool kit of knowledge offered by the program. Participating faculty and ASPECT courses come from the core contributing departments of History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science, as well as from Africana Studies, Area Studies, the Center for Public Administration and Policy, English, Environmental Design and Planning, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Government and International Affairs, an emerging program in Public Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Urban Affairs and Planning, Religious Studies and Women’s Studies.

ASPECT enables doctoral students to pursue work with faculty on compelling problems at the intersections of theoretically informed research in the humanities, social sciences and cognate professional fields. The program draws upon existing Virginia Tech faculty strength in areas of study that inherently require simultaneous attention to their ethical, cultural, political and social dimensions. Examples of such collaborative work already underway include projects on religion, ethics, and politics; the politics and culture of memory; theoretical approaches to individual and social transformation; democracy and democratic theory; corporate and non-corporate models of globalization and the ethics of community-based development; theorizing power in a post 9/11 world; and the significance of Frankfurt School political, constitutional, and cultural theory. Further emerging research clusters address cultural production and the politics of culture; democracy, science and technology; state sovereignty in historical and regional contexts; comparative ethics in a globalizing, cross-cultural world; historical and contemporary articulations of racialization, gender, and immigration; global civil society and the ethics of place; the political, social, and cultural  implications of bio-ethics and bio-power; and historical and contemporary approaches to power and justice. These are investigated in order, first, to uncover the historically conditioned nature of such forces; second, to understand how these forces work; and, third, to develop theoretical and practical alternative paths for changing their outcomes where necessary.