An innovative new interdisciplinary PhD and Certificate program has been launched at Virginia Tech in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences in collaboration with the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and the Pamplin College of Business. Fully approved by the University and the Virginia State Council of Education ASPECT is currently enrolling PhD students for the 2008-09 academic year.
As its acronym suggests, ASPECT, or the Alliance for Social Political Ethical and Cultural Thought, fosters an engagement between domains of inquiry often separated by the disciplinary confines that accompanied the 19th Century institutionalization of the modern research university. Through its teaching and research programs, ASPECT will link together the theoretical tools generated by ethical thought, cultural studies, political economic analysis, critical social and political theory as these have been articulated in various disciplines, subdisciplines and fields.
ASPECT allies together a multidisciplinary coalition of departments and disciplinary fields: History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science have been core units involved in the design of the program, who are joined by faculty from departments and programs including Africana Studies, Appalachian Studies, Area Studies, Architecture, English, Foreign Languages & Literatures, Humanities, Geography, Government and International Relations, Rhetoric and Composition, Religious Studies, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Womens Studies. ASPECT, however, can be expected to grow to embrace further fields and subdisciplines where theoretical work is important in understanding their objects of inquiry.
Faculty and students in this program conduct research and participate in graduate seminars and workshops about new interesting theoretical problems developing at the intersections of political theory, ethical philosophy, cultural studies, and intellectual history as researchers in these fields of scholarship grapple with such issues as state sovereignty, religion and politics, comparative ethics, radical, plural and other forms of democracy, material culture, science and technology, corporate and non-corporate models of globalization, identity and difference, environmental crisis, global civil society and the ethics of place, national and comparative perspectives on race, racialization, and nativism, bio-ethics and bio-power, gender and sexuality, or analytic approaches to power and justice.
ASPECT intends to foster a theoretically minded return to broader concerns with values and power and their various effects in contemporary states, societies, and cultures and to utilize the resulting understandings to analyze various sites that are both local and global in effect. As a new scholarly project, the program will not neglect the rich traditions of earlier approaches to cultural analysis, intellectual history, ethical philosophy, social theory, or political philosophy, but it also will not preoccupy itself with the small conversations that have often sidetracked, or even sidelined, these fields to the confines of their nineteenth century academic beginnings in the first research universities of Europe and North America. Wealth, race, knowledge, gender, class, and power remain active post 9.11. as the mental and material means of creating inequality and order, as they were when the modern research university was institutionalized. Yet, these forces often are not truly at the center of serious critical reflections in contemporary universities that have academic programs or disciplinary departments meant to understand and alter their effects. The ASPECT program will work to find that center, and then use the tools of social, political, ethical, and cultural theory to engage its faculty members and graduate students in new multidisciplinary efforts, first, to understand how these forces work and, second, to develop theoretical and practical alternative paths for changing their outcomes.
At the same time, as ASPECT returns to more engaged involvements in the everyday world to face these intellectual and practical challenges head-on, it will be ecumenical about what constitutes a meaningful text or object of analysis. Print documents cannot be ignored, but systems of thought operate through many other material modes of action, articulation, and authority. Whether symbolic expression, philosophical textuality, power/knowledge, or evaluative order are discovered in artifacts, artworks, buildings, codes, commodities, environments, films, ideologies, institutions, machines, networks, organizations, religions, or technics, almost any symbolic system or structure will be regarded as worthy of careful scholarly analysis by ASPECT faculty and students. The ASPECT project will, in time, examine and evaluate all of these collective sites, structures or systems as instances for the critical analysis of social, political, ethical, and cultural thought in action.
It is expected that the ASPECT program will continue to cooperate extensively with Virginia Tech's other equally interdisciplinary programs in the arts, humanities, bench and social sciences. These potential collaborative partners are already to be found in the departments and programs that offer existing and/or new doctoral degrees in Sociology, The Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies, Public Administration and Public Policy, Management, Governance and Globalization, Environmental Design and Planning, Economics, Rhetoric and Composition, as well as Architectural Design and Representation.