ASPECT featured on VT News
Students begin innovative interdisciplinary Ph.D. program
By Jean Elliott
(540) 231-5915, elliottj@vt.edu
Wolfgang Natter
BLACKSBURG, VA., September 4, 2008 -- The first cohort of Ph.D. students are beginning their journey through Virginia Tech's new interdisciplinary program in the humanities and social sciences.
Approved by the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) in January 2008, the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) program is the result of years of planning between core departments (history, interdisciplinary studies, philosophy, and political science), faculty, and college and university administrators.
The program design has already been hailed as a bellwether for higher education by numerous expert evaluators from peer institutions who contributed to the council's approval process.
Applications for this first cohort came from throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many students bring more than one advanced degree to their doctoral studies, and most have degrees in more than one discipline. Indeed, they are as diverse as the problem-centered, theory based, curriculum itself. Cohort research interests include post-industrial society and culture, critical social theory, social memory, human security in post-communist countries, the impacts of new communication technologies on social identities, liberation movements, and global transformations of democracy.
For program director Wolfgang Natter, who oversaw its curriculum design and approval, ASPECT is now poised to realize its full potential as a nationally and internationally renowned teaching and research program.
The initial vision for the program came from an internal proposal in 2000 by Timothy W. Luke, professor of political science, and University Senior Fellow for the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Luke spearheaded the early stages of the program's development until 2005, when Natter joined the Virginia Tech faculty. The program now draws upon the expertise of some 50 Virginia Tech faculty from three colleges.
Curricular hallmarks are the program's attention to theory and methodology, along with an emphasis on team teaching as a way of integrating interdisciplinary teaching and research. A team-taught seminar and integrated lecture series was piloted in spring 2007 on the theme of Democracy and Democratic Theory as part of its graduate certificate program.
In spring 2009, the seminar theme and integrated lecture series will be on Neoliberalism and Society. Other team-taught Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought seminars have addressed the topics of contemporary theoretical turns: spatial, performative, postcolonial, and animal; psychoanalysis and politics; and first contacts between settler and indigenous communities.
Program affiliates who have joined Natter in team teaching seminars include the Department of Philosophy's Steve Daskal and Phil Olson, the Department of History's Marion Mollin, Joanna Kucinski, and Brett Shadle, the Department of Political Science's Wayne Moore, Rick Shingles, and Antonio Vazquez, womens studies professor Barbara Ellen Smith, government and international affairs professor Rupa Thadhani, humanities professor Elizabeth Fine, foreign languages and literatures professor Janell Watson, and religious studies professor Brian Britt.
Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought is a research as well as a teaching program. A lively faculty working-paper series provides collegial feedback on work prior to its publication, and numerous workshops, panel discussions, and public lectures have been organized during the past two years. In addition, Virginia Tech hosted major conferences on democracy in commemoration of the founding of Jamestown, and an annual meeting of the International Social Theory Consortium.
Already there is some anticipation about the first graduates of the program: I look forward to recommending students to your program, noted Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut. And as someone who interviews job candidates every year, I especially look forward to that time when ASPECT Ph.D.s begin to have their impact on higher education.
Natter's research has been supported by the Fulbright Commision, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He received his masters and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins and his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University.
Participating faculty and course offerings in Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought hail from three colleges:
- College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences
- College of Architecture and Urban Studies
- Pamplin College of Business
They include the core contributing Departments of History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science, as well as programs and departments including Africana studies, Appalachian studies, area studies, business and economics, the Center for Public Administration and Policy, English, foreign languages and literatures, government and international affairs, an emerging program in public humanities, religious studies, science and technology studies, sociology, urban affairs and planning, and womens studies.
ASPECT featured by the Association of Integrated Studies and by Virginia Tech news
NEW Ph.D. at Virginia Tech in Social, Political, Ethical and Cultural Thought
Dr. Wolfgang Natter, Director, ASPECT (Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought); wnatter@vt.edu.
In January 2008, the Virginia State Council of Higher Education approved a new Ph.D. at Virginia Tech in Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought. This theory based, interdisciplinary, and project centered research and teaching program (ASPECT) is now accepting graduate students beginning for the 2008/09 academic year.
Planning Process
State Council approval concluded a multi-year planning process at Virginia Tech, during which support levels for the program, as well as general design, infrastructure, and curriculum were established in deliberations between the director, department chairs and participating faculty from fifteen campus units, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences (where the program is administratively placed), the University's central administration, as well as College, University, and Trustee level councils responsible for program approval. An on site visit with external evaluators, coordinated with the State Council, concluded a final round of program input.
Important initial decisions were the strategic decision of Virginia Tech's administration‚ A University whose motto is Invent the Future -- to commit resources to enhance the University's extant disciplinary based departmental degree offerings by creating an innovative, interdisciplinary and theory based Ph. D. program spanning the social and human sciences. Four core departments in the College of Human Sciences and Liberal Studies committed to lend support to the initiative; History, Interdisciplinary Studies ( a unit comprising programs such as Womens Studies, Humanities, Religious Studies, and Appalachian Studies), Philosophy, and Political Science. A further key decision was to widen potential faculty affiliation to members of the broader University community, wherever their tenure homes are, so long as they, like those affiliated members from the core departments, wished to contribute to the program's mission. Deliberations between the director and key administrators concluded with commitments made to attach 24 graduate TAships to the program, each of four years duration, phased in sequentially beginning in 2008. Additionally, new faculty lines were committed to contributing departments in support of the program, and a number of new hires await.
Overseeing the development of the program, its curriculum, the program's infrastructure, and most importantly, a scholarly community which now numbers 50 affiliated faculty, were all elements of the exciting process leading to the formulation and approval of the Ph.D. program. Participating faculty and course offerings now come from three Colleges at Virginia Tech: among them, the core contributing departments of History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science, as well as from Africana Studies, Area Studies, Business and Economics, the Center for Public Administration and Policy, English, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Government and International Affairs, an emerging program in Public Humanities, Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Urban Affairs and Planning. Building upon these elements, ASPECT faculty expect in the coming years to solidify a national and international reputation for social, political, ethical, and cultural thought.
Program Rationale
By design, the ASPECT Ph.D. prepares graduate students to undertake theoretically based, problem-centered, multi- and interdisciplinary analysis on important and challenging issues whose understanding requires simultaneous attention to their social, political, ethical, and cultural dimensions. ASPECT enables doctoral students to pursue work with teams of faculty whose work focuses on such problems.
Students enter the program having previously earned an M. A. or equivalent (e.g. MFA, MArch, MBA, JD). ASPECT is designed to be of particular interest to graduate students seeking a program of study with a framework wider than that of a specialized department. Its curriculum follows an emerging national trend in interdisciplinary studies in offering education that combines four multidisciplinary subject areas of concentration, in this case, social, political, ethical, and cultural-- which purposefully integrate both departmentally- based and program specific courses. In addition, core program seminars, several of which are team taught, permit focused integration of interdisciplinary theory and interdisciplinary methodology. As part of their pedagogical training, students are prepared to teach introductory and required courses in particular disciplines and departments, and they may further avail themselves of a conceptually complementary certificate course of study in teaching theory and practice offered to all graduate students through the University’s graduate school. A student's research emphasis, however, is on questions that span concerns articulated in a number of disciplines and whose complexity requires the entire tool kit of knowledge offered by integrated social, political, ethical, and cultural thought.
Some program graduates may prefer positions in government, non-profit, media, or industry organizations, where a broad understanding of the multiple contexts of significant social problems addressed by the program, along with the skills necessary to answer emerging ones, is required. ASPECT, however, will primarily prepare future faculty to conduct theoretically and methodologically attentive interdisciplinary research and to contribute as teachers and scholars to the expected 21st century knowledge economy.
ASPECT as a Research and Teaching Program
It bears special emphasis that ASPECT is an integrated research and teaching program. Good teaching, as the maxim goes, is informed by good research. Course offerings are complemented by a variety of research settings in which faculty and students participate. Program workshops, conferences, and a lively working paper series enable participants to receive interdisciplinary feedback and an avenue to share their research; while an e-journal and book series allow scholars to publish their findings along with scholars from other institutions. Graduate students are expressly encouraged to participate along with faculty in these venues. They contribute to the research clusters that ASPECT has thus far developed around themes such as Democratic Planning and Participatory Research; The Politics of Memory; Religion and Politics; Social and Individual Transformation; Epistemology in the Social Sciences and Humanities; Democracy and Democratic Theory; and Alternative Economic Development (see www.aspect.vt.edu). Program design foresees extending these topics to emerging others, commensurate with faculty and student interest. Such venues are augmented by an ASPECT-sponsored topical lecture series integrated with a team-taught seminar that brings renowned scholars to campus to discuss their work on a particular research field. These research activities, in turn, contribute in further integrating the interdisciplinary Ph.D. curriculum, leading to new course development and modification of existing ones in departmental and program settings.
Employment Rationale
Abundant evidence supports the view that the 21st century workforce, both at the university and elsewhere, expects a professoriate, and the students they prepare, to be sufficiently interdisciplinary in education and orientation to address multiple sources and kinds of problems, data, and information. For one, The AAU Task Force on the Role and Status of the Humanities makes a passionate case that AAU universities should not allow the humanities and social sciences to wither; it also suggests the great value of enabling programs of the type ASPECT models. Its fourth overall recommendation is that AAU universities should provide flexible structures for faculty and student interaction and collaboration on humanities scholarship and teaching, including interaction and collaboration with the social and natural sciences and the professional schools, and with community agencies and organizations. The report goes on to describe the strategies and goals of interdisciplinary initiatives in terms that closely match those of ASPECT: Interdisciplinary initiatives sponsor or help to sponsor a wide range of activities including conferences, workshops, internships, curriculum and faculty development. The goals of such initiatives are: to bring together faculty across a college and university who share complementary research and other strengths into interdisciplinary clusters; to bring national visibility to these programs as well as to the departments and other programs which are affiliated with them; to enhance the intellectual climate of the college and university; to increase research funding, scholarly and creative activity and curriculum development among faculty; and to improve recruitment of faculty and graduate students. Reports by other agencies as disparate as the US Bureau of Labor, the Rand Corporation, and the Social Science Research Council, and the recent strategic plans of a number of research universities, all offer a prognosis which support the timeliness of the ASPECT program.
Theoretically informed scholarship in social, political, ethical, and cultural thought has indeed been at the forefront in rethinking how the university can respond to the new knowledge economy. Given the shift toward interdisciplinarity across the humanities and social sciences, including expectations emanating from disciplines and departments themselves, we believe graduate education in ASPECT is ideally suited to prepare new Ph.D.s who will be competitively positioned for success as teachers and researchers in the expected post-secondary landscape of the 21st century.
Curricular Rationale
The Ph.D. curriculum concentrates on methodological and theoretical issues, as well as on domains where social, political, ethical, and cultural thought are put to work in understanding social and individual transformations in contemporary and historical contexts.
All requirements of the doctoral program in Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought are consistent with those of the Virginia Tech Graduate School for doctoral-level studies.
Students pursuing the ASPECT doctoral degree select a major and a minor concentration chosen from among four areas: 1) social thought, 2) political thought, 3) ethical thought, and 4) cultural thought. Key ASPECT course requirements additionally offer instruction in interdisciplinary theory, methodology, and professional development. Following fulfillment of other curricular requirements, students must pass a preliminary exam, prepare and defend a dissertation proposal, and then complete original research for their dissertation, all under the supervision of a multidisciplinary advisory committee.
As indicated above, ASPECT offers a curriculum that fosters research and teaching and that communicates on the basis of theory across the enabling limits that frequently result in disciplinary divides between units in the social sciences, humanities, and professional schools. By design, the curriculum stresses student flexibility and originality. It permits a focus on overarching problems by offering education in multidisciplinary areas of concentration as well as solid grounding in both interdisciplinary and disciplinary ways of knowing. Each area of concentration is composed of an impressive range of departmental, college, and cross-college offerings.
It is the modest ambition of this program to foster a research and teaching program that enables Ph.D. students with ASPECT faculty to pursue appropriate course work and research commensurate with the complexities of the particular problem they aim to investigate. The program institutionalizes the recognition that no single discipline has purchase on their full scope, but that each has made significant contributions to understanding the issue. The program thoughtfully places in tandem bodies of thought and their research applications that otherwise, and not least for curricular reasons, too frequently have cast divisions along fault lines of political theory vs. cultural studies, social theory vs. ethical thought, etc. A positive resolution to the situation is embedded in the ASPECT curriculum. A regular feature of the program are team taught, theory based, topical seminars. Significantly, these team taught venues embed in the curriculum settings in which authentic interdisciplinary work can be planned, practiced, and extended on a recurring basis.
Summary
In conclusion, the program offers Ph.D. candidates the opportunity to choose course offerings appropriate to their self-selected areas of concentration and the problems they wish to address in their research. ASPECT-specific coursework provides integrated exposure to interdisciplinary theory, interdisciplinary methodology, and to interdisciplinary professional development. The program offers students comparative and integrated insights into work centered on a problem as it has been pursued, for example, by historians, architects, philosophers, political, cultural, or social theorists. The research outcome this curriculum promises is original and significant work, which will reflect a range of relevant disciplines, departments and fields. At the same time, students will receive both hands on experience and education as instructors while teaching introductory undergraduate courses in departments and interdisciplinary programs participating in ASPECT.
Should this program be of potential interest to you, your colleagues, or students, I encourage you to visit the ASPECT website, www.aspect.vt.edu, or to contact me directly. It has been said that the program is a bellwether for higher education in the United States. I hope you will find reasons when you visit the website to contribute to the ringing of that bell.
From the May 2008 Newsletter of the AIS