THE 1-YEAR MA PROGRAM
Our program in Sociology and Social Anthropology emphasizes interdisciplinary and critical approaches to social issues. The integrated study of the two disciplines fosters an environment that is admittedly conscious of the historicity of social science categories and theories, their meaning in different cultures, and engagement in the practical world. The primary goal of the one-year program is to enable students to deepen and broaden their knowledge of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of social phenomena, structures, and processes. Through a wide range of courses on social theory, migration, religion, ethnicity, culture and cultural policies, economic sociology, globalization, dynamics of modernity, institutional change, urban processes, and gender relations, students are encouraged to elaborate a personal position with regard to the connection between the two disciplines in the topics they study. The one-year program also offers courses and training in several social science methodologies, including ethnography, interviews, discourse analysis, survey research, quantitative methods, and/or historical methods.
THE 2-YEAR MA PROGRAM
Our program in Sociology and Social Anthropology emphasizes interdisciplinary and critical approaches to social issues. The integrated study of the two disciplines fosters an environment that is admittedly conscious of the historicity of social science categories and theories, their meaning in different cultures, and engagement in the practical world. The primary goal of the program is to enable students to deepen and broaden their knowledge of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of social phenomena, structures, and processes. The Two-Year MA Program has a strong research component as one entire term is devoted to research for the thesis and two terms to designing and writing it. Students in the program acquire the required research skills through courses and training in various methodologies including ethnography, interviews, discourse analysis, survey research, quantitative methods, and historical methods. Part of the program focuses specifically on globalization and urban studies. Local sites offer strategic windows onto larger-scale processes of globalization. Historically, ‘global’ phenomena are outcomes of the interplay between various scales, with cities as key geographic and material nodes. Students in the two-year program thus have the option to specialize in Global and Urban Studies. This track is an innovative and interdisciplinary course of studies that focuses on the relationship between global processes in general, and cities more particularly, and on the ways in which political, economic, and social structures interact on the local, urban and global scales.