Bachelor's degree (180 credits) or equivalent in social sciences, humanities or arts.

General eligibility + the equivalent of Swedish higher secondary school English 6.

In this programme students engage with critical approaches from the humanities in order to study and understand the dynamics of cultural production and change in society. They explore the evolutionary torque of ideas about the human in different geographic contexts, and analyse cultural expressions (e.g. texts, films, artworks) as they are situated within diverse encounters, frictions, and historical entanglements. Situatedness is an important dimension, since it emphasises awareness of individual and collective subject positions in space and time, and pinpoints relations in and between human, non-human, and virtual contexts.

Students will strengthen their skills in effective humanistic methodologies, such as hermeneutic analysis, close reading, critical observation, phenomenology, reasoning, and engaged writing. These skills will be further developed through a course on action-based research. Through these methods, students engage in multiple ways of exploring cultural phenomena in society, where there are shifting and uneven points of access and possibilities for production and reproduction. Ensuring relevance to the “here and now”, the programme also provides a space for students to negotiate topical issues such as decolonising climate change, cryptocurrency and economic utopias, real and imagined borders and their transgressions, monuments and iconoclasm. Through these reflections, we ask: Who has the power to speak and act? How does representation work, and affect/produce different bodies? Under what conditions is knowledge ethically produced? All these approaches and questions set the tone for a rigorous critical inquiry into culture where students can interrogate challenging histories and their inherited biases, theorise reflexively, and also creatively experiment, and play with alternatives.

The programme is rooted in the academic traditions of critical theory, hermeneutics, cultural studies, and critical humanities, dealing with epistemological issues of power and ideology, critique as a praxis, ways of transmission, and problems of translation. However, its starting point is from an idea of culture as both made and inherited, meaning that it is the product of accumulated individual and collective actions (and reactions). Thus, special focus is given to participatory and action-based research methodologies that emphasise the situated and experiential dimensions of theoretical inquiry.

Progression between course modules is structured in a way that seeks to integrate theory and practice, putting theory into practice and letting practice inform theory. An important part of the programme is that students are encouraged to collaborate with cultural stakeholders and to co-create their own productions, as well as building a community of peers. In the programme students will gain the requisite skills to work in cultural production and cultural administration, in ways that are positionally aware and ethically responsible. At the same time, the programme provides the necessary rigour for students to prepare for doctoral studies within an interdisciplinary and international scholarly context.