Bard College
AC-2: Learning Outcomes

Environmental and Urban Studies: The Environmental and Urban Studies (EUS) program is designed to encourage students to engage intellectually across the disciplines as well as to acquire practical skill sets and experience addressing urban and environmental challenges. Students study in several rigorous interdisciplinary and disciplinary core courses, complete an internship and a practicum, and attend the EUS colloquium. To balance transdisciplinary breadth with depth in a particular discipline, each student also selects intermediate and advanced courses in a chosen Focus Area. Expertise developed through the Focus Area studies (particularly during the Junior year) prepares the student for the Senior Project. Anthropology: The core of the program consists of topical courses that examine human life in relation to global debates about cultural identity formations, through language, religion, gender systems, racial categories, class dynamics, and popular culture. In addition, anthropology productively challenges dominant understandings about development and the environment. Comparative in scope, the discipline is concerned with how individuals and communities produce social and cultural meanings within a transcultural world created by an international division of labor, the wide proliferation and consumption of media, and the commodification of culture. Strengths of the faculty span across a wide variety of areas: Africa; Latin America and the Caribbean; South and Southeast Asia; Australasia (the Pacific); and the United States. Sociology: Through a combination of interdisciplinary coursework, internships and field research, and a required senior thesis project, students come to locate questions of environmental justice and sustainability within the framework of civil and human rights. Rights are understood in a broadly inclusive sense, and students are expected to demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of the inter-related character of human and non-human agents within a context that includes environmental and climatic forces (Thomas Keenan) Human Rights: Through a combination of interdisciplinary coursework, internships and field research, and a required senior thesis project, students come to locate questions of environmental justice and sustainability within the framework of civil and human rights. Rights are understood in a broadly inclusive sense, and students are expected to demonstrate a sophisticated knowledge of the inter-related character of human and non-human agents within a context that includes environmental and climatic forces.