MAIS 601

Overview

As a core entry course in the MA-IS Program, MAIS 601: Making Sense of Theory in the Humanities and Social Sciences prepares learners for further graduate work in interdisciplinary studies, laying the groundwork for their own application and development of theoretical perspectives in their various itineraries through the Program while promoting dialogue, thinking, and writing in an interdisciplinary way.    

This course not only provides students with an opportunity to explore the origins and meanings of the various theories that inform the contemporary humanities and social sciences, but it initiates learners into the role of the theoretician who frames the world in a certain way in order to render particular phenomena more salient for study and analysis.  Thus, it is about doing theory above and beyond just learning about various theories, revealing theory to be, at its best, not the application of abstract mental constructs to an external world but a way of seeing that makes certain aspects of that world visible.  In this way, the course challenges the classical opposition between theory and practice, revealing theory to be itself a kind of practice that no pragmatism can afford to do without.

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