Mount Holyoke College

Upcoming Events:

Shattuck Picnic: American Studies, CST, English, and Medieval Studies
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
5:30 pm
The green between Shattuck and Dwight (sun) inside Shattuck (rain)

Department at Home: CST, German and Gender Studies
Saturday, May 24, 2008
3:00-4:30 pm
Library, Octagon Room, Miles-Smith, Level 4

Please email us if you have any
events you would like to share!

Welcome!

What is CST?

Critical Social Thought (CST) is designed for students with a passion for ideas, a desire to ask normative questions about social realities, and an independent approach to education. This interdisciplinary program explores the place of thought in history and society, and the ways in which ideas both are generated by and generate concrete practice. Critical social thought embraces the historical forces that have shaped contemporary experience; the creative expressions that have emerged to represent that experience; and the conceptual and political tensions between truth and uncertainty, individuality and community, power and freedom, cruelty and justice in the modern age. Treating common sense and conventional beliefs as points of departure rather than predetermined points of arrival, critical social thought pivots on questioning the taken-for-granted from all angles.

While acquainting students with a variety of intellectual traditions, this program also requires each of its majors and minors to combine different thinkers and currents of thought to engage with a theme or question of her original design.

A few examples of past themes students have chosen to pursue are: the Western Canon and its critics, the causes of peace and conflict, postcolonial studies, architecture and the social organization of space, social inequality, ethical values and social change, disenchantment, fractured identities in cross-cultural context.

More:
Vista article about the CST program
Published by Mount Holyoke College, September 1996 (Volume 1, Number 2)

Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College
50 College Street, South Hadley, MA 01075
Phone: 413-538-2132
Fax: 413-538-3206