Multiple Cultural Perspectives

What is the Multiple Cultural Perspectives Requirement?
Every Hampshire College student is required, as part of their Division II, to engage with questions of cultural diversity and the critical examination of questions of race, non-western perspectives, and/or the role of power and privilege in the production of knowledge. The "multiple cultural requirement" represents an opportunity for you creatively to expand your intellectual horizons and to see your chosen concentration in a larger global context; a politically, economically and culturally interconnected world. You may fulfill this requirement by demonstrating in your portfolio work and retrospective your serious engagement with one or more of the following critical issues:


 * Non-Western Perspectives: an intellectually vigorous engagement with non-western perspectives will expand the way you think relationally and historically about cultures and cultural productions outside of one particular tradition or geographical location.
 * Race in the United States: Study of the history, politics and culture of race in the United States and elsewhere will enable you better to understand the conditions that underlie discrepancies of power that often fall along racial lines. You are encouraged to achieve this goal by investigating the roles that race and racism play in American culture and society.
 * Knowledge and Power: The influence of discrepancies in power and privilege (within institutions, societies and globally) is hidden from much scholarly discourse, where canons of academic disciplines are apt to be presented as neutral and universal. Study of how academic knowledge may be shaped by relations of power and difference will help you think more critically about the processes under which intellectual or artistic perspectives can be either privileged or marginalized.

You are encouraged to examine the intersections between these three critical issues and, in particular, to think about the relationship between knowledge and power in regard to non-Western perspectives or race.

Historical Background
The Multiple Cultural Requirement was approved by the faculty in May 2000 and supercedes the 'Third World Expectation'.