Goucher College Announces New Cultural Sustainability Program

July 15, 2009 |

Goucher College has begun accepting applicants to its new Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability program. The program—the only one of its kind in the country—brings together tools from anthropology, history, communications, business and management, linguistics, and activism, and it teaches students how to sustain cultural traditions in an era of increasing homogeneity and globalization.

Cultural sustainability is a new discipline that combines activism, fieldwork, academic scholarship, and grassroots communications to help preserve cultural traditions and communities—whether these are neighborhoods, villages, cities, ethnic groups, religious or spiritual groups, tribes, or any other populations with shared traditions and values. 

“We envision our graduates as the future leaders of a new conversation about the crucial issues endangering the world’s communities,” says Program Director Rory Turner. “Culture underpins everything we do—from our environment to our economy to our arts and society. Without a thorough understanding of what’s important to communities—either here or abroad—we can’t hope to save their most essential traditions and ways of life.”

Goucher’s Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability coursework is conducted as a limited residency, distance-education program, meaning classes are primarily held online and are complemented with two one-week residencies on the college’s suburban Baltimore campus. This format allows the program to recruit the best faculty from across the nation and draw a diverse student population, and it gives students enormous flexibility to fit the program around their daily lives. The limited residency and workshop components provide face-to-face interaction and fieldwork with faculty and other students in the program.

Students complete 38 credits to earn the Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability. Eighteen credits must be completed from the required core courses, including a six-credit capstone project in the field; 10 credits must be earned from among program/interdisciplinary electives, and 10 are completed from the management curriculum.

Applications for the program are accepted twice a year. The deadline for January 2010 admission is October 15, 2009; the deadline for August 2010 admission is April 16, 2010.

For more information about the program, please see www.goucher.edu/culture or contact Debbie Cebula, director of professional graduate programs and lifelong learning, at 410-337-6296 or deborah.cebula@goucher.edu.