The Minor
This week’s feature is the Minor in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST) at Brandeis University. From the website:
The minor in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation offers a coherent curriculum designed to support Brandeis undergraduates with interests in the arts and creative expression as well as commitments to understanding and advancing social justice and the transformation of conflict.
Students enrolled in the minor take the Introduction to Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation core course, four additional electives, and complete a capstone practicum.
Two Interesting Courses
CAST 150b Introduction to Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation
How can music, theater, dance and visual and other arts contribute to community building, coexistence, and nonviolent social change? In the aftermath of violence, how can artists help communities reconcile? Students explore these questions through interviews, case studies, and projects.
CAST 180a Creative Approaches to Conflict Transformation and Sustainable Development
Explores creative approaches to contemporary complex challenges, focusing on conflict transformation and sustainable development. The course introduces theories of complexity, and considers how modes of understanding and engaging through arts and culture cultivate the capacities required to constructively address complex challenges. Through the course, students will consider key concepts, review and assess case studies, collaboratively design and advocate for initiatives. Students will engage with members of a global community of inquiry making the case for arts- and culture-based approaches to complex contemporary challenges.
Five Possible Complementary Majors at Brandeis University
Unique Opportunities within the Major/Minor
Students who have enrolled in or completed the core course for the minor are eligible to apply for Student Grants of $500, that “recognize exemplary creative, scholarly and activist work at the nexus of arts, culture, justice and peace, and to enable students to engage in further creative work and theoretical and practical learning about questions that are central to the minor.”
Sample Similar Programs
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- University of Iowa: Social Justice Major, The Arts and Social Change Emphasis Area
- University of San Francisco: Performing Arts & Social Justice Major
- Whitman College: Art-Environmental Studies Major