Cultural Analysis and Social Theory (MA)

An Interdisciplinary, Dynamic Program

Our program is designed to foster the type of critical inquiry that extends beyond the boundaries of a single academic discipline. Working with professors from across the humanities and social sciences, you gain a comprehensive perspective on the diverse theories and critical methodologies essential to understanding contemporary culture and society and the many challenges we face both locally and globally.

Through coursework and an optional independent research project, you refine your critical thinking, research, and analytical skills, broaden your perspective on contemporary issues and gain new insights into the social and cultural forces that shape the modern world. Our highly personalized program encourages students to place diverse perspectives into vital conversations in order to understand impediments to social justice.

Our program welcomes students from a wide variety of undergraduate disciplines and universities across Canada and around the globe. Our students include both those who have just recently completed their undergraduate studies and those who are professionally situated and wish to further their education. We offer a lively and intellectually engaging program designed to enable you to successfully conduct your graduate studies in a supportive student-centred environment.

Research Focus

CAST faculty and student research supports the development of critical strategies that underpin thriving communities and our readiness to ethically engage the future.

• Globalization, Identity and Social Movements fosters critical understanding of contemporary global economic, social and political processes and the struggle for human, cultural and social rights at the local, national and supranational levels.
• Body Politics: Gender, Sexuality and Embodiment focuses on gender, sexuality and embodiment, and the specific ways in which human bodies are inhabited and represented, historically and culturally.
• Cultural Representation and Social Theory engages a variety of thematic concerns related to the politics of knowledge production, whether in the context of academia and intellectual discourse, as a feature of media technologies, or a practice in everyday life.

Faculty Research

Key attributes of faculty research include: championing social diversity and inclusion; broadening understandings of ethical agency; centering awareness of social justice; and evaluating and understanding the production and limitations of knowledge, interpretation, and analysis, particularly as we attempt to address increasingly complex questions of our time.

Research Assistantships

Research Assistantships are periodically available to CAST students. These research assistantships enable you to work closely with a faculty mentor on a specific research project.

Recent research assistantships include constructing a digital memory map of Kitchener-Waterloo, curating an online art exhibition, and helping to organize a major international conference on biopolitics. Specific topics and the availability of research assistantships vary from year to year.

Recent Major Research Papers

• Post-mastectomy tattooing as ethical relationality, bodily (un)becomings, and monstrous embodiment
• Politics of belonging: Refugee women’s experiences of settlement and integration, ‘unknown, anonymous other’, in Canada
• Walking the line of volunteer tourism
• Problematising the angry gut: Inflammatory bowel disease, quality of life and self-management
• Emergent culture: Iranian rap music as a tool for resistance
• Queering player agency and paratexts: An analysis and expansion of queerbaiting in video games
• Female embodied becomings and de/reterritorializations: An exploration of the affective and phenomenological possibilities and limitations offered by Crossfit
• Postmodern poeisis: Madness, creativity, and the construction of an exploratory methodology in the Broken Glass Project plus Broken Glass Project podcast
• The emergent ethical assemblages of gaming: A case study analysis of ethical affordances in Quantic Dream’s Detroit: Become Human
• Accommodating the minimum: How “fight for $15” shifted the discourse on minimum wage in Ontario
• “It’s sad, it’s tragic, it’s not news”: Journalistic production of “grievability” in Western news depictions of girl victims of violent crime
• Sisters, self-defined: A thematic analysis of the visibility of black women in the canadian professional workplace
• Nationalizing the theft of a nation: Neocolonialism, cultural appropriation, and the official symbols of Canada

About CAST Courses

CAST elective courses examine the complex forces involved in the shaping of cultural processes, forms of subjectivity and modes of social inclusion and exclusion. You will explore:

• How power and politics are embedded in cultural systems.
• How socio-economic forces and popular culture are intermeshed.
• How categories such as gender, race, class, sexuality, and (dis)ability are socially constructed and inequalities reproduced.
• How language, bodies, affect, and memory are culturally constituted and contested.

Over the course of your studies, you deepen your appreciation for how political and ethical agency is possible – and why it is vitally important – in our globalized world.

We regularly offer special topics courses in order to address new areas of research expertise and teaching in our program. Please consult our posted list of yearly courses offerings to see topics and course descriptions.

Sample Elective Courses

Elective course offerings vary from year to year. We offer three electives in each year drawn from the following options and depending on faculty availability:

• CQ610: Race, Gender and Imperialism
• CQ613: Nostalgia and Exile: Memory, History and Identity
• CQ615: Theories of Multiculturalism and Intercultural Dialogue
• CQ617: Past Violence and Public Actions: Art, Literature, Politics
• CQ618: Biopolitical Theory
• CQ619: Global Political Economic and Environmental Armageddon
• CQ621: The Social Body
• CQ624: Rethinking the Body via Deleuze and Guattari
• CQ625: Ethics, Affect and Embodiment
• CQ630: Risk, Media and the Politics of Anxiety
• CQ631: Cultural Studies in Theory and Practice
• CQ632: Hybrid Discourses, Discourses of Hybridity
• CQ633: Power, Hegemony and Resistance
• CQ634: Visuality and Cultural Analysis
• CQ635: Social Theory and Contemporary Film
• CQ640: Special Topics in Globalization, Identity and Social Movements
• CQ641: Special Topics in Body Politics
• CQ642: Special Topics in Culture and Representation

• Start: Fall (September)
• Format: Full-time
• Application deadline: Mar. 30 (international applicants) or Aug. 15 (domestic applicants). Continuing to accept applications until the program is full.

Guaranteed Funding

Eligible students receive guaranteed funding for their studies. This funding comes in the form of a teaching assistantship in the amount of $14,000 to $16,000 per year. Graduate Teaching Assistants typically work in such areas as Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Global Studies, Women and Gender Studies, and related fields in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Additional funding is periodically available to enrolled students in the form of a research assistantship.

Winners of major external awards (OGS and Tri-Council) may be eligible for top-up funding which includes the Dean’s Graduate Scholarship (total value exceeds $10,000). A list of all funding opportunities available to Laurier graduate students is available on our graduate funding webpage.