1 GRADUATE COUNCIL MEETING 9 May 2012 102 Kern Graduate ...

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and other developed and newly-developing countries and regions vie for access to economic
opportunities and political influence.
Graduate students from Penn State’s multiplicity of academic and sociocultural backgrounds
who wish to study Africa’s role in the present global system, must be provided with an
intellectual ‘home’ to do so. The proposed dual-title doctoral degree program will provide this
opportunity by allowing Political Science doctoral students to obtain an African Studies
specialization to complement the degree in their major discipline. The proposed program will
provide such students with a framework within which they can integrate their Africa-related
courses in political science and other disciplines on campus, in a systematic way to engage in
comparative, mulitdisciplinary, African Studies.
The multidisciplinary approach of the proposed program will utilize the expertise of existing
Africanists at Penn State to design courses, which will adopt the lens of the humanities, social
sciences, education, biobehavioral sciences, and environmental sciences, as necessary and
applicable. For example, analyses of governance issues in Africa will not be merely a traditional
Political Science enquiry. Rather, it will integrate principles of climate change and resource
competition, political ecology, history, ethnicities, language and/or linguistics. In the same vein,
relevant comparative analyses will be invoked to interrogate pertinent issues of African
development, including, for example, those dealing with gender, refugees, child labor, terrorism,
and food security.
The integrative orientation of the proposed program builds on its multidisciplinarity and is
further embedded in two components: a pedagogy that assists doctoral students to synthesize
their thematic and/or regional interests in African Studies; and an overall structure that allows
doctoral students to combine their interests in their major discipline with African Studies into a
single intellectual endeavor. No other avenue currently exists at Penn State for doctoral students
to pursue this intellectual convergence between their specialization in Political Science and
African Studies.
The multidisciplinary, comparative, and integrated vision of the proposed program is consistent
with Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts (CLA) mission that dual-title doctoral degree
programs are essential to its goal of moving from “national prominence” to “national leadership”
(CLA Strategic Plan for 2008-2013).
Other major universities in the CIC (for example, Ohio State, Michigan State, and Michigan) and
around the country (Yale, Cornell, UCLA, Florida, and UPenn) have flourishing programs in
African Studies. None of these programs is, however, conceived explicitly as an intellectual
partnership between Political Science and African Studies. Owing to its uniqueness, the
proposed program provides an academic niche, which will contribute to Penn State’s vision of
becoming a leader in multidisciplinary, international, and multicultural scholarship.