Experience Domain

The humanities investigate human existence as it is personally and collectively experienced. Human experience is always situated, always intertwined with specific historical, geographical, political, social, cultural, or economic conditions and contexts. The humanities ask what it meant to be human in a specific time and place, and try to understand how human beings have sought to make sense of their lives, and of the events and ideas in which they participate and which have been handed down to them. To explore the meanings of human existence, the humanities study everything from the intimate arenas of embodiment, selfhood, and identity to the political and philosophical dimensions of collective planetary life. This category includes courses concerned with identity, social and bodily life, and with theoretical problems arising from the attempt to demarcate agency from the broader environments out of which it emerges.