A group of faculty members, led by Sociology Professor Brian McCabe and English Professor Sherry Linkon, are working to the create an urban studies minor to better equip students with the skills and knowledge to understand the urbanizing world. An official proposal has yet to be made, but, according to McCabe, there is much excitement and interest surrounding the potential addition of the minor.
McCabe described urban studies is an all-encompassing field that has generated interest among social scientists, economists, and public policy makers alike, especially as the world becomes increasingly urbanized and as more people move to cities.
“It’s an urban world out there. We are becoming much more urban, and we are going to continue to become more urban,” McCabe said. “Many of the world’s problems–climate change, inequality, refugee migration–are urban problems. If you want to to be able to solve global complex challenges, you have to know something about cities.”
The faculty in conversation hope to offer an urban studies curriculum that would create a flexible, project-based minor that could also incorporate coursework and student research.
“We want there to be flexibility so that the minor is responding to the kind of things [students] are interested in and [fostering] the kind of skills [students] want to build,” McCabe said. “Our hope is that we can create the kind of framework for bigger, more engaged projects about cities.”
According to McCabe, the minor could supply students with the skills and knowledge for projects they are already interested in. “Our students are out doing incredibly interesting work in the city. There is such an appetite for studying urban studies,” McCabe said. “I see a lot of students going out and doing work in the city, [but] they don’t have a framework to understand what is happening.”
Additionally, McCabe noted that the minor could be linked to a multitude of disciplines and majors already offered in each of Georgetown’s undergraduate schools.
“[It] could deepen any major that you do. If you’re a finance major with an urban studies minor, you could help a nonprofit establish a set of credentials that makes them viable in a city. If you’re a government major, you can be an urban studies minor with a project that is about the passage of a specific legislation through the D.C. City Council,” McCabe said. “Our hope is that people begin to see this as a way to deepen and extend their major.”
Currently, classes that are related to urban studies are tagged and catalogued under the urban studies cluster. The cluster gives students that are interested in the subject a list of related courses that span a variety of departments, including anthropology, history, and justice and peace studies. According to McCabe, the past and future courses within the urban studies cluster could form the curricular foundations of the minor.
As there is yet to be a formal proposal of the urban studies minor, there is no projected date for when it could be available for students. Linkon and McCabe have been informally discussing the urban studies minor for about a year, and they reached out to other professors for the first time last spring semester. The group of faculty discussing the minor have met twice this fall.
“I’m eager to see this process move forward. There seems to be a lot of student interest [and] there is momentum on part of the faculty … I think it will move forward, but I don’t know how long it will take,” McCabe said, referring to the need for approval from the administration.
