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The Social Thought and Political Economy Program (STPEC) is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The only program of its kind in New England, it is designed for students who want a challenging major that will help them understand the world, critique it, and work towards changing it. While STPEC faculty teach the core seminars, the program draws its courses from a variety of departments in the humanities and social sciences, including Afro-American Studies, Anthropology, Economics, History, Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, Legal Studies, Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

The program encourages students to engage in a critical examination of society and to develop their own capacities for critical reading, writing, and thinking on different axes of societal oppression/resistance, most prominently gender, class, race and ethnicity. To that end, STPEC students cross disciplinary lines to confront fundamental questions often ignored or neglected by traditional academic thought as they explore theories that address relations between individuals and society. STPEC courses may deal with issues such as freedom and the state, structural inequality in the economy, work and labor relations, the relationship of Western to non-Western cultures, power dynamics involved in issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality, and theories of social change.

STPEC students study not only to understand the world, but rather to prepare themselves to make a contribution to change it. For that reason, there is particular focus on developing skills for effective practice.  STPEC prioritizes the relationship between theory and practice by requiring that students engage in and reflect on internships in the community, play a role in university and/or community affairs, and assume active responsibility for the shape of their own education within the STPEC Program.