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Emory University uses an interdisciplinary approach in the undergraduate minor
HAUNTED BY HEADLINES of hate crimes on college campuses, highschool shootings, and foreign atrocities, many people seem to be asking themselves why violence is so prevalent today.
Here in one of the most violent cities in America, Emory University has created a unique interdisciplinary minor that focuses on violence. Undergraduates study its causes and consequences from more than a dozen disciplines, including history, sociology, biology, literature, and music. The students are also using the knowledge they gain in the classroom to create a violenceprevention program on the campus, and to serve community organizations.
"In the last several years, most people have come to agree that you can't adequately address violence from the perspective of a single discipline," says Robert Agnew, director of the violence-studies program. "As faculty members, we're each only looking at part of the picture."
Increasingly, colleges are beginning to offer isolated courses that take a multidisciplinary approach to violence, but Emory's program, now in its third year, may be the only comprehensive minor of its kind.
The classes that count toward the minor reflect just how broad the study of violence can be. Students can enroll in "Hong Kong Cinema: Swordplay, Gunplay, Melodrama and Ghosts" (film studies); "Evil: Philosophical and Literary Approaches" (religion); "Military Ethics" (philosophy); and "Latin American Revolutions" (political science).
In addition to existing courses such as those, the program's founders created an introductory Violence Studies 101 course, a sexual-violence-prevention seminar, and a class on how public-health officials study violence.
Outside the classroom, students in the minor are required to complete an internship. This fall's interns must work at least eight hours a week in a government or social-services agency. Among the options: keeping tabs on the welfare of foster children, visiting jails to interview crime suspects, and helping to keep at-risk teenagers off the streets.
Some students and professors continue to explore violence in their free time, watching films such as Saving Private Ryan and Bonnie and Clyde, and chatting afterward about how they portray violence.
Recent headlines have provided fodder for many campus events sponsored by the program. In April, Arthur Kellermann, chief of emergency medicine at Emory's School of Medicine and an expert on gun violence,...