Program Information
The Ph.D. program in Transborder and Global Human Dynamics is designed to provide doctoral students with a rigorous program of cultural, anthropological, political, historical, artistic, literary, and linguistic subject matter in the social sciences and humanities. At the heart of the endeavor is a program that fosters the study of the cultural pluralism and social, political, linguistic, and creative interactions that emerge from and shape the diverse practices, interpretations, and reproduction of transnational borders. Such a program is ideally suited to forge new interpretations, solutions, and understandings of relevant issues for scholars and students living and studying in the US-Mexico transborder region, with implications not only for our border region, but also for other border communities around the world.
The program is based on the Cambridge-Oxford collaborative research and instruction model. The program curriculum closely follows the NMSU Graduate School’s requirements and timelines for admission, doctoral committee formation, and comprehensive and qualifying examinations. The program has limited residency requirements, since doctoral students will perform research in the field, but come together to participate in colloquia at NMSU. The program centers on a set of common courses and colloquia exploring theory, methods, and mixed methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis, and six interdisciplinary research concentrations. Credits for fieldwork, archival work, and community engagement may involve transborder internships and experiences at universities, policy institutes, archives, and think tanks supervised by the student’s committee.
Interdisciplinary Focus Areas:
- Cultural and linguistic translation, interpretation, literature, and heritage
- Refugees, asylum-seekers and migration
- Transnational public policy and human rights
- Environmental justice, landscape, archaeology, and heritage management
- Food security, water and energy security, human health, and sustainability
- Power, inequality, and racial justice