Exploring World Arts and Cultures at UCLA: An Interdisciplinary Approach
The UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures (WAC) offers a distinctive Bachelor of Arts degree that encourages students to critically examine and constructively engage with the social and cultural contexts shaping artists and their creativity. Education in this major is built on the dialogue between theory and practice and between creative work and critical analysis.
Program Overview
The WAC major encourages students to understand the making and reception of arts and social movements through a critical lens rooted in a range of cultural and postcolonial theories. The department's vision is to blend explorations in the library, the field, and the studio, to find unity through a shared engagement with problems of cultural and aesthetic diversity.
Curriculum Structure
The WAC curriculum integrates theory, method, and practice and is grounded in diverse cultural artistic expressions. The preparation for the major introduces students to the study of cultural practices and how they represent, enact, and intervene in lived experience. Lower division core courses provide students with key concepts in the study of cultures, arts, and field-based research methods.
WL ARTS 2, a lower division seminar, enables students to join instructors in a workbench approach to education. Upper division courses continue to fill the parameters of how one understands arts and cultures through research methods that are both authoritative and collaborative. The upper division core requirements and electives also offer theoretical foundations in the study of specific media. Students will be required to take WL ARTS 102, an upper division “practice based” class, providing another chance to engage art-making. Students may propose to complete their degree with a "Senior Praxis" capstone project.
Comprehensive information on the undergraduate curriculum for current students can be found in the Undergraduate Handbook.
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Key Features of the Program
- Interdisciplinary Approach: The program operates with considerable independence, unified by a common concern for aesthetic production, corporeality and performance, the dynamics of "tradition," and "culture-building" in contemporary societies.
- Theory and Practice: WAC forges connections between critical theory and artistic practice, attending to the changing social roles and responsibilities of artists and scholars of the arts in the United States and worldwide.
- Community Engagement: In our courses, we take care to learn from and with community members, drawing on the long term partnerships that characterize our faculty’s research. We anchor our curriculum in a range of intersectional practices, including arts activism, critical theory, and inquiry into multiple visual mediums.
- Ethical Research: WAC has enabled many students to demonstrate to graduate school admissions committees that their bachelor's degree taught them not simply about culture and the arts but also provided them training in ethical research toward social justice.
Course Examples
Several courses provide practical experience for various career paths:
- "Art and Moral Action," "Art and Global Health," or "Film and Feminism": These courses provide practical experience for careers in environmentalism or work toward gender equality.
- Field-research class and community engagement courses: These provide hands-on training for those interested in non-profit or organizational leadership.
- "Visual Culture," "Introduction to Museology," and "Curating Cultures": These are for those aiming to work in museums.
Student Experiences
Students have expressed that the WAC curriculum is fun to learn because it’s about things they wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn and discuss if they were in a different major. The diverse coursework, the emphasis the department places on personal research interests and molding the coursework to an individual’s interests, collaboration with peers, and the opportunity to design independent studies are beneficial to students.
Hanna Young, WAC Class of 2021, shared, "World Arts and Cultures steeped me in advocacy and allowed me to actively challenge “traditional” ways of knowing, while still centering my work on psychological nuance and conceptualizations of experience. The department of World Arts and Cultures afforded me an education with incredible breadth and depth, as well as opportunities for collaboration that continue to support me in my current clinical, research, and academic endeavors."
Here are some examples of how students have tailored the WAC major to their unique interests:
- A slam poet who wanted to eventually go to medical school, but didn’t want a health sciences undergraduate major and wanted to minor in LGBTQ studies, majored in WAC and took advantage of the Art and Global Health research center, had double minors in LGBTQ Studies and Neuroscience, and is now a psychiatrist working with the LGBTQ population.
- A photographer who was interested in entrepreneurship but wanted more discussions around visual culture and how to build and lead culturally nuanced ideas around business and commerce, triple minored in Film, Television & Digital Media; Entrepreneurship; and Digital Humanities, worked in college admission and outreach following graduation, then went on to work in diversity technical sourcing for a tech startup.
- An Ayurvedic chef who was planning on majoring in Philosophy because it was the closest thing to holistic health but was missing the connection to food culture found that World Arts and Cultures provided the space to connect their interests in nutrition, philosophy, and culturally informed health and healing practices.
- An actor/performer who didn’t want to be a musical theater major because they were critical of the lack of diversity in the field, started at UCLA as an Environmental Science major, then switched to WAC because of the opportunity to explore theater and performance as a tool for social change and inclusive representation.
Career Paths
Graduates have excelled in fields including technology and the arts, videography, documentary, public service, education, theatrical/event production, performing arts, urban planning, law, environmental activism, public health, and medicine. They have made careers as independent artists, in community non-profits and activist groups, government arts agencies, museums, K-12 schools, and arts foundations.
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Potential careers for Culture and Performance M.A./Ph.D. and Choreographic Inquiry M.F.A. graduates also include positions in research universities and colleges, and M.F.A.
Our students have had a wide number of professional paths after graduating with a BA in World Arts and Cultures. From curatorial work to therapists, from non-profit work to educators, our students have found many ways that a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary education have supported their professional goals.
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