The School of Humanities and Social Sciences

The School of Humanities and Social Sciences offers the academic degrees: Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts and PhD. All study programs have been designed to combine elements of creativity, innovation, job perspectives and research orientation for an internationally competitive academic education.

One special feature of this education is an emphasis on a worldview which extends beyond the narrow confines of single disciplines. This emphasis is built into the School’s study programs in two ways. First, all curricula extend to a variety of neighboring disciplines in the sense of interdisciplinarity. Second, Jacobs University is proud to embrace in its curricula perspectives both from the Social Sciences and the Humanities as well as from Engineering and Science, and here is where the concept of transdisciplinarity comes into play.

Why is transdisciplinarity important? The speed of the technological and social change of recent years has forced modern societies to confront anew many of the standard assumptions about the world and the way it works. As a consequence, problems resulting from this change are becoming more complex and therefore require more complex approaches to deal with. And here is where transdisciplinarity enters the picture. On the one hand, Jacobs University as a matter of course values and nurtures such validated methods and theoretical constructs of the traditional academic discourse. But on the other hand, Jacobs University students learn in teaching and research that looking beyond disciplinary boundaries is not only an intellectual challenge, but also dearly pays off in academe and in the future workplace.

All in all, then, Jacobs University’s graduates achieve the broad grounding as well as the professional expertise necessary for life-long success in a world of change.