Admissions (Graduate School)

Introduction to the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies

The Kobe University Graduate School of Intercultural Studies was established in April 2007 through reorganization of the former Graduate School of Cultural Studies and Human Science. The Graduate School of Cultural Studies and Human Science sent numerous first-rate graduates out into the world and achieved excellent research results. While expanding on these achievements, the Graduate School of Intercultural Studies was conceived to address various issues deriving from increasing cultural globalization and trends such as radical localization. The purpose of the Graduate School is to cultivate advanced fields of cultural studies with an eye toward intercultural harmony and to construct new paradigms for understanding human culture. To this end, we have formulated the following five research aims.

Five Research Aims

1. Pursuit of cultural research that understand culture as a complex entity and takes intercultural correlation as its perspective.
2. Dynamic research into culture as a complex entity with attention to intercultural interaction in such forms as collision, fusion, and interchange.
3. Multifaceted studies of cultural metamorphosis amid the globalization of contemporary life.
4. Development of advanced communication research related to language and information.
5. Execution of a shift from monistic, single paradigms that apply over-simplistic dichotomies such as central/peripheral, civilized/uncivilized, and advanced/backward to pluralistic, multiplex paradigms, and creation of research methodologies adapted to the cultural dynamics of contemporary society.