Social and Cultural Anthropology KU Leuven

Overview

Get in touch: join KU Leuven ’s Webinars 

Discover all that KU Leuven has to offer via one of KU Leuven’s Webinars about KU Leuven, admissions & applying, housing, and more.

What is the impact of globalisation on family life? What kind of symbols and rituals shape our daily life? What is superdiversity and what does it mean for the social dynamics of the city and its infrastructure? How do people shape their religious identity by means of social media? This is just a small selection of questions that the programme engages with. 

As an aspiring anthropologist, you study issues such as the impact of colonisation, the making and unmaking of identity, the relation between people and their environment, the calibration of agency with instiutions and political economies. You will be taking the perspective of the actors involved, placing emphasis on their daily experience. This angle adds a different dimension to phenomena such as globalisation, ecology or migration. 

Such a power-sensitive, agency-driven, collaborative approach is reflexively practiced in the Master of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven. The programme offers students exciting pathways and critical insights into the fundamentals of the discipline, and invites them to pursue their own scientific interests and societal concerns in individual research projects. Drawing on the cutting-edge research conducted at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, the masters provides an ample research outlook, informed by – but not limited to–  its regional focus on Europe, Northern and Central Africa.

Strengths

•  The programme trains you in empirical and comparative research methodologies, which challenge your familiar ways of being-in-the-world and the prejudices you hold about yourself and others.
• Throughout the programme you develop your own research focus by  conducting fieldwork, critically analyzing data and writing on this particular topic in your final master's thesis. 

• Depending on your research topic, students have the opportunity to engage in qualitative research in many different locations around the world, possibly in combination with an Erasmus exchange or a summer school.

Career perspectives

Graduates of Anthropology find employment in numerous areas. Anthropologists are especially valued as highly critical professionals, who know how to analyse complex situations from different angles. They are well-versed in setting up, executing and evaluating (research) projects independently. Educated in a highly diverse and international programme, graduates are able to communicate and report adequately in an intercultural environment. Our alumni are employed as

• diversity experts
• cultural and political formation consultants
• employees in non-profit organisations
• educational consultants
• healthcare workers
• policy advisers
• researchers
• youth workers
• professors
• directors of socio-cultural organisations
• journalists