The coursework balances in-depth learning in local cultures with general issues of relations between cultures and nations.

IIS students are trained in perceiving the socially constructed character of knowledge, including different cultural and disciplinary knowledges. IIS students will acquire analytical skills to understand that widely accepted claims to neutral universal truths and to objectivity actually derive from local knowledge systems.

Moreover, they come to see how cultures and nations are defined within the context of issues of ethnocentrism, cultural appropriation, genocide, national and cultural imperialism, and homogenization and other developments due to a contested history of development and globalization. They come to see how cultures and nations are not fixed but derive from migration and transformation across heterogeneous and diverse social networks involving dominant and non-dominant groups. Students approach these topics through linking cultures and nations to history, institutions, economics, philosophies, world views, and ideologies, and the structural politics of domination at the global, regional, national, and local levels.