Month of the Majors - Student blog Humanities

And the Month of the Majors continues! This time, a stydent blog about the Humanities major.

By Tamara Uildriks, major student Humanities

I chose to do humanities because I think it is the major which explains you the most of how and why the world is organized in the way it is. The major addresses all actual issues and conflicts in the world, explaining them through research and works from all different fields, through different periods in time.

It is a combination of history, philosophy, sociology, and media-studies. This may seem very broad, but they are all combined to make up specific courses. So in the first block we had a course on epistemology, a sort of philosophy of knowledge, related to the current society. This course concerned for example why people believe in conspiracy theories, which institutions you should trust, and what it takes for someone to be an expert. Very relevant topics, which are recurrent in the news every day. These topics are fundamentally important for society, as it raises the question how people deal with information, and information institutions, and how they act on this.

Another course is Knowledge is power, which is a sort of media-studies alike course. It concerns how media influenced societies, starting from how the French revolution was caused in the 18^th century, to how newspapers struggle to survive today. Furthermore the course tells about how the media can influence democracy, and how journalism is fundamentally important, and can influence democracy. It teaches what the underlying causes of problems are, and how these are deeply embedded in society. Furthermore it concerns the internet, and what huge differences the internet makes for society and democracies, for example because people can say anything they want anonymously, and people can connect to like-minded, which can cause good things to happen, such as activism, but also right extremism

I want to go into the journalism direction, and I think humanities is the best choice for this. This because you learn to understand the deep-rooted causes of actualities, and can try to predict what will happen in society if there would be no interventions or solutions found for certain problems. You understand why our society and other societies are designed the way they are, and why the media and government make certain decisions.