Graduate School of Culture

Graduate School of Culture

The Graduate School of Culture was established in 2006 in order to nurture creative professionals working in the culture industry. The School's programs are aimed at teaching students the social and financial values of art and culture, and developing a long-term perspective on commercialization using the academic base of liberal arts studies. To achieve this goal, the School provides three programs:

1. Theory and Planning of Cultural Art
2. Cultural Management and Tourism
3. Media Art Engineering

The Theory and Planning of Cultural Art program is designed to educate talented planners able to produce creative cultural products based on knowledge of the humanities that encompass aesthetics, cultural studies, literature, ecology, philosophy, and sociology. The program aims to create cultural art theorists who have a clear grasp of current trends in global cultural project planning and policy. The program also aspires to enable professionals to communicate cultural and art products to the general public, and identify consumption and production practices.
The aim of the Cultural Management and Tourism Program is to train professionals in cultural management and tourism and create culture and place marketing experts who can conduct research and planning, and oversee management by uniting various professional fields in a creative and integrative way based on passion, knowledge, and executive ability.
“Culture, Tourism, and Place” are chosen as three key words of this program, and the two routes, the Cultural Tourism Strategist route and Place Marketing Strategist route, are available along with a 32-subject curriculum.

The Cultural Tourism Strategist route is designed to create tourism professionals equipped with comprehensive and unique abilities. This route empowers students to overcome the limits of mass tourism by identifying alternative industries such as eco-tourism, social welfare tourism, sustainable tourism, and green tourism.
The Place Marketing Strategist route aims to produce experts in the fields of place marketing and spatial culture. Students are empowered to practice in the new paradigm of Place Studies including place identity, urban culture, cultural politics of space, and human communication and networking, from which identity and authenticity of region and place as grounds of daily life are derived. This route focuses on nurturing the ability to conduct creative, critical, and practical research, and devise plans related to urban and local cultural contents and brands.
The Media Art Engineering program focuses on creating quality media specialists who are armed with cultural sensibility and a sound view on society through a comprehensive understanding of film, TV, photography, and digital media industries that are required in the digital era.
The above programs are closely intertwined to nurture a comprehensive view of cultural subjects in general. To this end, the following nine routes have been established in the three programs:

1. The Cultural Aesthetics Research route is dedicated to education with the aim of instilling cultural sensibility. Students are empowered to identify cultural uniqueness, universality, diversity, and differences in specific cultures, and to distill from these the beauty of our daily life and transform it into commercial products.
2. The Urban Culture Researcher/Planner route nurtures policy researchers in many cultural fields for academic institutions, public offices, and urban cultural planning organizations.
3. The Creative Planning route aims to teach students how to predict, evaluate, and remove obstacles by leveraging advanced abstract thinking, creative intuition, and the ability to understand the customs and sentiments of different cultures.
4. The Cultural Tourism Strategist route is designed to produce researchers with a creative and critical mind, and planning professionals with the practical ability to overcome the limits of the mass tourism industry by creating new paradigms.
5. The Place Marketing Strategist route aims to nurture creative and talented researchers and planning professionals with the ability to create urban and local cultural contents and brands based on local identity and authenticity.
6. The Public Policy Maker route is designed to produce culture policy makers equipped with a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics, policies, and purpose of ongoing projects in this field.
7. The Minority-Cultural Planning route aims to nurture cultural planning professionals who can cater to minorities emerging in society as a focal point of culture policies and icons. Examples of such minorities include immigrants, senior citizens, teenagers, people with disabilities, females, and the poor.
8. The Film Theory route aims to teach media languages and promote critical views on various media in our society.
9. The Video Production route aims to teach the production of professional media through experimental workshops and seminars.