The Lisbon Consortium is a network hosted by the School of Human Sciences at Universidade Católica Portuguesa .

The Lisbon Consortium offers two Degree Programs:

Master’s Program in Culture Studies;

Doctoral Program in Culture Studies.

Background: What is Culture Studies?

Culture Studies have come of age over the last two decades. Within the framework of the crisis in the humanities and the growing call for renewed arts-based forms of knowledge production, the study of culture has changed from being a frame for humanities’ disciplines into gaining prominence in its own right. Two developments triggered this change. On the one hand, the rise of cultural studies in the 1960’s drew attention to the social-political dimension of culture, to its ordinariness and the many ways in which power was blended into creation. On the other, over the course of the 1980’s a new metadiscipline Kulturwissenschaft (science of culture) drew on the interpretative skills of the humanities and the growing attention to forms of mediation in media studies to look at the multiple ways in which culture matters as driver of artistic creation and also address how societies represent themselves and view others, look at the past and prepare the future. Bringing together the sociological methodology that is proper to British cultural studies with the interpretative qualitative approach of Kulturwissenschaft, Culture Studies is by definition transdisciplinary. It has risen to become a problem-oriented metadiscipline, representing a new paradigm of integrated reflection on the artistic forms of expression of individuals and societies, across the visual arts, literature, cinema and the media.