Area studies

From Wikinfo

In the humanities and social sciences, area studies is interdisciplinary research and scholarship pertaining to a particular geographical or cultural region. The term exists primarily as a general description for what are, in the practice of scholarship, many heterogeneous fields of research. Fields are defined differently from university to university, and from department to department, but common area-studies fields include:

• Middle Eastern studies (or Near Eastern studies)
• Asian studies
  • East Asian studies (Sinology, Japanology)
  • South Asian studies
  • Southeast Asian studies
    • Indonesian studies
    • Thai studies
    • Burma studies
• African studies
• Latin American studies
  • South American studies
  • Central American studies
• Caribbean studies
• American studies (in the United States this has traditionally referred primarily to North America and especially the U.S.)
• European studies
  • English studies
  • French studies
  • German studies
  • Italian studies
  • Slavic studies

Other interdisciplinary research fields such as women's studies (also known as gender studies), and Ethnic Studies (including African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Latino/a Studies, and Native American Studies) are not part of area studies but are sometimes included in discussion along with it.

Some entire insitutions of higher education (tertiary education) are devoted solely to area studies such as School of Oriental and African_Studies part of the University of London or the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in Japan.

Contrast the term cultural studies.

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Area_studies" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_studies on August 11, 2006, and used under the GNU Free Documentation License