Why Cultural Sustainability?

Feeling a tension between the rapid pace of change and the rich traditions that define your community? You're not alone. In today's world, cultural heritage is under constant threat. But there's hope! Goucher College's Master of Arts in Cultural Sustainability equips you with the knowledge and skills to champion the values and practices that make communities distinct. Join this conversation with MACS director Amy Skillman to learn about how the program works, why it matters, and what graduates are doing to empower communities to shape their own futures, celebrate diversity and foster intercultural understanding, and find creative solutions to environmental and social challenges.

Amy Skillman is a folklorist whose work occurs at the intersection of culture and tension, where paying attention to culture can serve to mediate social change and foster cultural equity. She advises artists and community-based organizations on the implementation of programs that honor and conserve their cultural traditions, guides them to potential resources, and works with them to build their capacity to sustain these initiatives. For over 20 years, her work has integrated personal experience narratives of immigrant and refugee women into leadership empowerment initiatives. Working in collaboration with the PA Immigrant and Refugee Women’s Network, she has co-produced an exhibition called Our Voices, a theater piece about Coming to American in the 21st Century, and a reader’s theater called Magnificent Healing, which explores various cultural collisions with our healthcare system. She is currently working with the Susquehanna Folk Music Society to document traditional artists in Central Pennsylvania and create public programming that draws attention to and honors the breadth and depth of their work.

Other work includes a Grammy-nominated recording of Old Time fiddlers in Missouri, a yearlong arts residency with alternative education high school students rooted in the ethnography of their lives, and a traveling exhibition called Making It Better, about role of folk arts as a catalyst for activism in communities throughout Pennsylvania. She has been teaching in the MACS program since 2011 and became Director in 2012. She is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society and a recipient of the society’s Benjamin A. Botkin award for significant lifetime achievement in public folklore.