Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana

Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, 2013

The Faculty of Social Sciences is one of the largest academic units of the University of Ljubljana with 27 graduate and postgraduate programmes in Political Science, Communication, Journalism, and Cultural Studies. The teaching and research addresses pertinent national and international issues at a time when globalisation demands new perspectives on life in a multicultural world. In view of this, the faculty offers instruction and conducts research in English, French, German, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and Russian. The faculty houses the Institute of Social Sciences, the Jože Goričar Central Social Sciences Library, the FDV Publishing House, the FDV Art Gallery, and a computer centre.

As of 2012 the faculty employed over 270 members of the academic staff, and over 10,000 students have graduated to date.

Background

The predecessor of today’s Faculty of Social Sciences was established in 1961 under the name the College of Political Sciences, which in a few years developed and was renamed into the College of Sociology, Political Sciences and Journalism. In 1970, after becoming a member of the University of Ljubljana, the college was renovated and remodelled into the Faculty of Sociology, Political Sciences and Journalism (former FSPN). In 1991 the Faculty was renamed to the Faculty of Social Sciences.

Study programmes

The faculty offers interdisciplinary study programmes in the fields of Sociology, Communication Studies, Journalism, Political Science, and Cultural Studies. The newly established interdisciplinary doctoral programme Humanities and Social Sciences, which comprises 62 specialised areas, facilitates collaboration between the Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Social Sciences, the Faculty of Theology, the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, and the Academy of Music at the University of Ljubljana.

Other activities

Within the faculty operates the Institute of Social Sciences, which consists of 19 different research centres. The faculty also has its own publishing house, founded in 1995, which publishes scholarly books and research monographs and provides support to academic staff across all research disciplines. They annually publish around 30 works, some of which are published as e-books and are available online (in Slovenian or English).

The Jože Goričar Central Social Sciences Library is a part of the faculty and constitutes one of the largest faculty libraries at the University of Ljubljana with more than 160,000 items of library material. The library has its own website.

International cooperation

The faculty offers a wide and comprehensive group of graduate and postgraduate courses in English.

The faculty boasts an impressive number of bilateral agreements and partner institutions the world over. It participates in the European student exchange and internship programme SOCRATES/ERASMUS, which allows students to spend a year studying in the following counties: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Malta, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and Great Britain.