About

Founded in 1994

The Arts, Health, and Society (AHS) Division of the European Graduate School prepares its students to become reflective practitioners, researchers, and leaders in the field of Expressive Arts. Building from the core EGS mission — which centers on the critical and creative engagement with culture, the arts, and the human condition — the AHS Division has pursued a practice-based, interdisciplinary, and phenomenologically grounded education since its founding in 1994.

In its unique settings high in the Swiss Alps and in Malta, the Division offers MA and PhD programs in Expressive Arts, as well as Professional Development.   Its degree programs are designed to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and competences necessary to work effectively across three interconnected professional domains: therapeutical practice, coaching and consulting, and social change.  It also prepares them for academic careers related to these domains.  Throughout its programs, the AHS Division trains students to engage the arts as fundamental instruments of human transformation.  In this, it calls upon the concept of poiesis — the act of bringing forth something new through creative engagement.

The overarching goals of the AHS Division are:

— to develop advanced theoretical and philosophical literacy in the field of Expressive Arts, connecting foundational phenomenological traditions with contemporary interdisciplinary practice;

— to cultivate the practical and methodological competences necessary to design and implement arts-based interventions with individuals, groups, and communities across diverse cultural and professional contexts;

— to foster original research that contributes new knowledge to the field of Expressive Arts and to the broader intersections of arts, health, and society;

— to form ethically responsive, culturally sensitive professionals who can lead processes of transformation in clinical, educational, and social change environments;

• to support the ongoing professional development of students as scholar-practitioners whose inquiry does not end at graduation but continues as a sustained, lifelong commitment to the field.

These goals are pursued through a low-residency, blended model that enables students to integrate academic study with active professional practice — reflecting the EGS conviction that theory and practice are inseparable dimensions of genuine learning.

The Division’s model of on-site, intensive training serves students committed to collaborative and immersive learning environments.  AHS students benefit, there, from individualized academic advising within the context of a vital community of co-learners in a practice-based academic learning.  The program affords students considerable freedom in composing their academic trajectory and thus treats its students as mature learners whose prior experiences and individual perspectives are both acknowledged and integrated into their academic development. Rather than adhering to prescriptive instructional models, the Division seeks to cultivate autonomy, critical reflection, and the capacity to generate and articulate original ideas. 

The Expressive Arts

The Expressive Arts programs in the Arts, Health and Society Division take place within an interdisciplinary approach grounded in the concept of poiesis – our capacity to shape the world and thereby ourselves. Poiesis through play, art and ritual takes us into the alternative world of the imagination, thereby expanding our range of worldly engagement and providing us with a greater sense of our own resources. Education in the Expressive Arts at EGS aims to bring together theoretical understanding, practical efficacy and experiential and aesthetic learning by a combination of lectures, discussions and in-class art-making. As part of our learning frame, we offer educational excursions in the beautiful countryside around Saas-Fee, as well as sessions of community art, performances and workshops. Our goal is to help students become prepared to creatively meet the challenges that they will face in their work and in their lives.