171 - 180 of 337 results for: Anthropology

Anthropological research and knowledge production across multiple traditional and new media platforms and practices including film, video, photography, theatre, design, podcast, mobile apps, interactive games, web-based social networking, and augmented reality

This course examines how race is made. We will pay close attention to how people engage with material, economic, scientific, and cultural forces to articulate human group difference as a given, and even natural. In this seminar, we will look at the reality of race as a literally constructed phenomenon, where historical, colonial, bodily, market, penal, and humanitarian constituent elements both circulate and sediment racial understandings. To focus our readings and discussions we will divide this vast terrain into three units: race and the colonial encounter, race and biopower, and race in systems of capital accumulation.

This interdisciplinary course explores how modern African histories, bodies, and natures have been entangled with technological activities. Viewing Africans as experts and innovators, we consider how technologies have mediated, represented, or performed power in African societies. Topics include infrastructure, extraction, medicine, weapons, communications, sanitation, and more. Themes woven through the course include citizenship, mobility, labor, bricolage, in/formal economies, and technopolitical geographies, among others. Readings draw from history, anthropology, geography, and social/cultural theory. PhD Students in History completing the two-quarter graduate research seminar requirement should enroll in HISTORY 449A in Winter and 449B in Spring quarter.

The goal of this seminar is to explore the phenomenological method and its relevance for ethnographic and historical research. We will discuss work by Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Levinas, Petitmengin, and others in the philosophical tradition, and work by those in the empirical tradition like James, Jaspers, Parnas and Sass, Hufford, Taves, Radcliffe and others, and read them alongside ethnographic and historical work which sets out to understand subjective experiences like depression, trauma, identity, mysticism, smell and despair. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course.

This seminar will focus on recent and seminal texts in Medical Anthropology, broadly construed.Prerequisite: by instructor consent

In this course we will explore contemporary issues of culture and power rooted in science, medicine, technology and futurist proposals to better the human condition. We will investigate anthropological and ethnographic-based theories and methods to propose alternative ethical solutions to those with narrow technological fixes. Our readings will be rooted in examining global stratification, economic sources of migration, human biases regarding climate and nature, as well as the routinization of norms around sexual power, labor exploits, privacy infringements, data sharing, and pervasive automation. The course will be structured as a writing workshop with frequent, short writing assignments to be shared with others in the course. The workshop format will facilitate the course goal of each person producing at least one publishable article or other product of public-facing intervention at the end of the quarter.

This graduate seminar introduces interdisciplinary approaches to landscape study. The broad range of theoretical approaches includes human and non-human interactions and overlapping and divergent, spatial and temporal questions derived from the exchange between landscapes and humans. Fields such as Art history, Political Ecology, Anthropology, Geography, and Natural History draw attention to representational and non-representational ways that material and symbolic aspects of landscapes help constitute the making of place. Throughout the seminar students will development their research question or project. The requirements for this course are demanding. Prerequisite: Those not at the graduate level must seek the instructor's consent for enrollment.

Building on the concept of 'cultural techniques,' or 'Kulturtechniken,' that has been developing in recent German media studies, this advanced graduate seminar considers a wide range of culturally specific modes of elementary techniques, from cutting, connecting, to reading, writing, and counting, to cooking, sewing, irrigating, and so on, as ethnographic analytics. The seminar explores the epistemic shift in ethnographic methods and analysis from the symbolic sense of meaning-making to the material condition for such meaning-making. Prerequisite by instructor consent

Concepts of emancipation have been treated in a wide variety of historical, political, regional and social perspectives. In the US, emancipation and post emancipation societies are primarily understood around histories of enslavement. In the class, while taking inspiration and also covering work on enslavement and emancipation, we will endeavor to discuss theories, ideas and experiences that have been understood as potentially emancipatory from a globally and historically wide-ranging set of ideas. Issues of race, caste, class and gender are axiomatic themes within the class.Emancipation has frequently been understood as an emancipation from oppression and an impetus towards a form of freedom or new order. While theoretically this is formally understood and discussed, often with historical examples that use experiences to illustrate failures or successes, in this class we will try to understand the texture of practices as the primary means by which ideas about emancipation circulate, imagined, are discussed, are disappointed and so on. We will try and see what an anthropological and historically textured discussion can bring to theoretical discussions of emancipation. We will examine theoretical, historical, sociological and anthropological writings on emancipation, freedom, enslavement and servitude, political mobilization and revolution. Fundamentally this course tries to get students to think globally about multiple and different systems of persisting and enduring oppression and inequality through an emphasis on political thought, political imaginations and concrete political organizations and movements. Prerequisite: consent of instructor