241 - 250 of 337 results for: Anthropology

What does it mean to build a sustainable future - and whose future are we talking about? This course explores sustainability as a political and cultural project shaped by struggles over race, gender, and power. From colonial conversation and the rise of sustainable development to Indigenous, Black, and feminist movements for environmental justice, we will trace how difference communities have fought to define and practice sustainability on their own terms. Students will investigate how sustainability can be both a tool of control and a source of resistance - used by powerful institutions to justify inequality but also reimagined by marginalized groups as a language of care, repair, and survival. We will connect global histories of empire and development to local examples, from California's "green" identity to urban and rural movements across the world. Readings and discussions draw from anthropology, history, and social movements to show how sustainability becomes entangled with markets and finance, faith and belonging, and the everyday labor of maintaining land, food, and water. Together we will ask: What does it mean to sustain life in unequal worlds? How might we imagine and build futures that are not only livable, but just?

This seminar examines how our cultural ideas and practices shape our conceptions, perceptions, and experiences of emotion. We will read and discuss empirical research and case studies from psychology, anthropology, sociology, and medicine. Course requirements include weekly reading and thought papers, weekly discussion, and a final research project and presentation.

How do we talk about Palestine and Palestinian life in the midst of devastation and genocide? Through literature, poetry, visual and material culture, critical theory, and history, this team-taught course will provide context and generate discussion about Palestine's past, present, and future. Each session will be led by a professor with different expertise and disciplinary tools. These diverse perspectives offer students both a wide range of materials and an array of interpretive tools as we consider together how Palestine and Palestinians have figured and figured themselves in global imaginaries and geopolitics. The class covers history, anthropology, education, heritage, ethnic studies, poetry, literature, and film.

How do ideas about race get encoded in the design of new technology? How have science and technology shaped our understanding of race and identity? Drawing on research in anthropology, history, media studies, STS, and beyond, we will consider how technology can reinforce and amplify racial inequality. From the 'scientific' origins of the concept of race in the 18th century to contemporary algorithms that attempt to detect a person's race from their image, we will explore how social ideas about race are both embedded in and transformed by technology. We will also highlight how communities of color have resisted the encroachment of harmful technologies and developed alternatives that promote racial justice. Topics covered will include: algorithmic bias, policing and borders, surveillance, disinformation, data colonialism, and labor issues like micro-tasking and data annotation. This introductory course has no prerequisites and welcomes students of all disciplines.

This course examines social, political, and religious dimensions of various Middle Eastern societies. Key topics include the development of the modern nation-state, the Islamic revival, human rights, and discourses of democracy. Course materials include ethnographic studies, novels, and films, which provide a rich contextualization of social life and cultural politics in the region.

Medical anthropologists have spent decades complicating face-value diagnoses of human health, disorder, and normative ideas about the body itself. At its best, practitioners in this field expand the conceptual terrain for what it means to fully engage the human experience of illness. Course participants will learn how people - who are also gendered, raced, aged, classed, and frequently "othered" - differentially manifest conditions in various global settings. By chronicling and questioning established norms and modes of communication around health and disease, students in this course will do close readings of how anthropologists relay people's narratives about what it means to be sick, or afflicted, in different parts of the world. Working from a global view throughout the course, yet with close ethnographic detail in weekly readings, students will be invited to examine whether or not biological phenomena can be thought of as strictly "natural." Lectures and discussion sections will invite reflections on how it is that medical anthropologists convey people's illness experiences within the contexts of anthropologists' larger fieldwork projects, which can include research with experts and medical institutions. Course participants will also examine the tensions between "the universal" and "the particular" as we explore how specific conditions, ranging from genetic disorders to infectious disease, reproductive technologies, hormonal health, gendered suffering, and climate grief (to name a few) articulate with the body within larger political contexts, or "body politics," worldwide. Lastly we will be attentive to how cultural articulations of disease expose the priorities and anxieties of the social worlds in which bodies become afflicted in the first place.

This course explores the co-articulation of language, race, and ethnicity with a particular emphasis on race relations in US contexts. We will examine the varieties of English spoken by minoritized racial/ethnic groups in conjunction with theories from sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and adjacent social sciences to problematize common notions surrounding race and language. No prior knowledge of linguistics is required for this course.

In this seminar, we will investigate the relationship between body and environment in its many manifestations. Through engagement with key concepts in environmental and medical anthropology and social studies of science, we will ask: what is the relationship between environmental injustice and health inequity? How are relationships of power - such as colonialism, racism, and war - also environmental projects? And how do we study altered environments and ill or injured bodies in just ways? This course prepares students to critically engage questions of environmental and human health, with a particular focus on scholarship from beyond the United States.

This course introduces students to central concepts and approaches in linguistic anthropology, with a specific focus on the role of educational institutions, processes, and ideologies in shaping language use and vice versa. Students will learn practical skills for conducting linguistic anthropological fieldwork, including strategies for recording, editing, transcribing, analyzing, and archiving multimodal discourse data. The overarching goal is for students to gain a theoretical and methodological toolkit for examining and understanding how semiotic processes structure and transform sociocultural life.