261 - 270 of 337 results for: Anthropology

This course explores a series of foundational questions concerning the social sciences (e.g., sociology, economics, political science, anthropology, history, and applied fields of education and business). What is social science? Where did it come from and how did it emerge? What topics does it concern? Are social science topics different from topics and subject matter in other fields like the science and the humanities? Are the goals and questions of social science different from that of science and the humanities? How so? What sort of knowledge does social science try to establish? What kinds of methods does it employ? What sorts of disputes persist within the social sciences? What similarities and divisions exist among social scientific fields and why? This course is a graduate level seminar where students are asked to read challenging texts, discuss them, and offer constructive critiques in writing. Advanced undergraduates need instructor permission to register.

Language, as a cultural resource for shaping our identities, is central to the concepts of race and ethnicity. This seminar explores the linguistic construction of race and ethnicity across a wide variety of contexts and communities. We begin with an examination of the concepts of race and ethnicity and what it means to be "doing race," both as scholarship and as part of our everyday lives. Throughout the course, we will take a comparative perspective and highlight how different racial/ethnic formations (Asian, Black, Latino, Native American, White, etc.) participate in similar, yet different, ways of drawing racial and ethnic distinctions. The seminar will draw heavily on scholarship in (linguistic) anthropology, sociolinguistics and education. We will explore how we talk and don't talk about race, how we both position ourselves and are positioned by others, how the way we talk can have real consequences on the trajectory of our lives, and how, despite this, we all participate in maintaining racial and ethnic hierarchies and inequality more generally, particularly in schools.

This course uses social theories of difference to examine the intersections of disability, race and culture. The course will examine these concepts drawing from scholarship published in history, sociology of education, urban sociology, cultural studies, disability studies, social studies of science, cultural psychology, educational and cultural anthropology, comparative education and special education. Implications for policy, research and practice will be covered.

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.

This seminar explores sartorial practices as a means for examining formations of identities and structural inequalities across space and time. Building off the definition of dress, pulled from Mary Ellen Roach-Higgins and Joanne B. Eicher, this course examines sartorial practices as social-cultural practices, shaped by many intersecting operations of power and oppression including racism, sexism, and classism, that involve modifications of the corporal form (i.e., scarification, body piercings, and hair alteration) as well as all three-dimensional supplements added to the body (i.e., clothing, hair combs, and jewelry). The emphasis on intersecting operations of power and oppression within this definition of dress draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw's conceptualization of intersectionality. Through case studies and examples from various parts of the world, we will explore multiple sources of data - documentary, material, and oral - that have come to shape the study of dress. We examine how dress intersects with facets of identity, including race, age, ethnicity, sexuality, and class.

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.

What does it look, sound, smell, taste, feel like to be sexually liberated? Upon what grounds - material, affective, relational - are sexual freedoms cultivated? How might we find pleasures otherwise forestalled by colonialism and white supremacy in the present-future-past of Black life? Black sexualities and relationships are concepts that everyone thinks they know something about. Bom Crioulo: The Black Man and the Cabin Boy (1895), Birth of a Nation (1915), and the Moynihan Report (1965) are examples of social texts that position Black sexual-relational practices as problems needing to be fixed. Though media cultures across the African diaspora offer more capacious portraits of Black love, friendships, and family, Black eroticism continues to be censored in these representations for its impropriety and affront to Black respectability. Through contemporary Black scholarship, literature, visual culture and performing arts, this course engages Black Study as a roadmap towards radical sexual literacy. This knowledge - at once physical, emotional, and spiritual - is cultivated in ecologies that proliferate the pleasurable dimensions of Black sexualities, intimacies, desires, and erotics. We will develop this radical sexual literacy via a close reading practice for erotic materials that play with, satirize, or otherwise disavow the hold that slavery and its afterlives have on Black erotic possibilities. This course turns to Black queer and trans studies, transnational feminisms, porn studies, and visual-cultural anthropology to analyze erotic materials - and the people they (re)present - with care and generosity. Amidst ongoing sex wars that threaten to foreclose physical and digital ecologies of Black gender-sexual expression, it is imperative that we detail the pleasurable and liberatory potential of sex work, content creation, erotic writing, social dance, and other cultural productions that embrace a profane erotic. In doing so, this course engages with methodological practices that help us to sense capitalism, settler colonialism, and white supremacy differently, accessing new forms of resistance and livingness for Black folks in the process.

This course takes a comparative methodological approach to Black Gender Studies, introducing students to the important terms and debates that animate this field, such as Spillers' "ungendering" and Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation". We will read academic articles, book chapters, and exhibition materials in the fields of literary criticism, history, anthropology, gender studies, and fine art that trace Black Women's and gender expansive people's experiences across the Western Hemisphere. The purpose of this course is to aid graduate students in growing as theorists in their own fields by engaging with the methodologies and terms present in contemporary Black queer and gender studies. We will also learn to conduct historical scholarship via archival sources. Particular attention will be paid to scholarship published in the past decade, especially as it relates to performance, literary criticism, and expansive gender throughout the modern history of the Western Hemisphere.This course is by application only. Please send a statement of interest and your CV to mlrosa@stanford.edu.

This course uses social theories of difference to examine the intersections of disability, race and culture. The course will examine these concepts drawing from scholarship published in history, sociology of education, urban sociology, cultural studies, disability studies, social studies of science, cultural psychology, educational and cultural anthropology, comparative education and special education. Implications for policy, research and practice will be covered.