291 - 300 of 337 results for: Anthropology

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 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.

In this seminar, we will look at the origins of global health and how changes in discourse over the last century have shaped the current landscape. We will explore possible future directions for global health exchanges grounded in more equity-based paradigms.This course will introduce students to the various definitions of global health from colonial times, through international health, tropical medicine and now global health. We will consider what moral imperative leads to global health work, and how conventional thought about the relationships between providers, patients and systems in the global North and South is shifting.Global health has transitioned through various stages. In the 1800s, missionary doctors provided medical care while also spreading religion and colonial interests. During the twentieth century, great strides were made in sanitation and infectious disease treatment as part of systems and government based international health and tropical medicine. Paradoxically, in the last two decades, as the world becomes more intertwined, global health has generally involved shorter term encounters, usually with specialists at the vanguard.With the epidemiological transition and increasing communicable disease prevalence in developing countries, systems strengthening and capacity building are the main priorities. It is argued that the current global health infrastructure does not focus on building long term partnerships, or assign equitable worth to participants from the global North and South. The COVID19 pandemic further highlighted the challenges to achieving desired health outcomes for all in the existing system. We will investigate how effective our current efforts are, and think critically about the meaning of decolonizing global health as regards the flow of resources and individual, population and systems outcomes.We will explore long-term partnerships that have yielded considerable success. The seminar will be grounded in a primary care perspective, with additional insights from guest speakers from various fields including biomedical science, anthropology, policy, governance and philanthropy whose global health backgrounds and experiences on the front lines will stimulate further dialogue and reflection.

This brief course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of science & technology studies (STS), also known as Science, Technology & Society. It's a broad area that includes history, sociology, anthropology, ethics, and humanistic scholarship. We'll explore STS through recent scholarship on global infrastructure: the widely shared networks, systems, and services that undergird modern life, from power grids and classification systems to container shipping and climate knowledge. For STS, a lot of infrastructure is technological, but it always has organizational, political, and human dimensions as well. It reflects social choices, but also shapes them. How did modernity's infrastructures develop? What are the technopolitics of infrastructure today? What kinds of infrastructural change loom ahead of us in the age of AI, climate change, and energy transitions?

This graduate colloquium explores gender and sexuality in China during the last few centuries through a survey of scholarship in history and anthropology. Our focus is the Ming-Qing, Republican, and Maoist eras. Readings have been selected to introduce the work of major scholars and basic issues and debates in this field. Our topic is historical, but the course as a whole explores questions fundamental to gender studies more generally. How have culture and history shaped the categories of 'woman' and 'man'? How have class, status, and divisions of labor influenced the shaping of normative gender roles and sexualities, as well as actual patterns of behavior? How has gender performance interacted with bodily disciplines and constraints (e.g., reproductive and cosmetic technologies)? How has the modern transformation played out across different societies, and how has the construction of normalcy/deviance changed over time? Is the experience of Euro-American women relevant to women in other parts of the world? What roles have women and 'the woman question' played in revolution? By what standards should liberation be defined, and how can it be achieved?

The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of issues, from the nature and dynamics of colonization and cultural development as a way of understanding the human experience in this part of the world, to topics such as food, disease, and heritage. The course studies the many ways in which research in the Indian Ocean has a direct impact on our ability to compare developments in the Atlantic and Pacific. Classes will initially take a longitudinal perspective, looking at the major changes over time to have impacted communities in the Indian Ocean. The course will then explore key topics: maritime endeavor, food, and labor, with particular emphasis on the colonial period and influence of Europeanization. Throughout the course, stress is placed on how archaeo-historic datasets can inform our understanding; however, the course will also be enriched through the inclusion of evidence and perspectives from anthropology and art.

To what extent can sound or music heal? This interdisciplinary course asks questions about music and healing around the world, drawing on the fields of medical ethnomusicology, medical anthropology, sound studies, and music therapy. Our case studies will be multi-sited, as we interrogate sound-based healings and healing sounds from diverse cross-cultural, global, and historic perspectives. No musical background is needed to interrogate these issues. We begin with the knowledge that the social, cultural, and political contexts where definitions of music and healing are created inform sound and its various and often conflicting interpretations and meanings. This course is currently full for Autumn Quarter 22-23 enrollment.

This class will cover creative, historical and theoretical aspects of sited artworks based in sound. We will create, install and critique new works that use sound with special attention the ways that sound intersects with time, space and architecture. Attention will be given both to sound as immaterial signal and to sound in its relation to visual environments and objects. The class is intended for artists, composers and others who want to explore the spatial, social and aesthetic dimensions of sound. Assigned readings will cover sound practices in the contexts of art, music, sound studies and anthropology. Experience in sound recording or production, signal processing and spatialization, or installation are valuable but not required. Curiosity and attention to sounds are.

A graduate-level introduction to the field of ethnomusicology. Issues and debates are traced through the history of the discipline, with emphasis on influences from anthropology, performance studies, linguistics, and cultural studies. Topics include music and: social organization, "culture," structure, practice, comparison, representation, globalization, identity, transcription, and embodiment.