151 - 160 of 204 results for: ANTHRO

"War and It's Worlds" needs little introduction as to why war is significant in characterizing the twentieth and twenty-first century and how our societies are created around profound militarization and violence. This class takes a book length ethnographic take on classic debates within the anthropology of violence and war. Each week we will read a different ethnography which tackles fundamental questions, for example: How does war create new forms of work? How do we understand differentiated forms of victimhood and suffering in war? What is experience in war? How is war experienced and how do wars shape experiences, sensorially, epistemologically, and structurally? These are just some of the many questions that different ethnographies tackle. We will read broadly across region and emphasize historically situated works that endeavor to understand war and their worlds not through episodic but chronic forms.

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 seminar examines scholarship produced and informed by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, particularly as relating to biopolitics, governmentality, subjectification, and death. Focus is given to how anthropology and related disciplines have been applying, challenging, and extending these areas of thought in order to address contemporary predicaments. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

An anthropological approach to politics through bringing anthropological ways of thinking and modes of analysis to bear on key presuppositions of modern Western political thought. Ideas of rights, the individual, society, liberty, democracy, equality, and solidarity; ethnographic accounts used to identify the limits of conventional analytical approaches and to document the forms of politics that such approaches either ignore or misunderstand. Prerequisite: By consent of instructor. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

Care: A Critical Inquiry examines ethnographic, philosophical, and social theoretical texts to understand the recent turn to care in anthropology. Topics include care as a relation; care and abandonment; the rationalization of care in law and medicine; the ethics of care; the queering of care, among others. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student.

Archaeological knowledge about the past is a resource for imagining and working towards a better future. This graduate seminar examines how archaeological research contributes to future-building through three core topics: (1) archaeological research about liberation, survivance, and self-determination in the past; (2) archaeological methods, such as community-based participatory research, that build capacity to act in the present; and (3) heritage programs that aim to preserve and present histories of hope to future generations. The seminar is intended to foster an active and engaged learning community that critically engages with the challenges and opportunities of conducting archaeological research in the current moment. Seminar participants can expect to be invited to contribute to the syllabus and to develop and implement a self-designed research project related to course themes.

A central concept in modern social theory, the notion of tradition often invokes a picture of life stressing constraint against freedom, continuity against becoming, and transmission instead of novelty. This course asks why the concept of tradition evokes these binaries and how they limit our analytical imagination. What other understandings are possible? The course brings together ethnographic and archaeological debates on tradition, examining how pasts and futures relate in the present. From these engagements, we will consider themes of virtue and embodiment, learning and conduct, and historicity and time. Prerequisite: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

"The family" is considered one of the most universal structures of human life. The study of kinship has wandered off anthropological syllabi just as it assumes ever greater significance within contemporary (often dystopic) political debates on the societies produced by different kinds of families. This course explores, cross-culturally and historically, how particular models and ideologies of ideal family structure and form have come to dominate and reshape society. We focus particularly on the importance of ideologies of kinship and family within moral imaginations, as well as the inevitable impossible nature of the emotional and material obligations placed by such ideologies. Firstly, the course will ask whether kinship structures are distinct structures of recognition that generate their own ambivalence, anxiety, and comfort. We will focus this through discussing the relationship of kinship to gender roles and ideologies. Secondly, it will locate how talking, thinking, doing and imagining how people are 'properly' related to each other (as well as potential transgressions) are central to imaginations of the social itself. This will also initiate a larger debate on the nature of social change. Thirdly, the course will give students a precise and calibrated entry point into the debates around kinship from the perspective of three differing disciplines, social history, psychoanalysis, and anthropology. Prerequisites: By instructor consent. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student in this course

Multimodal Methods