61 - 70 of 204 results for: ANTHRO

What is global trade? How does it affect social and political life and how is it shaped by politics? Under globalization the world appears to be seamlessly connected. This is in part because of the ease and speed of access we have to goods, services, and commodities. In this class we look at global trade (the flow of goods and services between different countries) as a product of political relations at various scales. This class introduces students to global trade as a product of power and a producer of unequal economic conditions across the globe. Students will explore the categories, meanings, and experiences of labor, work, gender, and race produced in contexts such as logistics, mining, domestic work, migrant labor, and corporations. This course is aimed at students who are interested in anthropology, development studies, geography, international political economy, and politics.

Modern life is marked by institutions - schools, hospitals, international conglomerates, even prisons - so how did they develop and become so common? Historical archaeology can help us tell a different history of institutions because it combines documents, especially official records, with the material items left behind by the people who lived and worked in the institution. This course uses archaeological case studies to look at the different theoretical frameworks used to explain why institutions exist and how they function. We will also use practical examples to make connections between historical institutions and modern life. For example, what can looking at nineteenth century prison menus tell us about prison or hospital food today? And how can we use the archaeology of institutions to 'read' the Stanford campus? No prior archaeological experience required.

Core course for Urban Studies majors. A majority of the world's population now live in urban areas and most of the rapid urbanization has taken place in mega-cities outside the Western world. This course explores urban cultures, identities, spatial practices and forms of urban power and imagination in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Participants will be introduced to a global history of urban development that demonstrates how the legacies of colonialism, modernization theory and global race thinking have shaped urban designs and urban life in most of the world. Students will also be introduced to interpretative and qualitative approaches to urban life that affords an understanding of important, if unquantifiable, vectors of urban life: stereotypes, fear, identity formations, utopia, social segregation and aspirations. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.

Land is often treated as stable ground, bounded property, or neutral territory. This course challenges these assumptions by examining interdisciplinary conceptions of land within anthropological scholarship. Its goal is to understand and situate the intersecting contestations over land as a global resource, shared environment, property, territorial foundation of the nation-state, and a site of human and non-human dwelling. Through historical and ethnographic case studies from different regions of the world, the course explores how land becomes central to colonial projects and decolonial struggles; how property and ownership are tied to citizenship and rights; how land is governed in contemporary settler-colonial and post-colonial contexts; and how climate change and environmental planning unevenly shape vulnerability and belonging. Together, these perspectives invite students to rethink land as a dynamic and unstable social relation rather than a fixed or neutral ground.

Forests shape our lives more deeply than we often realize and linger in the peripheries of public discourse. Forests can be enchanted, industrially managed, engulfed by fire, preserved as wilderness. Drawing upon emerging frames, such as multispecies ethnography and feminist studies of the environment, this course takes a "rubber boots" approach to the forest, which includes a visit to the Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve at Stanford. Additionally, we will explore how forests intersect with climate justice, colonial legacies, and Indigenous sovereignty. By the end of the course, you will be able to tell the forest from the trees.

There are few cities more emblematic of the rapid urbanization of today's global population than Mumbai, India, formerly known as Bombay. With over 20 million residents, Mumbai today stands as the most populous city in one of the world's most populous countries, an ever-expanding metropolis marked by starkclass disparities and a heterogenous collage of religious, ethnic, and caste communities struggling to find space on a narrow peninsula painstakingly reclaimed from the Arabian Sea. The city's glitz, glamour, and diversity have long made it an object of fascination for both Indians and foreigners alike. Not only is Mumbai a major engine of culture and politics within India, but the city also has a long history of furnishing imagery of South Asian life to the wider world, whether as a site for documentaries and novels or through colorful Bollywood films. In this course, students will have the opportunity to use Mumbai as a jumping-off point to explore South Asian culture and society, as well as contemporary themes in global urban studies: How do issues such as gentrification, rural-urban migration, segregation, the globalization of capitalism, and decolonialization play out in a city such as Mumbai? What happens to supposedly timeless identities such as religion, caste, and ethnicity when they are subjected to the pressures of intense urbanization? What kinds of data can we use to answer these questions, and what are their respective strengths and limitations?We will address these questions through a wide range of materials, including film, literature, and academic texts. By the end of the quarter, students should not only find themselves with expanded knowledge of South Asia, Mumbai, and global urbanism, but also with increased confidence regarding the types of data, methodology, and analysis they can employ in their own projects. No prior knowledge of South Asia or urban studies is assumed for this course.

For the past 40 years, feminist scholars have been exploring how the lack of diversity among archaeologists in the present affects what we learn about the past. As disciplinary demographics become more inclusive, how has the practice of archaeology changed? What inequities linger, and how can they be addressed? How do these inequities shape the knowledge we produce about the human past? In this intersectional course, we will examine sexism, racism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, and cissexism in the field. Along with grounding ourselves in the literature and hearing from a variety of guest speakers, we will focus on understanding the methods of this body of investigation, and developing new research on these issues. Students will develop small-scale original research projects using surveys, participant observation, oral histories, or interviews to understand a form of inequality in the discipline. These papers will be presented in a symposium at the end of the quarter.

An introduction to themes and discourses in Black Geographies: a field concerned with the spatial dynamics and dimensions interwoven with Black life and being. This seminar-style course operates from the premise of the social construction of race and racism as spatial phenomena. As Jovan Scott Lewis and Camilla Hawthorne put it in The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (2023), "the production of space is tied to the production of difference." We thus commence the course with a theoretical orientation to this interdisciplinary field and its intersection with Black Studies at large. Subsequent weeks focus on how the Black experience(s) manifests around the world through various spatially-oriented imaginaries (the Black metropolis vs. Black suburbia, Black America vs. Black Europe, the African Diaspora vs. the African continent, Afro-Asia vs. Afro-Orientalism, Jim Crow laws in the southern United States vs. the South African apartheid regime, etc.). The course concludes with a meditation on the construction of Black utopias - or dystopias? - whether real-world places (Tulsa, Oklahoma's "Black Wall Street") or fictions (Wakanda, the home of Marvel's Black Panther superhero). Throughout the quarter, we will endeavor to balance theorizing Blackness as a social construction and geographic phenomenon with the lived experiences of people of African descent who navigate, resist, and challenge structures of spatialized power. Through both cultural production and the historical archive, we will ask how Black people have navigated anti-Blackness to create affirming senses of place in hostile spaces and times.

The Indian Ocean has formed an enduring connection between three continents, countless small islands and a multitude of cultural and ethnic groups and has become the focus of increasing interest in this geographically vast and culturally diverse region. This course explores a range of topics and 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 religion, disease, and heritage The course guides studies in 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. Significant work outside of class time is expected of the student for this course.