171 - 180 of 199 results for: ANTHRO

Concepts of emancipation have been treated in a wide variety of historical, political, regional and social perspectives. In the US, emancipation and post emancipation societies are primarily understood around histories of enslavement. In the class, while taking inspiration and also covering work on enslavement and emancipation, we will endeavor to discuss theories, ideas and experiences that have been understood as potentially emancipatory from a globally and historically wide-ranging set of ideas. Issues of race, caste, class and gender are axiomatic themes within the class.nEmancipation has frequently been understood as an emancipation from oppression and an impetus towards a form of freedom or new order. While theoretically this is formally understood and discussed, often with historical examples that use experiences to illustrate failures or successes, in this class we will try to understand the texture of practices as the primary means by which ideas about emancipation circulate, imagined, are discussed, are disappointed and so on. We will try and see what an anthropological and historically textured discussion can bring to theoretical discussions of emancipation. We will examine theoretical, historical, sociological and anthropological writings on emancipation, freedom, enslavement and servitude, political mobilization and revolution. Fundamentally this course tries to get students to think globally about multiple and different systems of persisting and enduring oppression and inequality through an emphasis on political thought, political imaginations and concrete political organizations and movements. Prerequisite: consent of instructor

This seminar will focus on the emerging body of literature on the materiality of the production, circulation, and mediation of paperwork as constituitive of modern forms of governance. We will discuss specific genres of paperworks - notes, memos, files, documents, as well as archives and other mnemonic technologies - both as cultural practices and reflexive objects, and examine how they produce modern social epistemologies of accountability, evidence, the fact, and truth in the fields of law, business, and public administration, as well as in civil society generally. Readings will include works by Max Weber, Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Cornelia Vismann, Ann Stoler, and others. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor.

This workshop-style seminar will introduce students to a range of semiotic and linguistic anthropological approaches and tools for ethnographic analysis. A group of (linguistic) anthropologists from other universities will be invited to offer workshops, through which students will learn 1. how to teach semiotics in anthropology courses and 2. how to use semiotic concepts for their own research projects.

Science and technology are important cultural products that often dramatically reorganize various aspects of human life. In this course we will explore how recent innovations in the life sciences and biomedicine may reconfigure crucial elements of social institutions, lend new structures to identity politics, and often change the way we interact with and conceive of nature. We will examine these issues in various global settings to explore how everyday politics shape politics of life in different locales.

This course explores the social and political organization of time. Anthropology has long been critical of the narratives of progress that are embedded in concepts of modern politics, such as development, citizenship, secularism, and sovereignty. How do social actors respond to the perceived failures of such narratives? How do they re-articulate historical pasts to political futures in the aftermath of modernization? In this course we will read studies that examine lived experiences of the passing of time. How is memory linked to anticipation? How is consciousness of the past structured by expectations of a future to come? We will pay particular attention to the material aspects of these temporal relations, including their social, economic, and infrastructural conditions. Drawing from current debates in anthropology, queer theory, and post-colonial studies, we will critically interrogate theories of ruination, crisis, hope, and utopia.

This seminar explores how biological, political and social conditions transform and conjoin experiences of living and dying in the world today. Engaging contemporary ethnographies and social theory, we will examine how life and death, the natural and the social, the individual and the collective, are braided together in ways that challenge conclusions about what constitutes care, community, health, rights, and violence, among other issues. We will also reflect on whether and how the braiding together of these domains leaves room for the recognition of their singularity. Thus, an abiding question for this seminar is the relation of history to the present. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

At the intersections of urbanism and environmental studies, political ecology, postcolonial theory and the new materialism, new fields are in formation. This seminar explores scholarship that connects cities with countrysides rough questions of resources and infrastructures. We will consider questions id inequality access and community as well as unexpected urban ecologies

This course examines a variety of approaches that claim to explore the relationships between humans and things. Some of the approaches include Marx and material culture studies; Heidegger; cognitive and phenomenological; Actor Network Theory. But there is a need also to examine behavioral and ecological and Darwinian approaches. Many of these approaches do not adequately deal with the physicality of things as objects and there is a need to seek a way to incorporate such aspects of things into social theory. Prerequisite: graduate standing or consent of instructor

Advanced graduate seminar focused on the archaeology of colonial and postcolonial contexts, both prehistoric and historic. Emphasis on intersections between archaeological research and and subaltern, postcolonial, and transnational feminist/queer theory. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.