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61 - 70 of 197 results for: ANTHRO

ANTHRO 132D: Thinking Technology: Anthropological Perspectives

What role does technology play in society, and vice-versa? This course considers the question from an anthropological perspective, pairing different conceptual models of social-technical relations (Social Constructivism, Actor-Network Theory, Cyborg Anthropology) with real world examples. Through such technologies as factory machines, trains, Bakelite, slot machines, computers, missiles, and PET scanners, students will gain insights both on how the social suffuses the mundane objects around us, and how technologies have radically redefined how we see the world.
Terms: Aut | Units: 3
Instructors: Bykowski, M. (PI)

ANTHRO 133: Masculinity: Technologies and Cultures of Gender (ANTHRO 233, FEMGEN 133M)

What is masculinity? How are masculinities invested with power and meaning in cultural contexts? How is anthropological attention to them informed by and extending inquiry across the academy in spheres such as culture studies, political theory, gender studies, history, and science and technology studies? Limited enrollment.
Last offered: Spring 2019 | UG Reqs: GER:DB-SocSci, WAY-EDP, WAY-SI

ANTHRO 134A: Whose Ghost in the Machine? Cultures, Politics and Morals of Artificial Intelligence

This course seeks to divert attention away from bleak fantasies of an impending AI apocalypse that would be unleashed by ¿the blind and irresponsible advent of oppressively dehumanizing technology¿ and instead highlight the oppressive ¿human¿ elements that structure how AI is imagined, researched, designed, produced and utilized. The aim of the course is to analyze how culture at large influences the development of AI and how, or to what extent, AI reproduces political and moral structures of human societies.nnWhat makes us, and even Silicon Valley tycoons, become afraid of science-fictional fantasies of nonhuman villains to wipe the human race, while we easily shrug off rampant racism or sexism that is reproduced and reinforced by ¿algorithms of oppression¿? What kind of political and cultural elements influence the mostly invisible political economy of how AI, machine learning and deep learning is designed, produced and utilized as a commodity by some of the most powerful corporations in contemporary global economy? In short, how does human culture at large configure within the scientific and technological research into and development of non-human intelligence?nnAnthropology has a long history of researching about human-technology interaction and often joins forces with History of Science and Science and Technology Studies. In that spirit, we will cover a wide array of literature on the historical development of academic research on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, consciousness, machine learning, deep learning, cybernetics and robotics. However, the primary aim of the course is to offer a meta-perspective on the ¿cultural aspects¿ of how these topics have been studied and practiced by entrepreneurs, research scientists, engineers, philosophers and futurists, and not the disciplinary knowledge generated by research on these topics.nnApart from ethnographic and historic researches about how AI is studied and produced, we will utilize works by theoretical cultural critics, historians and philosophers, like Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Michel Foucault, as well as Gilbert Ryle, Daniel Dennett and David Chalmers. Furthermore, we will heavily rely on cultural images, fantasies and narratives about artificial intelligence in literature, arts and cinema. To that effect, we will watch a wide array of movies and will interactively analyze these cultural works in class, asking to what extent they represent actual research into and development of AI.
Terms: Win | Units: 3

ANTHRO 135C: Moving Worlds: Anthropology of Mobility and Travel

This course looks at human mobility from an anthropological perspective. We will read texts that ethnographically explore the experiences of refugees, labor migrants, tourists and seafarers, among others. In particular, we will look at the intersection of physical mobility and social mobility, as people often move in order to improve their life, to increase safety or economic security, or to gain social capital. However, the mobility perspective has also been criticized for depoliticizing and celebrating movement without critical attention to its socio-political and economic context. While mobility as a term points to the ability to move, human migration is at least as often characterized by restrictions and obstacles to movement, such as borders. We will think critically about the deep inequalities that exist in terms of why and how people move, and who are able to mobilize resources to move.
Last offered: Autumn 2017

ANTHRO 136B: White Identity Politics (AFRICAAM 136B, CSRE 136)

Pundits proclaim that the 2016 Presidential election marks the rise of white identity politics in the United States. Drawing from the field of whiteness studies and from contemporary writings that push whiteness studies in new directions, this upper-level seminar asks, does white identity politics exist? How is a concept like white identity to be understood in relation to white nationalism, white supremacy, white privilege, and whiteness? We will survey the field of whiteness studies, scholarship on the intersection of race, class, and geography, and writings on whiteness in the United States by contemporary public thinkers, to critically interrogate the terms used to describe whiteness and white identities. Students will consider the perils and possibilities of different political practices, including abolishing whiteness or coming to terms with white identity. What is the future of whiteness? n*Enrolled students will be contacted regarding the location of the course.
Last offered: Autumn 2017

ANTHRO 137: The Politics of Humanitarianism (ANTHRO 237)

What does it mean to want to help, to organize humanitarian aid, in times of crisis? At first glance, the impulse to help issue generis a good one. Helping is surely preferable to indifference and inaction. This does not mean that humanitarian interventions entail no ethical or political stakes or that they are beyond engaged critique. We need to critique precisely that which we value, and to ask some hard questions, among them these: What are the differences among humanitarianism, charity, and philanthropy? What of social obligations and solidarities? How does the neoliberal world order currently create structural inequalities that ensure the reproduction of poverty and violence? How does the current order of things resemble or differ from the colonial world order? This course examines the history of humanitarian sensibilities and the emergence of organized action in the 'cause of humanity'. In the early years of humanitarian intervention, political neutrality was a key principle; it has now come under ever greater analytical and political scrutiny. We will examine the reasons for the politicization and militarization of aid -- be it humanitarian aid in natural disasters or political crises; development programs in the impoverished south ('the Third World'), or peace-keeping. We will end with a critical exploration of the concept of human rights, humanity, and personhood. The overall methodological aim of the course is to demonstrate what insights an ethnographic approach to the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of humanitarianism can offer.
Terms: Aut | Units: 5
Instructors: Malkki, L. (PI)

ANTHRO 137D: Political Exhumations. Killing Sites Research in Comparative Perspective (ARCHLGY 137, ARCHLGY 237, DLCL 237, REES 237)

The course discusses the politics and practices of exhumation of individual and mass graves. The problem of exhumations will be considered as a distinct socio-political phenomenon characteristic of contemporary times and related to transitional justice. The course will offer analysis of case studies of political exhumations of victims of the Dirty War in Argentina, ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia, the Holocaust, communist violence in Poland, the Rwandan genocide, and the Spanish Civil War. The course will make use of new interpretations of genocide studies, research of mass graves, such as environmental and forensic approaches.
Terms: Spr | Units: 3-5
Instructors: Domanska, E. (PI)

ANTHRO 138: Medical Ethics in a Global World: Examining Race, Difference and Power in the Research Enterprise (ANTHRO 238, CSRE 138)

This course will explore historical as well as current market transformations of medical ethics in different global contexts. We will examine various aspects of the research enterprise, its knowledge-generating and life-saving goals, as well as the societal, cultural, and political influences that make medical research a site of brokering in need of oversight and emergent ethics.nThis seminar will provide students with tools to explore and critically assess the various technical, social, and ethical positions of researchers, as well as the role of the state, the media, and certain publics in shaping scientific research agendas. We will also examine how structural violence, poverty, global standing, and issues of citizenship also influence issues of consent and just science and medicine.
Terms: Spr | Units: 5 | UG Reqs: WAY-ER, WAY-EDP

ANTHRO 139C: Anthropology of Global Health

Global health has been the contested realm of theoretical debates and praxis in medical anthropology. Rationalities behind global health projects reflected the predominant mode of envisioning health in specific historical moments.nn· In this course, we will first assess the ways in which memories, materiality and institutions of the colonial past persist in the field of global health in Africa.nn· Secondly, we will explore how early medical anthropologists participated in international health projects in order to facilitate implementation of the Western biomedicine in developing countries by investigating cultural barriers under the post-war regime of international development in the efforts of controlling malaria and HIV/AIDS in Latin America. nn· Thirdly, we will examine achievements and limitations of subsequent critical medical anthropologists¿ shift of the focus of analysis on global health from culture to structure, larger political economic conditions that produced vast health inequalities around the world, including World Bank policies under the Cold War and neoliberal reforms that increased the prevalence of TB and other diseases in post-socialist contexts nn· Finally, we will question previous anthropological discourses on global health and propose potential insights by understanding moral imaginations of contemporary global health participants such as WHO or Gates Foundation and humanitarian medicine such as MSF, and continuities and discontinuities of colonial and developmental past in current global health movement.
Last offered: Spring 2018

ANTHRO 140C: Mobilizing Nature

From Brazil's Landless Worker's Movement (MST) to Water Wars of Cochabamba to Standing Rock, these moments of protest have turned into movements. This seminar will examine how theoretical framings of movements have shifted from claims about political rights to environmental ones. We will address two overarching questions: How are notions of ethnicity, gender, and class constructed in relation to the environment? And how do people understand these relationships in such a way that motivates them to mobilize? Students will explore what kinds of ecological claims are being made, who is making, how, and who benefits from them. The objective is to ultimately understand how movements not only reflect, but also (re)shape political and social practices around the environment.
Last offered: Autumn 2017
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