University of Ottawa
This is critical, decolonial introductory course to Social and Cultural Anthropology. The aim of the course will be to give students a better grasp of the anthropology’s history and present, while also demonstrating how anthropological understanding of human difference comes to bear on contemporary life and our interconnected yet profoundly unequal world.
This course introduces students to contemporary anthropological research, through four thematic clusters: 1. Kinship: Reinventing a Classical Anthropological Object; 2. Anthropology of Current Events: Refugee and Migration Crisis; 3. Human-Machine Relations and 4. New Public Anthropology.
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Bookended by two very different ethnographies of protest, this course combines ethnographic and theoretical texts, in order to query how durable forms of political engagement are possible amidst crises, catastrophes, and overdetermined political structures. What’s more, rather than merely trace the origins of the subdiscipline of political anthropology, this class will focus on the themes that arrive front and center in contemporary anthropological research, such as sovereignty, governmentality, national belonging, violence, and political contention. The course combines serious reading in political philosophy with ethnographic text and documentary film.
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Overview of debates about ethnographic writing through a critical reading of classic and contemporary ethnographies with attention to narrative form and technique, contextualization, scale (local, global), location to the subject (close, distant), and presence of ethnographer and research participants in text.
Check out students’ experimental writing work at: http://www.cammac.space/ant3142
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This course is a fourth-year anthropology practicum that provides a framework for a semester-long independent research project around the topic of “work”—broadly construed. The aim of this course is to give students an opportunity to put into practice theoretical and methodological learning they have acquired in anthropology in the course of their undergraduate studies. The goal is to produce a limited research project, which is nested within existing anthropological literature and uses ethnographic methods, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, in order to produce a compelling anthropological analysis. Students may also employ other methods, including online ethnography, and archival and media research, in order to gather their empirical material.
Check out students’ poster presentations from Winter 2019 at: http://www.cammac.space/ant4301
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FSS 4150/4450: Activist Research | Recherche activiste (directed research course)
Research development and advanced methodology course that seeks to expose students to engaged research—the kind of research that aligns itself with goals of social movements and local communities, that have come together around various social justice issues. Students will develop or deepen their existing relationships with communities or groups with which they are interested in working, and based on those collaborations, develop their own research agenda for a future project.
This graduate seminar is a survey of ongoing debates in political anthropology focused on both imagination and practice. In foregrounding recent ethnographic monographs, this course will familiarize students with anthropology’s distinctive approach to political life, in its historically situated and translocal forms. Simultaneously, by looking at contemporary research, students will explore how anthropologists position themselves in relation to ongoing conversations, as well as how they construct links between ethnographic material and theoretical concepts.
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This topical graduate seminar examines the resurgence of interest in environmental issues in anthropology, by foregrounding different themes, including but not limited to more-than-human-anthropology, extractivism and mining, water politics and climate change. Students read a series of contemporary ethnographies, alongside the work from environmental humanities, decolonial thought and feminist science and technology studies.
ANT 6122: Environmental Anthropology
Cornell University
What was state socialism and what trace do its memories and legacies leave on cultures and politics of Eastern Europe, communist East Asia, and the former Soviet Union? And what do the experiences of citizens of these “really-existing” socialist states can teach us about the force of political ideology and modern regulatory regimes in a newly (re)globalized, post-1989 world? Were (post)socialist subjects merely captive minds in a totalitarian machine, or can their experiences and struggles offer us new ways of thinking about late liberal politics and the post-Cold War era? This seminar brings together anthropology, political theory, and social and cultural history in order to complicate our understanding of the processes of subject formation in late socialist and postsocialist societies, and beyond.
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DePaul University
This class focuses on the world of material goods, and the relationships that the production, distribution, marketing, and consumption of these goods engenders among people living in different corners of the globe. In this course, you will be asked to take a closer look at the things that you might take for granted in your own lives and everyday surroundings. Together, we will explore the global histories of consumer goods and the various effects they make in the world. The learning that you will acquire in this class should help you make a new sense of the increasingly globalized popular culture and neoliberal capitalism. What’s more, it will also equip you with tools for critical analysis of the relationship between material culture and tastes, affective attachments, and even political values. Last but not least, this course will analyze material goods as products of human relationships, including those based on labor, gift-giving, and kinship.
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This course is a 4th-year-seminar which brings together theoretical and ethnographic perspectives on political violence. In parallel with examining these texts, students work on their own individual research projects for the duration of the term, which culminate in writing a major research paper.
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“Culture and Inequality” uses the methods and analytics of social and cultural anthropology to interrogate the problem of historical and cultural difference. I take as my point of departure that inequality is not merely a structural relationship, but an artifact of history. In this class, we will treat cultural difference as a historical and epistemological problem that encompasses but also goes beyond conventional forms of economic privation. By consequence, this seminar tracks "two histories of dispossession" by looking at how capitalist expansion has also engendered, promoted but also depended on the silencing of histories, knowledges and lived experiences of the non-Western "others." In parallel, in an effort to take culture seriously, we will also seek to move beyond standard conceptualizations of identity politics, hybridity, and multiculturalism as modes of accounting for difference.