Making Sense in a Changing World
This course provides an introduction to the discipline of anthropology. It challenges students to engage with diverse ways of knowing and being in the world, and to rethink taken-for-granted knowledge and beliefs. The course uses the lenses of decolonization and globalization to examine a range of topics including society, culture, identity, power, gender and sexuality, relatedness, religion and worldview, time, history and the future.
Anthropology through the Visual: Images of Resistance/Irresistible Images (SUMMER ABROAD COURSE in LISBON)
Drawing upon images produced by anthropologists, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists, and activists this course asks questions about how the visual continually challenges and shapes understandings of self, community and other. This course uses ethnography, film, video, visual art, photography and new media to explore issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, globalization, power, authority, politics, religion, gender, class, and sexuality. Students will look at a number of these issues by exploring the visual worlds and vibrant visual life of the city of Lisbon and its peoples. Students will work on research project related to the aesthetics of Lisbon’s infrastructures and produce a multi-modal project.
Speculative Futures
This course explores the prospective and yet unknown condition of the might-be. Students engage with articulations, expressions, and representations of the (im)possible, (extra)ordinary, and (un)imaginable—or speculative—futures that diverse individuals, groups, communities, and societies are envisaging, dreaming of, composing, conjuring, striving for, imagining, and bringing into being. Students will explore ‘Indigenous Futurisms’, ‘African Futurisms’, ‘Afro-American Futurisms’, ‘Arab/Gulf/Muslim Futurisms’, and ‘Asian/Sino/Indo/South Asian/Adivasi Futurisms’, as well as concepts including “slipstream”, “futurity”, “utopia”, “survivance”, “contact”, “skin thinking”, “temporality”, “apocalypse”, “alien”, “dreaming”, “fractals”, and “fantastic”. The aim is to think anthropologically, creatively, and in solidarity with the individuals and groups who are undertaking critical and imaginative labour — to walk alongside them in the face of their past and present extinctions and possible future ones. Students are invited to articulate their concerns and speculations about the future and work collectively and collaboratively to craft multi-modal expressions of futures in the making and yet-to-be.
Anthropology, Islam and Muslim Societies
This course takes an anthropological approach to the study of ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim societies’ with the aim of introducing you to the diversity of Muslim perspectives. Throughout the course we draw upon historical and contemporary primary sources to introduce you to the long-standing and emergent debates amongst Muslims about matters of faith and life. We examine how anthropologists and others have described and analyzed these debates. In this regard, the course introduces you to a range of ethnographic studies of Islam and Muslim Societies. Each year, we take one topic (i.e., ‘Islamophobia’, ‘digital Islam’, ‘Muslim fiction’) and explore it in-depth.
Anthropology and the Senses
This course explores the relation between the perceptible and the imperceptible, as well as the role of the senses in what we know and what we believe. We draw on anthropological studies of vision, touch, smell, taste, hearing, and also move beyond these ‘five senses’ to explore other sensory modalities and ways of knowing the world. We examine how the senses shape practice, culture, and politics with a particular focus on how the senses are mobilized to secure faith and fact in both the sciences and in religious experience. The course is designed so that you gain an appreciation of the multidimensionality of the sensorium and learn to analyze and critique prevailing and lesser known sensory hierarchies. Experiential learning forms a crucial component of the course. Through laboratory-style investigations and other assignments such as the production of mini-ethnographies, you are invited to develop your own sensory dexterities on and through the senses. You will also enhance your knowledge and experience of the senses through lectures, fieldtrips and working sessions with practitioners from different disciplines.
Anthropology through the Visual: Images of Resistance/Irresistible Images
Using film, video, visual art, photography and new media, this course explores race, ethnicity, nationality, globalization, power, authority, politics, religion, gender, class, and sexuality. Drawing upon images produced by anthropologists, journalists, filmmakers, photographers and artists, the course asks questions about how the visual and visual technologies that can look deep into our bodies as well as far out into space are continually challenging understandings of self, community and other. The course incorporates blended (internet-based) and experiential learning alongside classroom lectures and discussion. The course assessment includes the production of an image-based scrapbook (on-line or paper-based).
Core Concepts in Anthropology
Sociocultural Anthropologists are concerned with understanding the experiences, histories, values, and lifeways of people in every setting you can imagine. We also study what social and cultural forces shape people’s lives. The breadth of anthropology is vast. The ways anthropologists seek to understand people is constantly being refined. By and large, anthropologists are qualitative researchers who do fieldwork. That is, we participate and use our full sensorium to come to grips with how people live in and understand the world around them! We not only ask questions of people, but we also ask questions of ourselves: why do we think the way we think and what are the histories of this thinking? We write and analyze all this stuff up as well as film, photograph, exhibit, and sometimes perform it (yes!) in what we call ethnography. Some of this stuff gets debated amongst professors and students in universities, but some of this stuff informs the wider public in the forms such as journalism, policy making, and marketing. So, in sum this course seeks to introduce you to what Anthropologists do and have done and get you think about how thinking anthropologically can have impacts well beyond the university setting. But we’re not going to learn about anthropology by the typical modes of listening passively to lectures and going off and reading texts. We are going to get our hands dirty, and actively do anthropology through the critical reflections, lab-style assignments and writing mini-ethnographies and meetings with guest lecturers from a range of disciplines.