Courses
This course is an introduction to urban anthropology through the study of diverse "urban experiences," how they are shaped by power relations as well as resistance, and how they change through the evolution of technology, shifts in capital investment, and flows of migration. We will examine a variety of ethnographic and historical examples from many regions of the globe to discuss how culture, class, race and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, inflect the experience of urbanity; and we will assess how different concepts and perspectives capture the variety of affects and dynamics of urban everyday life in the contemporary world.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
In our present "urban age," the city appears as the privileged framework to claim citizenship rights. This demand, however, clashes with issues of urban renewal and development, security and circulation, as well as conditions of stark inequality that relegate vast sectors of the urban population around the globe to informality and precarious residence, without access to adequate healthcare, sanitary services and amenities, or secure housing tenure. This course examines the intricacies of the notion of "urban citizenship" and how the "right to the city" is imagined and demanded in struggles for belonging and inclusion in cities throughout the world.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course examines mapping through an ethnographic lens. We will both study the design of maps as a key technology to survey territories and populations, as well as forms of countermapping: practices that turn this top-down, governmental tool on its head and facilitate a ground-up, collaborative process of representing space. We will survey various forms of data visualization, oral history and narrative cartography, as methods for the generation of local knowledge. Cases include indigenous counter-mapping of communal land, collective cartography in Latin America, anti-eviction mapping projects in American cities, and others. The course involves critical discussions of theoretical and ethnographic texts, as well as the practical exploration of different mapmaking techniques (ArcGIS, hands-on activities on campus and its surroundings), and their importance as possible contributions to anthropological analysis and community engagement.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Who is the subject of mental illness? This course brings us into the study of mental illness and addiction by considering the relations, institutions, and vocabularies in which illness is embedded. It will bring us into the questions of the normal and the pathological, the shifting line of the normal, the quotidian experiences of madness within the scene of the domestic, and the ways in which mental illness is legitimated or denied by institutions. We will also work towards developing an anthropological perspective on mental health within the context of humanitarian intervention and assistance, global health policies and frameworks.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This is a hands-on course that introduces students to the process of designing a project of social research, from the initial idea to the final proposal. The class provides tools on: how to frame a problem, ask key questions, review the relevant scholarly literature and determine the data needed to check hypotheses. We will discuss issues related to what defines social science inquiry: its quantitative and qualitative methods, its forms of collecting and evaluating evidence, using archives, doing fieldwork, conducting interviews and surveys, or interacting with various groups of people on the ground, and ethical concerns related to social research. Social science implies venturing into the real, empirical world and its contemporary problems. We will study how researchers analyze, interpret and make sense of multiple human experiences and social processes.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Baltimore is replete with economic experimentation, organizing, and transformation. Learning from/with these experiences and contributing to them is the main aim of this course. It involves a combination of engaged service, collaborative research, reading, and reflection to understand and inform place-based efforts to build equitable urban futures in the city. Sponsored by the JHU Center for Social Concern, the course is co-taught with community organizers to give first-hand exposure to economic conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts. Students will work closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects for social justice and urban regeneration. Schedule is flexible to facilitate visits to on-site work and conversations.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course explores the intersections and boundaries between magic, science, and religion. Students will examine how these domains of knowledge and practice have been defined, differentiated, and interrelated in various societies. Central questions include: How are the differences between magic, science, and religion consolidated, negotiated, and manifested in everyday life? How do these categories shape worldviews, social structures, and individual experiences? Through case studies, theoretical readings, and hands-on projects, students will gain a nuanced understanding of how humans make meaning and navigate between different ways of knowing and acting in the world.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
South Asia boasts a rich history of film making of different genres and languages, ranging from commercial to art films. Many have come to be the favorites of the faculty of Hopkins who work on South Asia. In this course each of the faculty teaching this course will introduce a film of their choosing, pairing it with a reading.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course is an introduction to urban anthropology through the study of diverse "urban experiences," to explore how they are shaped by power relations as well as resistance. We will read about crowds and anonymity, finance and poverty, media and public space to understand how they change through the evolution of technology, shifts in capital investment and flows of migration. We will examine the scope and limitations of classical (Western) notions of foundational studies city life. We will also explore how the notion of "cityness" better captures the variety of affects and dynamics of contemporary urban everyday life.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
With their biogeochemical power of rearranging elements, plants have sustained and proliferated life on Earth. Accordingly, humans have cultivated different relations with plants, from domestication to sciences, from agriculture to industrialized plantation, across space and time. Planetary ecological crises have radically pushed us to reconsider not simply what it means to be human but also what it means to live as an “earthling” within the complicated, fast-changing webs of life and nonlife, which are fundamentally intertwined with the vegetal forms of life. This course will explore anthropologically-informed diagnoses and prognoses of the various ways of engaging plants. Specifically, we will delve into standard forms through which humans have engaged plants, institutional frameworks that have given rise to these forms, and alternatives to these forms and institutions
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
What is gender? We talk so much about it, but what is it really? How does one distinguish between the social and historical life of gender vis-à-vis sex as a biological category? Yet even the category sex as biology is not as straightforward as it seems and often indicates arbitrariness and blurriness when it comes to demarking definite lines of difference between a binary gender model (male, female). Anthropologists are increasingly exploring gender in multiple contexts, from kinship structures and political economies, as well as in settings of piety and religiosity, to spaces in which the category of human itself becomes difficult to define. In this course we will engage in genealogies as well as current debates. We will learn and discuss a wide array of perspectives, debates, and theories that have shaped feminist anthropology, queer theory, and black feminist theory.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Historical archaeology might be defined as the study of the modern world's development through investigations of material and archival remains of past societies. Because of its focus on the post-Columbian era, Charles Orser drew attention to the “haunts” of historical archaeology, including colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, and modernity. This course focuses primarily on the field in North America, including its history and development. Historical archaeology now provides crucial perspectives on the silenced, overlooked, and obscured histories and experiences of marginalized peoples. Anthropological approaches enable historical archaeologists to link past events and processes to our current moment and to better understand the enduring legacies of sociopolitical formations and institutions that perpetuate various forms of inequality.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
We will read sections of the two major epics Ramayana and Mahabharata to see how issues of morality and ethics are posed in these texts and the disputations around these issues.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
An emerging body of literature argues that cities in the Global South work differently than Eurocentric theories of the city and urbanization suggest. This course will focus on such issues as the important role of cities in the nation’s economy, politics, and culture and interrogates the relationship between the city and its “outside.” This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that African cities, as an urban form, concept, and geography have been generative in anthropology, as well as in history, sociology, and urban studies. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of an African city outside of this limiting history? In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of African cities as an urban form, and lived experience, re-sorting its geographies and theorizations. We will explore issues of urban planning, (de)industrialization, urban race/ethnic relations, movement, and other issues important to the urban experience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This is an introductory course for those interseted in gaining basic knowledge about contemporary Iran. The focus will be on culture and religion and the ways they in which they become interwoven into different kinds of political stakes.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the craft of ethnography as a mode of research and writing fundamental to anthropology. Through the close reading of several ethnographic works, we will consider the intertwining of description, local concepts, and analysis. We will undertake several observation and writing exercises to learn how to write in an ethnographic mode and translate field research into lively texts.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
In this course we will examine different conceptions and experiences of "home" through studies of domesticity, kinship and household in diverse cultural settings. Reading anthropological analysis of urban built environment and locality, we will explore the notions of home and homeland, as realms of care, intimacy and belonging yet also as sites of subjection, discrimination and gender/racial inequality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will explore the intersections of scientific knowledge and law that shape the experience of environmental and occupational diseases from an anthropological perspective. We will first look at the concepts of risk and danger; medical and legal reasoning on causation; role of expertise in science and law; and the place of victim testimonies in public perceptions of risk. In the second part we will take up four case studies on the topics of lead poisoning, Bhopal gas leak, Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters, and exposure to toxic dusts in the workplaces.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
The course is designed to introduce students to the Indian anti-colonialist figure and political thinker Mahatma Gandhi, his key ideas on politics and society in their historical and political contexts, and to put them in conversation with contemporary social and political theory. Many today may consider Gandhi’s ideas, such as that of turning away from technology or an insistence on non-violence even in the face of threat and violence, as too idealistic or impractical for our complicated times. Through a close reading of his work, this course will challenge this reflex response, and explore the relevance of his thought for rethinking our approach to contemporary political and ecological crises.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine new ways of theorizing family and kinship due to changes brought about by technology, experience of war and collective violence, and recognition of the multiplicity of ways of forming relations.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Students will be introduced to problems of global governance in the context of transnational conflicts, changing nature of war, new epidemics and pandemics, and the threats of planetary extinction. What are the ways security is imagined and what kinds of political passions are mobilized for security of people versus security of states.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course invites students to examine an idea central to theories of transitional justice: that holding perpetrators of mass violence legally accountable enables transitions from war to peace and authoritarianism to democracy. We will examine this idea by focusing on Latin America, where social movements for legal accountability and human rights prosecutions have flourished since the 1980s, influencing law and transitional justice mechanisms globally. By engaging ethnographies of transition, we will critically examine concepts such as justice, accountability, catastrophic violence, transition, and the rule of law, comparing how anthropologists and lawyers reason, formulate questions, and engage evidence.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Given that we inhabit a world after European colonialism, some would argue that empires are an artifact of the past. Yet, imperialism continues to shape our contemporary multipolar world. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will explore topics ranging from transnational anti-colonial worldmaking projects to (post)colonial infrastructures, to the politics of citizenship and race, contested border regimes, and the rise of far-right movements to focus on the modalities of (im)mobility, subject formation, and how difference and belonging within these often-fraught imperial settings have been both defined and defied. We will also attend to non-European imperial varieties and decenter a Eurocentric perspective on migration and empire.SPECIAL NOTE: There will be a $30 lab fee for the course.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Baltimore is often described as "a city of neighborhoods." But what exactly does this mean? In this class we will use the tools of urban anthropology to disentangle the notion of "neighborhood," inquiring how it is defined by spatial contours, layouts and material histories; and asking about the vibes, experiences, and cultural traits that characterize neighborhoods and distinguish them from one another. We will engage in an on-the ground, hands-on exploration of a local neighborhood to collectively craft a biography of its lived and built environments. First, we will examine how city-wide and local events might leave marks on the experiences of local dwellers and the stories of the urban landscape, and we will use these as entry points for tracing the life of the neighborhood. We will do archival research to learn how the neighborhood has been shaped by power relations as well as resistance, how it has changed through shifts in capital investment, zoning and political decision-making, and flows of populations. Then, we will refresh our skills in various methods of urban ethnography, such as participant observation among local residents and organizations, in-depth interviews, life-stories, kinship charts, and narrative maps, that will allow us to trace individual trajectories as well as the unfolding, in time and space, of buildings and urban areas. Our aim will be to map out variety of affects and dynamics of contemporary urban everyday life.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course aims to teach basic fieldwork skills: Choosing and entering a community; establishing contacts; learning to listen and to ask questions and locating archival material that might be relevant. It is a hands-on course that increases student familiarity with various neighborhoods such as the Arts District in Baltimore. Recommended Course Background: two or more prior courses in anthropology (not cross-listed courses). Course is a requirement for anthropology major.
Prerequisite(s): AS.070.132 OR AS.070.273
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
Bangladesh, the small, populous Muslim majority country in South Asia, steadily moving into middle income status, offers an off-centered but important vantage point upon the political culture of the region. We will read several new historical and ethnographic works, combined with film, fiction and art, to get a feel for this perspective, even as we interrogate what Bangladesh presumes about itself.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Land acquisition by the government to create useful public infrastructure has long been perceived as both necessary and legal. However, recent land acquisition processes have encouraged widespread illegal land grabs, the loss of livelihoods and the largescale displacement of local communities. This course invites students to examine what has changed in terms of states, economies, and societies to make such processes globally disruptive and violent. We will also consider the range of protests available to prevent or modulate such excesses of the politics of land rights.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
We approach Iran through building layers of understanding through works of literature, cinema, ethnography, and take particular note of the recent uprising and of some of the central works that are being produced on matters of environment and climate change.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will takes the reverberations of the Korean War to examine the ways in which catastrophic violence is absorbed into and corrodes social life. Particular attention is paid to the transnational nature of conflict, how boundaries around peace and war are established, and how recent scholarly and artistic work on the Korean War has critically engaged dominant frameworks of memory and trauma. Readings will draw from fiction, ethnography, historiography and will also include film. This course also draws from the public syllabus on Ending the Korean War.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Students are invited to attend, for credit, the departmental research colloquium in anthropology. The colloquium meets most (but not all) Tuesday afternoons during the semester. Students are expected to attend and listen, encouraged to ask questions when they wish, and to write one brief reflection on contemporary trends in the field, based on what they have observed during these sessions. This course does not apply to Anthropology major or minors towards their minimum department requirement. It counts towards your total credit requirement to degree.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Tom Jobim, best known as the composer of the bossa nova classic “Girl from Ipanema,” once quipped, “Brazil is not for beginners.” Beyond enduring stereotypes, the complexities and contradictions of Brazilian society have long been fertile ground for anthropological inquiry. This seminar offers close readings of classic and contemporary ethnography that interrogate Brazilian society as a set of questions and paradoxes. We will also explore, conversely, how studies in Brazil have deeply shaped core anthropological thought.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.070.636, are not eligible to take AS.070.336.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Invisible Cities by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The curious little book, a kind of re-imagining of Marco Polo’s travels as a parable about the tensions between description and abstraction, has enchanted countless readers and directly inspired projects in architecture, performance art, and the social sciences. This course embarks in a close reading of Invisible Cities to enliven engagements with urban anthropology.?We will explore the hidden and uncanny in urban worlds as an inroads into discussions of theory and ethnographic inquiry.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Migration or the global movement of people is occurring at all different scales across the world. While the focus has largely been on the causes and men’s experiences of migration as the norm, this course will focus attention on the relationship between migration, kinship and gender. We will ask, how do existing family relations structure movement, how do migrants form kinship relations in their new homes, and what happens to those left behind. What is a gender perspective on migration? Through an interdisciplinary range of readings, we will explore both the dominant, usually statist frameworks by which migration is studied and how bringing in the perspective of kinship and gender stands to push against these frameworks and commonsensical understandings as to why people migrate.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the idea and practice of the commons through various sites and objects (money, work, natural resources, urban land, knowledge and culture, etc.). We will examine the promise and limitations of local, grassroots social and economic forms of organization that propose alternatives to the market economy. Focusing on workers, consumers and housing cooperatives; community currencies; urban gardens; self-help associations; fair trade organizations and knowledge networks; we will enquire how these social economies propose autonomous forms of living together, and sharing resources, property and labor.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
What is violence? Ubiquitous as a concept, it remains difficult to define both its essences and boundaries. How do we distinguish between criminality, organized, and unorganized violence? Is violence the antithesis of society, or a central component of it? In this course, we will disscuss the concept of violence, the challenges of writing about it and explore the potentials that emerge from bodies subjugated to racialized/gendered forms of violence. We will examine a number of different ethnographic spaces, including genocide in Rwanda, conflict resolution among the Nuer, the concept of criminality in Indonesia, largescale massacres in Thailand, and police violence in the United States
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.070.645 are not eligible to take AS.070.345.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Why are so many social media apps free? How did surveillance take place before the internet? What does the TSA see when you go through a body scanner at the airport? This seminar will help students answer these questions by introducing them to the historical development of surveillance cultures as well as their contemporary iterations. We will explore how surveillance shapes communities, politics, subjectivities, and more broadly, our everyday lives. Through readings of key academic texts, documentaries, literary texts, ethnographies, and current events, we will try to gain a full picture, through discussion, of how surveillance has evolved and come to permeate society. By understanding surveillance as a technology of power, we will analyze how this power is applied differentially across different marginalized groups and in different regional contexts. In addition, we will examine the political possibilities that emerge from activist and otherwise everyday tactics to counteract surveillance.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The Korean War from the dominant U.S. perspective is seen as a “forgotten war”, one that today registers in caricatures of the predicament of the two Koreas. This course will explore the entangled histories of empire in the Korean War. It will seek to shift our understanding of Korean War from a U.S. dominated Cold War perspective to the Inter Asian contexts in which war unfolded. Further, it will examine closely how scholars in Korea and diasporic scholars have engaged an ongoing war and partition and moved beyond ethnonationalist frameworks. As a study of war, we will consider how techniques of punishment and torture came to be justified and refined in specific sites, the role of the Korean War within multiple other wars, such as Vietnam, and in mass atrocity (such as Gwangju Uprising and Massacre) and the figure of the political prisoner and the subject of humanitarianism.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course examines ideological and imaginative encounters between Buddhism and modernity. Drawing on detailed case studies from various regions of Buddhist Asia, the course critically examines how Buddhist communities have responded to modernity and continue to navigate the complexities of the modern and contemporary world. Through readings, films, field trips, and creative projects, the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing various ideological, social, and cultural issues that intersect with Buddhist modernism.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course examines, through an anthropological lens, the promise and limitations of local, grassroots social and economic forms of organization that propose alternatives to the market economy. Using the framework of "diverse economies," we will look closely at worker-run businesses; consumer cooperatives; community land-trusts; local currencies; self-help associations; fair trade organizations and knowledge networks; to inquire how these social economies propose autonomous forms of sharing resources, property, and labor. The course will involve research on some of Baltimore's burgeoning co-op endeavors.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Climate change is a vast topic, pervading our present and casting a pall of uncertainty over the possibility of a livable future. But, stepping back from a sense of climate change as a self-evident set of biophysical realities, how does climate, which unlike weather is only knowable in highly mediated ways, become sensible? What problems does it pose for thought? And how might we become more adequately responsive to its challenges? Departing from these questions, we will explore a variety of angles through which anthropologists have approached climate change, in dialogue with materials from other disciplines and media, to consider what anthropology may contribute to our understanding of life with climate change.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2)
Writing Intensive
This course will invite students to inquire into knowledge production in the context of the Cold War in Asia by exploring how our knowledge of wartime is selected, regenerated, and repressed by archives. The course will examine the dual nature of archives in documenting conflicts and serving as evidence of state violence. We will also consider how the archive may extend beyond documents to incorporate oral narratives and material artifacts.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This class is an occasion for speculative anthropology, a chance to reimagine this place (an American city on the Jones Falls river) in a future beyond the bustle of our fossil-fueled present. What culture might people of that distant time produce, and how might they make creative use of the many things we leave behind? In this class, we will work together as anthropologists and artists of another time, crafting an inventive and collaborative story about a culture to come, and the material artifacts of a very different collective life. The class will be co-taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian and visual artist Jordan Tierney. We will nurture our imaginations through experiential practices of observing nature, collecting materials, and assembling artifacts. What we build will serve as the core of a spring 2025 local museum exhibition we will plan together.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
"Although we often think of religious freedom as a fixed philosophical doctrine of Enlightenment liberalism, it is a concept continually being (re)made from the ground up in increasingly important ways that today affect national politics and the judiciary. Nowadays, religious freedom has cultivated oppositional meanings: it holds together both a freedom from and to supersede government regulation; where actions in the name of religious freedom seek both to separate from government and to radically engage it as a theological force. We begin by taking this tension as a provocation to look locally and draw widely from a variety of ethnographic, historical, philosophical, literary, and other present-day texts and media, which will deepen how we understand the significant scope of what is at play and at stake in contemporary America and its politics. Through our readings and discussions, we will better grasp how religious freedom and its legal interpretations have grown from the bottom up, moving through local policies, social geographies and institutions, such as churches and prisons, as much as through any singular adherence to transcendent philosophical doctrine. While this class is an overarching exploration of how American Christianity has developed, it will pay particular attention to the Alabama and Louisiana prison systems and their distinctive religious histories. And we will focus on how the varied conceptual forms of religious freedom relate to the social geographies, religious discourses, literary texts, and media produced in and through ideas of the American South."
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the role of science and technology in the making of African histories and politics. We will examine precolonial iron-working, healing, and weaving; the ways guns and railroads functioned as tools of empire; the role of hydroelectric dams in postcolonial nation building; and the rise of digital communication and payment systems in the present. Throughout, we will challenge commonsense distinctions between the material and the spiritual, designers and users, wealth and people.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Students will learn to read legal judgement and decipher how law is used to make and contest claims over infrastructure.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Media Artist in Residence Jane Jin Kaisen is a team-taught class between Clara Han (Anthropology) and Bernadette Wegenstein (MLL). In this class we will prepare the artist residency of Jane Jin Kaisen, a visual artist born in Jeju Island, South Korea and raised in Denmark. In the first part of the semester, we will cover theoretical questions raised in Jane Jin Kaisen’s work such as cross-cultural adoption, diaspora, migration, war, gender and sexuality, and translation. In the second part we will involve students practically in questions of media arts curation for the artist’s exhibit planned for April 2-9, 2022, at the Parkway Theatre, featuring three of her recent and acclaimed installations and films: The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger (2010), Apertures/ Rifts (2016), and Community of Parting (2019. In this class students will be closely involved with JHU's Center for Advanced Media Studies (CAMS), and the Baltimore Stavros Niarchos Parkway Theatre’s artistic director Christy LeMaster. They will also meet the artist Jane Jin Kaisen during her residency.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
One quarter of the planet's urban population lives today in slums, shantytowns, favelas, chawls, colonias and other forms of rudimentary settlements (according to UN Habitat). Despite their prevalence throughout the world, these places are still depicted as spaces of informality and abjection, rather than as sites of emergence ofinnovative -even if disadvantaged-, makeshift ways of producing the city. This course will combine ethnographic and geographical literature, as well as works of fiction and film to explore the lives of squatters and slum-dwellers in many regions of the world and examine in what way their practices, forms of dwelling, sociality, conflict and cooperation are constitutive of the urban experience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course offers an advanced examination of the interpersonal, institutional, and societal dimensions of addiction in the United States. The course will be divided into four sections. This first section tracks the evolution of addiction from a moral problem of the will to a formal, biomedical disease category over the course of the 20th century. This section introduces the problem of addiction within the societal context of the United States, exploring questions of political governance, social control, and issues of race, class, and gender inequality. It asks the question: what is the social life of addiction in the United States? The second section of the course will ground these broad inquiries in the urban U.S. by examining how addiction overlaps with mass incarceration, poverty, and homelessness in the U.S. city. Over the course of this section, we will engage and reframe the crack crisis of the late 20th century. The third section of the course will shift our attention to the rural United States and how addiction overlays unemployment, social isolation, and the urbanization of the U.S. Through this social and institutional lens, the third course section will explore the contemporary opioid crisis and draw comparisons with the crack crisis. The course concludes with an examination of the personal dimensions of the addiction experience and explores substance dependence in the realms of kinship, love, and personal understandings of recovery.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course focuses on human variation from an anthropological perspective. We discuss biological variation within and between human populations as the product of adaptive, maladaptive, and random changes. This includes an understanding of the diversity of human biologies as the product of complex interactions between environment, culture, and biology.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
The Environmental Justice Workshop is a space for engaged learning and collaborative environmental work, giving students a chance to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. In the fall of 2025, the workshop will be taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins) as a cross-institutional partnership with anthropologist Chloe Ahmann (Cornell University) and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. Working together as a team of faculty and students at both universities, we will collaborate with environmental justice activists and Baltimore residents to research, write, and produce a four-part digital humanities curriculum about the discriminatory history of waste management in Baltimore and its impact on working-class and minority residents. Students enrolled in this course will gain experience with archival and ethnographic research methods, learn how to conduct time-sensitive research responsive to community needs, and produce media resources for a broader civic audience engaged in the fight for environmental justice. Many class sessions will take place in various community locations in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Recent years have seen a renewed commitment to public work in anthropology, in terms of writing, presentation, and activist engagement. This course will focus on recent ethnographic work in a public vein, examining questions of medium, voice, and responsibility, as well as contexts of circulation and reception. We will explore what it means to pursue anthropology with a broader public in mind.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that Africa, as a concept, has been generative in history, as well as in political and social thought. Although in the long arc of history, the period of European colonialism on the continent was brief, it fundamentally reshaped how we think about Africa as a space and place. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of Africa outside of this limiting history? The idea of Africa has also existed as an important rubric for African scholars to counter such colonial inheritances and for diasporas to re-engage the black Atlantic. The emergence of Pan-Africanism as well as liberation movements across the continent have pushed back against a reading of Africa simply as a site of exploitation, but as home (“Africa for Africans”), space (Afrofuturism), and as a site of radical politics. In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of Africa as an idea, re-sorting its geographies and stories.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Governing health explores the vital relationship between governance and health. The class interrogates how the stratification and management of populations are linked with the diagnoses, categories, and inequities that make up our contemporary health landscape. We will explore how the concept of governance troubles our understandings of key concepts in medical anthropology like care, inequality, and the state. Moving from the level of the population to the individual body, from state institutions to the four walls of the clinic, this course traces governance as it generates and degenerates health.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
The household appears as commonsensical to us. It is where people, most often those of a family, reside together, sharing its resources, labor and collective fate. However, anthropologists have been arguing against this commonsense since it emerged in the 1950s. Yet the household is back again in current policy discussions as being most vulnerable to the problems associated with temperature extremes, food insecurity, exacerbated disease, enhanced competition and political violence. How might anthropological debates and controversies relating to households and householding as an activity within the context of war, famine and migration, provide important insights into today’s urgencies?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Anthropology is an endeavor to think with the empirical richness of the world at hand, a field science with both literary and philosophical pretensions. This course grapples with the nature of anthropological inquiry, reading classic works in the discipline as well as contemporary efforts to reimagine its foundations. Required for anthropology majors.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Take a moment to reflect on the present and future, and it is difficult to escape a sense of things breaking down in a fundamental way. But cycles of breakdown and repair are an ecological reality. And human communities, especially those marginalized and exploited by prevailing social and political structures, have long pursued repair and reparation as matters of both survival and justice. This course thinks through ideas of repair as means of engaging with contemporary social and ecological impasses in a spirit of restitution. Drawing from environmental anthropology, materialist philosophy, and abolitionist thought, we will work to chart the ethical and strategic promise of repair as a mode of engagement with toxic and unlivable circumstances. We will also work in the manner of a collective studio, each of us pursuing and charting a specific practice of repair.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
This course begins with reading the Origin of Species (1859), Darwin’s monumental work that was published some 150 years ago. We then build on this foundation to survey biological anthropology as a Darwinian historical science, with an emphasis on human evolution, variation, and biocultural histories. This allows us to understand how Darwin’s theory was misunderstood and misrepresented within social and scientific circles for more than a century. In the early 1950s, Sherwood Washburn called for a “new physical anthropology.” His approach shifted away from static, descriptive typology towards a dynamic, biocultural history of the human species. Recently, the “biocultural” approach is being revitalized to challenge disciplinary practices that consider the body as either a constructed cultural symbol or a natural anatomical specimen. We conclude with scholars’ creative attempts to decolonize knowledge production within ecologies of beings that are historical, relational, and multiple. This course requires the student to have taken at least one Anthropology course previously.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course will trace the history of an idea - how to make the human body physically immortal - in two Indian systems of knowledge, Yoga and Ayurveda. The course will follow the development of this idea in both theory and practice in the ancient and medieval Indian world. Beginning with accounts of immortal humans that are found in early Sanskrit literature, the course will move on to the elaboration of yogic practice in the tantric movements and to the refinements to alchemical theory (rasayana-sastra) in Ayurvedic texts. The course will then move to the emergence of postural yoga (ha?ha-yoga) as an independent discipline, which marks a new phase in the pursuit of corporeal immortality. Throughout we will keep track of competing theories of the body - its systems, components, processes, subtle dimensions, channels, centers, layers of physicality, and interactions with breath and spirit - as these form the ground on which to apply bespoke, immortality-creating methods.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This year-long course will create a space for students to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. The course is co-taught by community organizer Shashawnda Campbell (South Baltimore Community Land Trust) and anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University). Students will gain first-hand exposure to environmental conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts in south Baltimore, working closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects in sustainable design. Team projects will continue in the spring. Class sessions will take place mainly in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.Admission by permission of instructor. Apply at this link: https://tinyurl.com/ykjauf84
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
This is an advanced course in which we will interrogate the boundaries between war, civil conflict and techniques of policing. Students should be prepared to work through texts of an interdisciplinary character.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the presence of persons and of things in the related genres of ethnography and fiction. Students will be expected to experiment with finding what kinds of struggles for narrative space they can detect with regard to persons,, characters, and things in the texts they read.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Our present is said to be rife with more rumors, conspiracy theories and disinformation than ever before. Is this moment so different from previous, historical moments of crisis? Haven't these modes of expression always been present, albeit at the margins of the political order? What does it say about knowledge to have multiple “regimes of truth” (Foucault)? How does a new media landscape based in algorithmic modularity, and particularly social media, change the set up from an old analogue media economy? This course, co-taught by an, a literary theorist, and a media theorist, aims to provide a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives to help us examine the current state of reality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Anthropologist Irma McLaurin explains that Black feminist anthropologists are “Black women (first) who do anthropology (second).” Broadly, Black feminism is based on the notion that Black women and their knowledge matter. Being Black and female within a patriarchal white supremacist society subjects Black women to unique experiences that give insight into the many forms that oppression can take. But Black feminisms and Black feminists are not homogenous. There are various political views and disciplinary approaches. Of course, not all Black feminists are academics—there are artists, organizers, and mothers. There are different gender identities and sexualities. What is shared among Black feminists is an emphasis on retrieving and (re)producing Black women’s knowledge, doing activist work, and a commitment to humanism. In this course, we focus on engagements with Black feminism in all subfields of anthropology.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
The Environmental Justice Workshop is a space for engaged learning and collaborative environmental work, giving students a chance to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. In the fall of 2025, the workshop will be taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins) as a cross-institutional partnership with anthropologist Chloe Ahmann (Cornell University) and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. Working together as a team of faculty and students at both universities, we will collaborate with environmental justice activists and Baltimore residents to research, write, and produce a four-part digital humanities curriculum about the discriminatory history of waste management in Baltimore and its impact on working-class and minority residents. Students enrolled in this course will gain experience with archival and ethnographic research methods, learn how to conduct time-sensitive research responsive to community needs, and produce media resources for a broader civic audience engaged in the fight for environmental justice. Many class sessions will take place in various community locations in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recent years have seen a renewed commitment to public work in anthropology, in terms of writing, presentation, and activist engagement. This course will focus on recent ethnographic work in a public vein, examining questions of medium, voice, and responsibility, as well as contexts of circulation and reception. We will explore what it means to pursue anthropology with a broader public in mind. Cross-listed with AS.070.403
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that Africa, as a concept, has been generative in history, as well as in political and social thought. Although in the long arc of history, the period of European colonialism on the continent was brief, it fundamentally reshaped how we think about Africa as a space and place. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of Africa outside of this limiting history? The idea of Africa has also existed as an important rubric for African scholars to counter such colonial inheritances and for diasporas to re-engage the black Atlantic. The emergence of Pan-Africanism as well as liberation movements across the continent have pushed back against a reading of Africa simply as a site of exploitation, but as home (“Africa for Africans”), space (Afrofuturism), and as a site of radical politics. In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of Africa as an idea, re-sorting its geographies and stories.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Governing health explores the vital relationship between governance and health. The class interrogates how the stratification and management of populations are linked with the diagnoses, categories, and inequities that make up our contemporary health landscape. We will explore how the concept of governance troubles our understandings of key concepts in medical anthropology like care, inequality, and the state. Moving from the level of the population to the individual body, from state institutions to the four walls of the clinic, this course traces governance as it generates and degenerates health.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The 18th century German philosopher Schelling has been hugely influential on 20th century thought (Freud, Heidegger, Nancy, Zizek, Pierce) but remains unknown outside of philosophical circles. This neglect is unfortunate given that he has so much to offer anthropological inquiries into the relations between mind and matter, nature and culture, theology and mythology among other topics. This course places Schelling’s writings and commentaries on his work alongside anthropological texts and figures to explore lines of productive conversation. The theme of a romanticism appropriate to our present will be consistently explored throughout the course.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The household appears as commonsensical to us. It is where people, most often those of a family, reside together, sharing its resources, labor and collective fate. However, anthropologists have been arguing against this commonsense since it emerged in the 1950s. Yet the household is back again in current policy discussions as being most vulnerable to the problems associated with temperature extremes, food insecurity, exacerbated disease, enhanced competition and political violence. How might anthropological debates and controversies relating to households and householding as an activity within the context of war, famine and migration, provide important insights into today’s urgencies?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will consist of close reading of anthropological and philosophical texts to tracesome important aspects of the underlying presuppositions of social theory. We will try to see how regions generate both data and theory; and also see how some abiding concerns around the relation between structural formations and formations of subjects are expressed in classical and current anthropological thought.
The seminar will offer a forum for students to reflect on preliminary field research and think further about problems of ethnographic method. We will proceed in the manner of a workshop for ongoing projects. Open to anthropology graduate students only.
Anthropology is an endeavor to think with the empirical richness of the world at hand, a field science with both literary and philosophical pretensions. This course grapples with the nature of anthropological inquiry, reading classic works in the discipline as well as contemporary efforts to reimagine its foundations. Required for anthropology majors.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What’s in a name? In this course, we will explore how naming has long been an essential cultural practice, and yet one that has been increasingly highlighted as a site of contestation, revealing naming as an often unsettled and fraught space. From copyright and branding, to the politics of Latinx, deadnaming and doxing, as well classic spaces of kinship and the religious, this course will move among different ethnographic and conceptual spaces in order to understand the histories and lived worlds of naming. We will examine how naming practices allow us to better think about a number of underlying concerns in language itself, from erasure, topic avoidance, and silence, and will consider how naming is bound to category making, of making people and things animate and inanimate. In attending to the deep asymmetries in the power to designate, we also discuss the practice of refusal of names and the force and violence of anonymity and namelessness.
Take a moment to reflect on the present and future, and it is difficult to escape a sense of things breaking down in a fundamental way. But cycles of breakdown and repair are an ecological reality. And human communities, especially those marginalized and exploited by prevailing social and political structures, have long pursued repair and reparation as matters of both survival and justice. This course thinks through ideas of repair as means of engaging with contemporary social and ecological impasses in a spirit of restitution. Drawing from environmental anthropology, materialist philosophy, and abolitionist thought, we will work to chart the ethical and strategic promise of repair as a mode of engagement with toxic and unlivable circumstances. We will also work in the manner of a collective studio, each of us pursuing and charting a specific practice of repair.
To approach social life as performative marked a pivotal moment in anthropology and related disciplines, and even as an implicit framework it continues to undergird more recent theoretical orientations. Revisiting foundational works in ethnography and critical theory and tracing their resonances in contemporary turns and experiments, this seminar explores play and performance as both subject and method.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How does language become a site of contestation? From the attention to speech on social media, discrimination and exclusion based on how people sound, the realism of ChatGPT, to debates regarding what constitutes proper and improper language in school textbooks, we seem to increasingly talk about how we talk. How do we study language in these spaces, and amidst contestation and social change? Moving between a number of different contexts, this course explores how language becomes a focal point of agreement and disagreement. Topics include the history of code-switching, language identities around the world, AI and chatbots, indigenous revitalization projects, and how language is thoroughly embedded in our understandings of gender, race, and the concept of the social “other.” Throughout the course, we will read some classic linguistic anthropology texts as well as a contemporary literature, that together provide a foundation for how to think about the role of language in our lives.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This year-long course will create a space for students to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. The course is co-taught by community organizer Shashawnda Campbell (South Baltimore Community Land Trust) and anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University). Students will gain first-hand exposure to environmental conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts in south Baltimore, working closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects in sustainable design. Team projects will continue in the spring of 2023. Class sessions will take place mainly in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Graduate students are encouraged to register for the departmental research colloquium in anthropology. The colloquium meets most (but not all) Tuesday afternoons during the semester.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is an advanced course in which we will interrogate the boundaries between war, civil conflict and techniques of policing. Students should be prepared to work through texts of an interdisciplinary character.”
Writing Intensive
Tom Jobim, best known as the composer of the bossa nova classic “Girl from Ipanema,” once quipped, “Brazil is not for beginners.” Beyond enduring stereotypes, the complexities and contradictions of Brazilian society have long been fertile ground for anthropological inquiry. This seminar offers close readings of classic and contemporary ethnography that interrogate Brazilian society as a set of questions and paradoxes. We will also explore, conversely, how studies in Brazil have deeply shaped core anthropological thought.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.070.336, are not eligible to take AS.070.636.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Invisible Cities by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. The curious little book, a kind of re-imagining of Marco Polo’s travels as a parable about the tensions between description and abstraction, has enchanted countless readers and directly inspired projects in architecture, performance art, and the social sciences. This course embarks in a close reading of Invisible Cities to enliven engagements with urban anthropology.?We will explore the hidden and uncanny in urban worlds as an inroads into discussions of theory and ethnographic inquiry.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What is violence? Ubiquitous as a concept, it remains difficult to define both its essences and boundaries. For example, how do we distinguish between criminality, organized, and unorganized violence? Is violence the antithesis of society, or a central component of it? How can we resolve disparate forms of violence such as that of language, environment, and that of the body? What does an anthropological and ethnographic engagement with violence involve? In this course, we will read and discuss the concept of violence, the challenges of writing about violence and race, and examine the potentials that emerge from bodies subjugated to violence.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.070.345 are not eligible to take AS.070.645.
Writing Intensive
In this course, we will grapple with pollution as an existential predicament, a permissible effect, and an organizing problem. We will read ethnographic engagements with waste and waste infrastructure, industrial toxicity, fossil fuel production, environmental justice, and environmental health. We will consider pollution’s debt to capitalism and colonialism, and relations between environmental and moral pollution. Working in the manner of both a seminar and a collaborative workshop, we will seek to bring into focus the questions and lessons that arise from readings of diverse places and our own emergent field projects.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How does the idea of a form of life as the mutual absorption of the social and the natural inform anthropological conceptions of the human? Taking the status of the example in both Wittgenstein and Austin, and how it bears on conceptual innovation, this course offers a reading of primary texts from philosophy and anthropology on these issues. Open to advanced undergraduates with permission from the instructor.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Pairing classics in the anthropology of religion (e.g. Durkheim, Weber, Turner, Asad) with contemporary writings (ethnography, literature), this course will explore the jagged edge of religious self-making, experience and expression and its intersections with the state, capital and nature.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Through this course, first year graduate students in anthropology will prepare for the first-year exam at the end of the spring semester through discussions of assigned texts with anthropology department faculty." Open to First Year Anthropology Graduate Students Only.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The seminar will offer a forum for students to discuss research projects, prepare grant proposals and think further about issues of ethnographic methodology and writing. Open to Anthropology graduate students only.
Writing Intensive
This class is an occasion for speculative anthropology, a chance to reimagine this place (an American city on the Jones Falls river) in a future beyond the bustle of our fossil-fueled present. What culture might people of that distant time produce, and how might they make creative use of the many things we leave behind? In this class, we will work together as anthropologists and artists of another time, crafting an inventive and collaborative story about a culture to come, and the material artifacts of a very different collective life. The class will be co-taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian and visual artist Jordan Tierney. We will nurture our imaginations through experiential practices of observing nature, collecting materials, and assembling artifacts. What we build will serve as the core of a spring 2025 local museum exhibition we will plan together.
This course will examine the presence of persons and of things in the related genres of ethnography and fiction. Students will be expected to experiment with finding what kinds of struggles for narrative space they can detect with regard to persons,, characters, and things in the texts they read.
Writing Intensive
Our present is said to be rife with more rumors, conspiracy theories and disinformation than ever before. Is this moment so different from previous, historical moments of crisis? Haven't these modes of expression always been present, albeit at the margins of the political order? What does it say about knowledge to have multiple “regimes of truth” (Foucault)? How does a new media landscape based in algorithmic modularity, and particularly social media, change the set up from an old analogue media economy? This course, co-taught by an, a literary theorist, and a media theorist, aims to provide a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives to help us examine the current state of reality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
We will do a close reading of selected texts of Foucault to track the concepts of power, subjectivity, government, and care of the self.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course we will engage classical texts from the anthropological archives and explore debates and contemporary salience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The relationship between speakers, communities, and forms of language-in-use (ritual, everyday life, oral literature) can only partly be captured by conceptions of language as a sign system. In this course, we will review structuralist approaches most closely identified with semiotics and move on to explore the concept of “presence” and its explanatory potential for anthropological attempts in understanding language.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course surveys the anthropological theories of exchange and circulation, both within and beyond the human communities. We explore how intersecting patterns of material flow—fuel, food, cash, gas, heat, or rain—nourish social relations, and give rise to certain ethical stances and political struggles. Course material will bridge classic work on gifts, alienation, and kinship with contemporary accounts of extractivism, climate change, toxicity, and infrastructure.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In this course we will engage classical and contemporary texts from the anthropological archives and explore conversations and keywords that maintain enduring importance for the discipline. We will approach the history of anthropological thought and practice in a contrapuntal method, dispensing with the notion of texts being connected merely as matters of influence or the competition of ideas. Rather than approach materials as occupying fixed and ossified places in the “canon,” we will invite other habits of reading, of inhabiting texts as sources of intellectual recreation. Writing exercises will encourage playful and creative modes of engagement with older and newer texts.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Readings in Anthropology is a required course for first year graduate students. However, this course does not present a stable canon of anthropology, nor does it assume that anthropological knowledge is delimited by national boundaries. This course is designed for students to engage the crosscurrents in disciplines and thinking that underlie anthropological knowledge. It will introduce so-called canonical works in order to engage in close and critical reading of these texts. In this course, we will look closely at conceptions and descriptions of kinship in light of a history of anthropological knowledge marked by colonial power and authority. How are certain forms of relating made to disappear within the anthropological archive? How do we read such texts to elucidate the traces of lives in the recesses of the text? How has new kinship literatures repositioned the study of family and kinship relations. This course will take us through classic anthropological thought in social anthropology and biological anthropology, as well as historical studies of kinship.
This course will focus on how Foucault makes the subject appear in his readings of the archive and the relation between the subject, subjectivity and self-formation. Restrictions: Open to upper level undergraduates with permission of the instructor - please write to veenadas@jhu.edu
Writing Intensive
Anthropologist Irma McLaurin explains that Black feminist anthropologists are “Black women (first) who do anthropology (second).” Broadly, Black feminism is based on the notion that Black women and their knowledge matter. Being Black and female within a patriarchal white supremacist society subjects Black women to unique experiences that give insight into the many forms that oppression can take. But Black feminisms and Black feminists are not homogenous. There are various political views and disciplinary approaches. Of course, not all Black feminists are academics—there are artists, organizers, and mothers. There are different gender identities and sexualities. What is shared among Black feminists is an emphasis on retrieving and (re)producing Black women’s knowledge, doing activist work, and a commitment to humanism. In this course, we focus on engagements with Black feminism in all subfields of anthropology.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course is open to anthropology graduate students only and is to be run on a workshopmodel. It is to help those students writing their regional essay for the comprehensive exams toacquire expertise in regional debates and literature relevant to their field research. Our understanding of regions is one of cross-cutting concepts and questions rather than geographical framings alone. After identifying a concept or question, each student will create an annotated bibliography, trace the shape of arguments as they emerge within the readings, create an outline and work toward a draft of the final essay.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Summer Research for doctoral students
Course for Anthropology graduate students who are TAing as part of their academic training.
Secularization theory has entrenched itself in our usual theorizing about the state, naturalizing the separation of religion and state and consigning religion to the private. However, as writings on political theology (theory, commentary, ethnography) show, such a separation doesn’t hold in actuality. The religious makes its presence known through notions such as the Church eternal, the king’s mystical body, the theological underpinnings of concepts of the political, the incitement of revelation, the mythological underpinnings of authority and so on. This course will delve into these readings so as to grow our attentiveness towards these aspects of power and governance as well as to understand their presence within the everyday.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Independent Study/Research