AS.070 (Anthropology)

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.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

LAMA Lab is a space in which students and faculty address the different technologies of language and media. Encompassing in its approach and design, this lab emphasizes an up-close, ethnographic, and qualitative approach, and with an eye to AI and its influences and effects on media. With a particular attention to shifting technological developments, LAMA Lab is open-ended and exploratory in nature. Centered around reading groups, workshops, guest speakers, and experimentation with different interfaces and software, as well as providing small grants, this laboratory provides a space of convergence for those who are engaging in questions related to language, media, and AI. It is accessible to students and faculty at different stages of research, from planning to post-research analysis. This laboratory also provides a wider space for ethnographic engagements with language and media, from translation and oral history to audio and visual archives. For students enrolling for 1-credit course, the lab will meet throughout the semester, approximately every three weeks. Credit hours will be accrued through attendance to guest speakers, workshops and reading groups.

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 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 course offers an introduction to the religious traditions of East Asia, including Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, and Shinto. Moving chronologically from ancient foundations to modern developments, we will explore how religious ideas and practices have shaped—and been shaped by—East Asian societies over time. Emphasis will be placed on the diversity and unity of religious expressions in these traditions, with readings drawn from a wide range of texts: religious scriptures, philosophical texts, popular literature, and ethnographic accounts.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

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.

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 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)

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

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), Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

This is an introductory course for those interested in gaining basic knowledge about contemporary Iran. It assumes no previous expertise and is open to undergraduates at all levels including Freshmen. The aim is to deepen our understanding of Iran and of the ways in which culture, religion, and politics might get entangled.

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), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

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.

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

In this course, we will explore the social worlds of AI. Given how AI is and promises to be increasingly interwoven into multiple aspects of our lives, we will examine different ways of thinking and ethnographically engaging in these emergent technologies. We will think about how people are encountering and designing AI in different ways, from the ubiquity of AI slop on social media and ChatGPT to the predictive use of AI in healthcare, to the internal culture of start-ups. Throughout the semester, we will move between spaces of media, the uses of large language models and their relationship to the speaking subject, ethnographies on technology and labor rights, surveillance, and state and corporate uses of AI. We will also consider fundamental questions concerning the relationship between technology and life, the utopias of automation, the ethics of human exceptionalism, and the potential legal frameworks in which to situate and guardrail AI.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

There are roughly two firearms owned by civilians for every person living in the United States—a country with by far the highest rate of civilian firearms ownership in the world. Making sense of this fact leads invariably to diagnoses of America’s “gun culture,” a term used to explain both the popularity of firearms and the devastating rate of gun-related injury and death. But what does it mean to think about gun ownership and use as a “cultural” phenomenon? And what happens when we treat firearms not simply as policy problems or public health liabilities, but as objects uniquely embedded within violent histories, vested with symbolic power, and enmeshed within everyday circuits of exchange and use? While historians, social scientists, and cultural theorists have begun to consolidate a new field of Gun Studies, anthropology brings distinctive tools for analyzing how firearms mediate agency, value, symbolism, and identity across individual, communal, and institutional scales of social life. This course invites students to apply those tools by connecting theoretical readings to case studies drawn from both scholarship and media, from tragic headlines to blockbuster films to YouTube productions to video games.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Writing Intensive

From Buddhist almsgiving and Christian fasting to Islamic halal laws and contemporary movements toward vegetarianism and veganism, this course examines how certain food practices articulate broader concerns about purity, taboo, hierarchy, sacrifice, ecology, and embodiment. Drawing on a wide range of religious texts, ethnographic case studies, and critical theory, students will engage with questions of religious identity and ethics to better understand the complex entanglement of food and morality in religious life.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Cancer, the ‘emperor of all maladies,’ is a leading cause of death worldwide. Cancer is, seemingly, everywhere: it brings to mind screening programs, pinkwashed fundraisers, promises of a cure, and myriad memoirs and fictions, lending cancer an abundance of meaning in our contemporary world. With developments in genetic testing and early detection, many aspects of contemporary cancer care have transformed—and with them, questions around risk and responsibility. In the clinic, cancer outcomes are increasingly understood in terms of individualized risk. Yet, these developments and ways of understanding cancer are limited to urban centers of the world, largely in the U.S. and Europe, with access to costly medical technologies. Further, experiences and outcomes of cancer care, from surveillance to treatment, refract along lines of race, gender, and geography, and the disease is a frame through which the politics of healthcare can be starkly seen and traced. In this upper-level undergraduate seminar, students are invited to explore cancer care—inequalities, experiences, and poetics—through literary and ethnographic analysis.

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

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

Are you interested in learning how to design and run a student journal? Do you have a piece of writing you would like to prepare for a public-facing platform? If so, then join us for the Argot workshop. We will revitalize the JHU undergraduate anthropology journal, featuring work from students in the humanities and social sciences at Hopkins and beyond. In the workshop, students will engage with every aspect of the publication process, including soliciting submissions, reviewing and editing articles, and creating and designing the online platform. Students enrolled in the workshop will also submit one piece of work to be published in the journal. With that in mind, we ask that each student enter the workshop with a piece of writing they would like to see through to publication. This could be an essay from another course, a research project, or a visual or multimedia work (with a writing component). During the semester, students will work on their own submissions, provide editorial guidance for others, and design, create, and publicize the journal. The journal will be published online at the end of the semester, creating a concrete opportunity for student work to reach a wider audience.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

This course invites students to critically examine China’s growing engagement and influence on a global scale. Over the past two decades, China’s outbound investments, loans, infrastructure projects, migration, medical, and cultural initiatives have surged dramatically. These sweeping yet variegated footprints have profoundly shaped the international political and economic landscapes. What are the peculiarities of China’s overseas practices, processes, patterns, and policies in a globalized world? This course will guide any undergraduate at Hopkins with an interest in contemporary China to analyze the multifaceted dimensions of “Global China” using ethnographic methods and other social science approaches. The course is designed to attract students from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, international studies, East Asian studies and Africana studies. The course is structured into three units. In the first unit, students will be introduced to the general phenomena, multi-level dynamics, and reflective methodological frameworks of Global China, laying the groundwork for the remainder of the course. In the second unit, students will explore how Global China manifests across various domains, including industry, agriculture, infrastructure, resources, and medicine. In the third unit, students will reflect on the interactions between overseas Chinese entrepreneurs and local populations, Chinese political-economic power and soft power, as well as the relationships among different overseas Chinese communities.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and 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

This seminar explores the formation of Black Atlantic worlds through a selection of historical and ethnographic texts, material artifacts, and films. We will encounter familiar themes of slavery, revolution, commodity production, and imperial power recast in the minor key of the Black experience. Exploring major works by anthropologists, particularly key figures from Johns Hopkins, the course also examines how studies of transatlantic movements have reshaped our very understanding of history and culture, not simply as static or official forms but as fields of contention.

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

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

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.

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

Do you get the feeling that reality ain’t what it used to be? Reality is one of those Big Concepts that we often think with yet seldom think about. Taking up the notion that reality is never a self-evident thing, this seminar explores a central paradox: reality is conceived as a given totality—an ‘everything’—nonetheless produced and maintained from a partial and situated practice of making. The course begins with historical examinations of reality-making and –undoing. We look critically at the role of scientific knowledge, technological development, and capitalist and socialist ideological regimes in consolidating a sense of reality. The course puts forth the case that anthropology is uniquely situated to grasp how systems of knowledge and collectively held feeling come into being and stabilize a social order, while also investigating the inherent contestability and fragility of those systems.

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

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

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

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

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)

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 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)

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

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

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)

In his war memoirs, Wilfred Bion attempts to find a form by which to describe psychic life amidst death, “I died there.” Here, questions of form, genre, subjectivity and the precariousness of reality are knotted together. In this seminar, we will seek to move our thinking outside of the hard and fast boundaries between “extreme violence” and “chronic violence”, or between catastrophic events and everyday life to instead explore the interconnections of voice, intelligibility, and volatility in selected anthropological texts, ethnography, paired with specific philosophical and psychoanalytic texts.

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

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 and chemical 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

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

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.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

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

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.

This seminar explores the formation of Black Atlantic worlds through a selection of historical and ethnographic texts, material artifacts, and films. We will encounter familiar themes of slavery, revolution, commodity production, and imperial power recast in the minor key of the Black experience. Exploring major works by anthropologists, particularly key figures from Johns Hopkins, the course also examines how studies of transatlantic movements have reshaped our very understanding of history and culture, not simply as static or official forms but as fields of contention. This section is for graduate students in Anthropology.

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.

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

In his war memoirs, Wilfred Bion attempts to find a form by which to describe psychic life amidst death, “I died there.” Here, questions of form, genre, subjectivity and the precariousness of reality are knotted together. In this seminar, we will seek to move our thinking outside of the hard and fast boundaries between “extreme violence” and “chronic violence”, or between catastrophic events and everyday life to instead explore the interconnections of voice, intelligibility, and volatility in selected anthropological texts, ethnography, paired with specific philosophical and psychoanalytic texts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This course is for students who have finished required coursework and are working on completing their qualifying exam essays in preparation of dissertation research.

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

This independent study course is for graduate students to work alongside a faculty member on a directed list of readings, designed for a student's specific study & research goals. Requires faculty approval before registration.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Independent Study/Research