Courses
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.
Writing Intensive
How have biodiversity protection measures, cultural heritage NGOs, genomic science, and transnational media altered the lives of Indigenous groups in North America in the twenty-first century? What does "recognition" mean for these people, and how does it actually work in practice? This course will explore the emergence of new spaces and technologies of Indigenous politics and their new roles in shaping everyday experiences, from Inuit communities in Arctic Canada to urban centers in the United States.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This introductory course will focus on the theme of “encounter,” which has been central to anthropology’s self-formation. We will focus on the encounter with the other, the colonial encounter and the encounter with the possibility of human extinction to explore how newness comes into the world and how it may be structured by prior violence.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This introductory course investigates what we eat and, as a consequence, who we are. By taking a cross-cultural perspective, students will examine the politics of food production, the values associated with food preparation, and the material and social dynamics of food consumption. Through readings, films, field trips, demonstrations, and tastings, the course offers an interdisciplinary and dynamic pedagogical approach to analyzing cooking and eating—activities central to daily life and social forms more broadly. Local- and global-level issues will be addressed as students explore histories, economics, social issues, and identity formation related to food.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores maps as cultural documents and ethnographic sites. Students will learn how cultural understandings of space, time, and the visible world shape cartographic conventions. Through mapping exercises we will explore how ethnographer can use maps to theorize the nature of political, cultural, and economic life.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Climate change is represented in many pictures, such as those of tables, graphs, iconic photographs and filmic images. It materializes in many objects and qualities in our everyday lives, such as emissions, heat, solar grids and taxes. Artists attempt to picturize climate through photographs, installations and performance art. In this class we will examine these myriad representations, materializations and artistic efforts to see what ethical, political and aesthetic issues are at stake within them. We will ask to what concerns and desires does climate change give expression?
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Writing Intensive
This course will introduce first-year students to the anthropology of modern South Asia from the lens of its varied minorities. We will interrogate ideas of nation, community, tradition, and belonging across the region to understand contemporary dilemmas of diversity, heterogeneity, and cultural citizenship.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course explores the context, experience, and consequences of data proliferation in the contemporary moment. Both experts and laypeople generate and study data at unprecedented rates to make decisions, communicate with each other, and process their environments. How do data advance or constrain our social, political, and economic relationships at large? How is knowledge transformed when it is mediated by large volumes of data? What are the consequences of trusting sociopolitical decisions to data-processing algorithms? What happens when everyday users generate data about themselves and volunteer their data to for-profit entities? The course consists of different modules zeroing in on topics ranging from the economy, to public health, climate change, media, and the law. Each module consists of lectures and seminar-type discussions, as well as interactions with invited speakers. Students will be expected to actively participate in all discussions and develop one independent project. The course content and activities tie into the 2019-2021 Sawyer Seminar on “Precision and Uncertainty in a World of Data” led by the Departments of Anthropology and the History of Medicine.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The course explores contemporary approaches to illness and disease in which somatic expressions reflect broader histories of political violence. The readings in the course will challenge students to consider the ways in which the contours of the human body, its interior as well as its dynamic relations with the milieu are touched by structures of violence and histories of militarization. This will enable students to understand the varying expressions in which illness is expressed in the interactions between medical professionals and patients in clinical and non-clinical settings..
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Over the past two decades, African cities have absorbed rapid population increase without accompanying economic growth. Students will review the major challenges of this mode of urbanization and explore the vibrant ways residents have sought to meet them. Following anthropology’s commitment to lived experience, we will track these issues through the twists and turns of everyday life, and consider what they may say about urbanity more broadly in the 21st century. Topics include livelihood, the built environment, conflict and membership, and popular culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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 and argumentation; and through various observation and writing exercises, we will develop a practical understanding of the ethnographic method of transferring social worlds from the field to the text.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course examines the multiple and overlapping crises afflicting Latin America today through an ethnographic lens. Featuring conversations with authors of recent work on the region’s most pressing issues, we will explore the contours of knowledge production itself under conditions of precarity and violence. Discussions will include the retrenchment of borders, migration crises, the state management of life and death, the resurgence of authoritarianism, food insecurity, and resource conflicts.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Writing Intensive
Reality is a key concept we often think with more than we think about. And yet reality is not a self-evident thing. This seminar explores a central paradox in the concept of reality: as a 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 then proceeds to approaches from anthropological theory and ethnography. It looks critically at the role of scientific knowledge, technological development, and capitalist and socialist ideological regimes in making realities in their own image. The course puts forth the case that anthropology is uniquely situated to understand how systems of knowledge come into being and stabilize a social order while investigating the inherent contestability and fragility of those systems.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What is the relation between social life and shelter? How do the kinds of buildings we move through shape our sense of what is important, beautiful, or possible? Why do some buildings feel good and others bad? And how do buildings evolve as people inhabit, repurpose, repair or degrade them over time? The course begins with philosophical reflections on spheres, shells, and containers in relation to childhood and memory. It then explores the long interdisciplinary conversation between architecture and anthropology, focusing on the social and cultural dimensions of built structures. Finally, it considers how architectural practice is responding to contemporary challenges of migration, pandemics, and climate change.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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. Prerequisite: Students must have completed one Anthropology course previously This course does not apply to Anthropology major or minors towards their minimum department requirement. It counts towards your total credit requirement to degree..
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar offers an examination of Brazilian culture and politics through close readings of classic and contemporary ethnography. The course will track how anthropologists have approached the complexities and contradictions of Brazilian society. And, conversely, we investigate how studies in Brazil have prompted challenges to and generated innovations in anthropological thought.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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. 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
Writing Intensive
This course takes the Korean War as a site to both explore: 1) contemporary historical and political transformations in East Asia and globally and 2) the ways in which violence, catastrophic loss, and separation are woven into everyday life. It will explore the Korean War through film, fiction, historiography, and draw on comparative materials in anthropology
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
"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."
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Students will learn to read legal judgement and decipher how law is used to make and contest claims over infrastructure.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will collectively craft an anthropological critique of housing, both as a social concern and as an object of public policy and urban planning. As a key component of the structure and functioning of cities, housing is instrumental to urban governance, segregation, and citizenship, as well as to cultures of consumption and class formation, identities, solidarities and the imagination of alternative social orders. We will study several ethnographies to examine how the material and social effects of housing shape the politics of difference, rights, markets and property relations, consumption and activism in the US urban context.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
How does an idea or an observation become a “fact”? How does one study "science” anthropologically? This course will introduce students to the field of science and technology studies (STS) by asking how different societies have defined the relationship between experimentation, knowledge, and power. Through ethnographic portraits of laboratories, clinics, toxic landscapes, and virtual simulations, we will explore how scientists and other experts have understood their relationships with other citizens, the state, and the physical environment.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will explore social and cultural dimensions of contemporary ecological problems, thinking between ecological anthropology, environmental philosophy, and activist literature and media. It will be taught as a community-based learning course in partnership with the Center for Social Concern and a Baltimore environmental organization. Coursework will be organized on a collaborative studio basis and a project-based approach.Recommended Course Background: One prior course in either Anthropology or Environmental Studies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will grapple with the social and cultural dimensions of contemporary ecological problems through a local, project-based approach. Coursework will be organized on a studio basis in partnership with a local environmental organization, Friends of Stony Run. Continuing a collaborative project initiated in the fall of 2019, we will work together to develop interpretive materials for the Stony Run stream and urban watershed adjoining our campus.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar explores how precarity in South Korea gains expression in the medium of TV and film. In particular, this seminar will focus on how the moving image brings the viewer into the texture of everyday life. We will focus on the TV show Misaeng and include films such as Parasite and Burning. TV and film will be paired with readings on the transformations of intimate life in contemporary South Korea and comparative work on precarity.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This 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 for environmental justice. The course builds on the work of the Sustainable Design Practicum in the fall of 2022. Class sessions will take place each week in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus. Restrictions: Admission by permission of instructor. Apply at this link: https://tinyurl.com/ykjauf84
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.
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
From casinos to canoes, algorithms to animal traps, our worlds are bursting with intentional objects. The word design has come to evoke the prestige of such objects, and their power to shape our collective habits and sensations. This course explores the anthropology of designed artifacts and their complex social trajectories. Beginning with philosophical investigations into the relationship between materials, form, and craft, we will proceed through ethnographic case studies of design as expert discourse and ordinary practice. Ultimately we will consider the affinities between the ethnography and design as open-ended and not entirely predictable engagements with the world.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar offers a close reading of selected works of Karl Marx, along with supplemental secondary literature. We will explore how the central pillars of Marx’s thought--including dialectical materialism, critical political economy, and utopian socialist thought—shape his critical method in interrogating the logic of capital.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar explores the shifting lines of the normal and the pathological and the constitution of disease in the complex of medicine, public health, and the social. Readings include the works of Canguilhem and Foucault, historical monographs and ethnographies. Students will have the opportunity to develop substantial research or review papers throughout the course of the seminar.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
In this course we will examine how forms of governance, politics, expert knowledge, and citizen actions are implicated in the emergence and management of epidemics.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
We wil track the transformations in kinship theory in relation to wider changes in legal theory, biomedicine, and the relation between state and family. In particular we will ask how the concepts of sovereignty, gift, exchange, human and non-human milieus affect notions of relations.Co-listed with AS.070.639
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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.
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. 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
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What is the nature of anthropological concepts and what relations do they bear to concepts internal to a society? We invite students to think with key ideas from Hindu and Islamic traditions, asking if anthropological concepts are best seen as abstractions from the particular or as intertwined with ongoing lines of inquiry, say into the nature of the real and continual efforts to test it? Topics in ritual theory, grammar, aesthetics, translation, revelation, luminosity, figuration and the mythological among those to be considered.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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.
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 climate change policy discussions as being most vulnerable to the problems associated with climate change, such as, temperature extremes, food insecurity, exacerbated disease, enhanced competition and 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?
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
This 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 for environmental justice. The course builds on the work of the Sustainable Design Practicum in the fall of 2022. Class sessions will take place each week in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus. Restrictions: Admission by permission of instructor. Apply at this link: https://tinyurl.com/ykjauf84
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
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.
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar offers a close reading of selected works of Karl Marx, along with supplemental secondary literature. We will explore how the central pillars of Marx’s thought--including dialectical materialism, critical political economy, and utopian socialist thought—shape his critical method in interrogating the logic of capital.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This seminar explores the shifting lines of the normal and the pathological and the constitution of disease in the complex of medicine, public health, and the social. Readings include the works of Canguilhem and Foucault, historical monographs and ethnographies. Students will have the opportunity to develop substantial research or review papers throughout the course of the seminar.
Writing Intensive
In this course we will examine how forms of governance, politics, expert knowledge, and citizen actions are implicated in the emergence and management of epidemics.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
We will track the transformations in kinship theory in relation to wider changes in legal theory, biomedicine, and the relation between state and family. In particular, we will ask how the concepts of sovereignty, gift, exchange, human and non-human milieus affect notions of relations.Open to undergraduate anthropology majors with instructors approval..Co-listed with AS.070.426
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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.
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.
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 seminar will explore how violence and catastrophe are embedded in everyday life in Korea. It will focus on how to interconnect the catastrophic with the everyday, and focus on the level of the household and on forms of state knowledge of the population and the unit called “the family”. This is a research seminar. Students are expected to discuss their research in depth each week and should be prepared to write a significant research paper during the course.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What is the nature of anthropological concepts and what relations do they bear to concepts internal to a society? We invite students to think with key ideas from Hindu and Islamic traditions, asking if anthropological concepts are best seen as abstractions from the particular or as intertwined with ongoing lines of inquiry, say into the nature of the real and continual efforts to test it? Topics in ritual theory, grammar, aesthetics, translation, revelation, luminosity, figuration and the mythological among those to be considered.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
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.
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course we will engage classical texts from the anthropological archives and explore debates and contemporary salience.
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.
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course introduces classical texts from the anthropological archives in relation to contemporary debates in the discipline. In this year’s iteration, our readings and discussion will explore the idea of a public and engaged anthropology.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The word "romantic" has long carried negative connotations within anthropology meaning the tendency to idealize, exoticize, or seek out the irrational. Instead, through a focus on the themes of magic, art, myth, nature and creativity, we suggest that romantic philosophy has offered and continues to offer much of interest for contemporary anthropology. Drawing on select readings in philosophy and anthropology, we will explore the suppressed romantic legacy of anthropology. This is an undergraduate and graduate combined course. Recommended Course Background: Undergraduates have to have taken at least one anthropology course (any level) to register. Or else they need the permission of the instructor.
Writing Intensive
This course will ask: what constitutes an anthropological tone in philosophy? We will take up classical topics such as rule following, everyday life, skepticism, concept formation, realism, and signification in selected texts of anthropology and philosophy for understanding if these crisscross and overlap.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Summer Research for doctoral students