Featured Graduate Course Descriptions

In this hands-on ethnographic research course, advanced anthropology students will learn how to use anthropological methodologies to collaboratively investigate social problems and positively impact society. We will develop a model of ethnographic research oriented toward facilitating dialogue between student ethnographers and research interlocutors (community members, policy makers, elected representatives, scientists)...

Who counts as an expert? This course will examine expertise as a cultural category through an exploration of the processes by which certain individuals and groups are accorded intellectual authority, while the knowledge claims of others are simultaneously delegitimized. What forms of training and socialization make it possible for a...

This course is an exploration of key theoretical readings in cultural anthropology from the foundations of anthropology in the 19 th century up to the late 1960s. Most of the materials we read are primary sources from one of the three major traditions in 20 th century anthropology – American...

People make meaning in and through language. We collaboratively produce narrative accounts of experience with those around us, according to—or in resistance to—normative frameworks for communication. Ethnographic data often consist of these very stories and narratives, and like our interlocutors, ethnographers produce stories and narratives as a process of meaning-making...

This graduate seminar examines policy as a form of cultural logic and a productive site for critical analysis of global and local political power. Drawing on anthropological, science studies, and interdisciplinary literature, the course will focus on policymaking as a form of expert labor; the role of institutions, organizations, and...

This graduate seminar will examine the political, social, and material lives of numbers and data. While discourses of scientific objectivity often present numerical representations as value-free reflections of reality, an emerging body of work in anthropology and science and technology studies focuses instead on how people do things with numbers...

This graduate seminar provides an introduction to the Anthropology of Media, paying particular attention to contemporary anthropological approaches, ethnographic practices, and writing strategies. This course is intended to encourage students to theorize about their own experiences and to spark interest in the possibilities of the anthropological study of media. We...

This is a project-based, hands-on course. Students will experiment using different qualitative research methods in cultural anthropology such as participant observation, oral history, and interviewing. They will also practice writing fieldnotes, analysis and ethnography. Through practice and reflection on individual and group research projects, students will think critically about the...

Archaeozoology will give students practical and analytical skills in the identification and analysis of animal bones from archaeological sites. Students in the course will engage with current methodological and theoretical issues in the discipline, and develop a basic familiarity with the vertebrate skeleton using museum specimens, reference collections, and archaeological...

Instructor: Bailey Duhé Who invented race? Do police really target communities of color? Are race and ethnicity the same thing? Is white privilege bad? If you’ve asked any of these questions and want a space to work through the answers, ANTH 4020: Brown Studies is for you. This is an...