Anthropology (ANTH)

This course deals with the nature of anthropology as a broad and diverse area of study. The anthropological study of humankind will be approached from the perspectives of physical anthropology; prehistory and archaeology; and linguistic anthropology and socio-cultural anthropology. The diversity of humankind will be explored in all its aspects from times past to the present.

Can the secrets of the past help us solve our problems in the future? This course uncovers the clues that our ancestors left behind in ruins, abandoned cities, pyramids, and on the earth itself. We will discuss key issues facing humanity today through the lens of the past. How prone are we as a species to degrading our environment? How flexible are we in the face of environmental change? Are humans basically violent, and are we destined to keep killing each other? These are some of the big questions that can be addressed using the archaeological record. The anthropological and archaeological study of past failure (and success) can help us understand the urgent challenges our our own age.

Creole is spoken by an estimated seventeen million people. Creole is spoken on the islands of the Caribbean and the western Indian Ocean that were former or current French colonial possessions and in the countries where many of these former island residents have emigrated, including the United States, Canada, France, Dominican Republic, Bahamas and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Haitians are the largest Creole speech community of approximately eleven and a half million speakers. Creole language courses provide a valuable foundation for Notre Dame faculty, staff and students working to understand and address critical issues related to Haiti and the Francophone world, from language and culture to history and education, from engineering to public health. Creole language and literature are of increasing interest in the dynamic field of Francophone studies. Creole has also become a major area in the field of linguistics, especially in areas of language evolution, sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Students attend class with an instructor (T-TH) and work on-line (MWF). The instructor will balance both spoken and written Creole as well as exercise reading and listening.

This course celebrates the vivid, sonorous language of Kreyòl and the histories, cultures and agencies of its speakers. Students in the class gain communicative competence in the language through development of basic conversational, reading and writing skills. Meanwhile, we engage a critical, anthropologically informed study of Haitian experiences of colonialism, revolution, development, education, race, gender, kinship, and transnational migration. Audio recordings, music, film, art, and food enhance our study of the language and culture. The class welcomes students who have some familiarity with Kreyòl, have taken Beginning I Creole Language and Culture, or have competence in French. The course is the second segment of a four-course sequence through the Intermediate II level.

This class provides an educational and entertaining reconfiguration of the historical spread and cultural importance of the Irish as part of the 2st-century transnational world. Based on comparative perspectives with other emigrations, such as people from 19th century Italy and Germany into the New World, our study of the Irish helps students to understand the human narrative of resettlement, the national and global policies of settlement and resettlement, and the global impact of the spread of the Irish into many areas of the world. Based on lectures, films and presentations, we explore some fundamental historical questions, such as how are the Irish Famine, emigration, and economic developments of the 18-20th centuries interconnected, and how did the Irish diaspora shape the historical and cultural trajectory of America. We explore a range of themes relevant to other large-scale population migrations, such as the impact of the Irish spread on trans-Atlantic social memory and global economies across time and space.

Human beings may be classified as one species among many in biological terms, although a strict physical determination marks only the starting point for a broad inquiry into what we mean by human nature. Anthropology moves forward from this beginning to explore, in theory and by empirical investigation, the particular forms of cultural expression that characterize the development of human societies and account for their richness and their remarkable variety. This course examines the fundamental elements of this fascinating social science. It addresses the sometimes-controversial evidence related to such questions as evolution and genetics, as well as issues of ecological adaptation and the emergence of complex societies. It looks into language and other symbolic systems as central components of distinctively human behavior. It concentrates with special emphasis on the vast domain of social and cultural life, drawing upon many ethnographic examples from near and far, to illustrate how anthropologists seek to study all dimensions of human experience, from kinship to kingship and from cyborgs to shamans. Seminar format.

This course is an introduction to the methods, goals, and theoretical concepts of archaeology, with a primary focus on anthropological archaeology practiced in the Middle East, North America, and Europe. The field of archaeology is broadly concerned with material culture (at times combined with textual information) that can be employed to generate interpretations about past human societies. The challenge of this social science is to interpret past societies and anthropological behavior using the fragmentary, but nonetheless rich and complex, data base of the archaeological record. Lecture topics will include the methods and goals of archaeological excavation; analytical techniques employed in material studies; and the problems and challenges in the interpretation of past human behavior. Case studies of survey, excavation, and analytical techniques will focus on recent or on-going investigations of archaeological sites in North America, Central America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

This class is designed to introduce anthropology as a lens to analyze the human condition and the diversity of human expression. We will also identify key topical themes and interests in cultural anthropology including an overview of its history and methods. Anthropology illuminates the myriad of cultural patterns and social systems throughout the world. Expressed through ethnography, anthropology reveals a vast variety of global cultural phenomena that reveal complex social patterns and the stunning vibrancy of ways we can live and view life. The course explores human action through multiple holistic lenses including culture concepts, kinship patterns, economic strategies, political practices, religious rituals, artistic performances, gender roles, ethnic identities, communicative languages, medical systems, patterns of violence, and the legacies of globalization.

Language is fully embedded in human culture and society. It has both meaning and efficacy; that is, it both means things and does things. Our goal in this course is to become aware of some of the ways language functions in social life, often below the level of awareness of its users. Students will engage in a number of practical exercises that demonstrate some of the more astonishing features of language all around us. Topics include: the nature of language, including language origins, nonverbal communication, and electronic communication; language, culture, and thought (linguistic relativity); speech acts and what we do with words; conversational analysis; language and identity (class, race, gender); and language in the world (multilingualism, language endangerment and revitalization, language and education).

Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, smartphones, and automobiles? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.

How do the technologies around us shape our lives, our bodies, and our engagements with the world—and what hidden social dynamics shape them? In this course, we will explore the fascinating intersections of science, technology, medicine, and society, focusing on how contemporary innovations—like AI, smart algorithms, and new medical technologies—are deeply intertwined with issues of social power and control. Through case studies, social theory, and discussions, students will discover how technologies are never neutral, but instead reflect and reinforce issues of inequity, ethical dilemmas, and dynamics of uneven political and economic power. This course will challenge you to think critically about the power dynamics embedded within the tools we use to heal, to communicate, and to engage with the world around us. Prepare to question everything you thought you knew about science and technology!

Illness and disease have been part of the human experience for as long as we have existed. The nature of these challenges, and how we have responded to them, has evolved over time. In this course, we will dig into evidence from the archaeological record and bioarchaeological data from skeletal remains to trace the history of human health. From prehistoric pandemics to ancient healing practices, we’ll uncover the sick and tired side of archaeology that reveals how illness and the pursuit of health have shaped—and been shaped by—human history. You’ll learn how archaeologists and bioarchaeologists reconstruct stories of past health, exploring how humans have cared for one another since our evolutionary origins and how our understanding of “health” has shifted across time.

This class will explore what anthropology can teach us about surgery, such as surgical processes, variability, and outcomes, as well as what these topics can in turn teach us about broader social issues. Questions to be addressed in class will include the history of surgery, what is surgery, how are surgeons trained, how does surgical practice vary across cultures and time-periods, outcomes and impacts of surgery, the impacts of resource scarcity, and dangerous/unnecessary/life-saving surgeries. Students will engage in questions about the aesthetics of scars, physician and patient decision-making, and how patient background (race, gender, class, identity) impacts access, experience, and outcomes. Types of surgery to be explored will include, plastic surgery, cesarean section, fistulas, organ donation, among others.

This course will examine the interactions of culture and biology within sports. The anthropology of sports can help us gain valuable insights into broader social and cultural phenomena, the role of ritual in society, and illuminate how sports have been used to bring people together, but also to exclude people. We will begin with studying the evolutionary origins and non-human examples of play. We will then move into the prehistoric and historic foundations for sport. We will also discuss how people change their bodies, in good ways and dangerous ways, for a greater chance at success, and how those bodies are often more harshly judged by society. Finally, we will explore the ways in which contemporary sporting and fan practices are culturally ordered and/or challenge social norms. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we will pay special attention to questions of gender, race, genetics, nationality, health, equality, and human variation. In addition, students will be encouraged to think critically about their own sporting experiences, both as active participants and as fans, and how sports impact their lives.

This course examines the origins, causes, environmental settings and cultural factors within which natural selective forces converged throughout human evolution to create the human infant, one of the most vulnerable, slowest developing, and energetically demanding mammal infants of all. We consider who the caregivers are, and how and why they might "share care" which was needed to keep our highly vulnerable infants and children alive, and to nurture them throughout their exceedingly long childhoods. Specifically, we trace the origins of modern parenting systems from their mammalian base paying especial attention to the transaction between infant care practices themselves and how they relate to, if not depend on, the emergence of other characteristics that define us as human. These include bipedalism, empathy, learning, food sharing, and a "theory of mind". Here we will examine not only the unique roles that mothers and fathers and other important caregivers (allomothers) play but the underlying biology that both inclines that care but also responds to it biologically. We also emphasize the manner in which social values, ideologies, cultural expectations, social roles, and economic pressures assert critical influences on caregiver physiology and behavior.

When diseases emerge in Africa, the media presents a relentless tide of infection, with AIDS and Ebola, for example, claiming thousands of hapless victims of “backward” thinking and rejection of western medicine. Western journalists express disbelief that people suffer and die because they refuse to take appropriate steps to protect themselves, whether it is taking the sick to the hospital, or wearing condoms to avoid contracting HIV. We are led to ask why treatable or even preventable diseases are claiming so many African lives. Why does popular thinking about health and disease on the African continent appear to be impervious to biomedical models? This class uses an anthropological perspective to look beyond the simple popular and medical answers to questions of sickness to examine the social and political frameworks that inform people’s understandings of the health of their bodies and communities. This course will introduce students to cultural perspectives on disease through an investigation of how people around the continent understand and experience illness, and why what appears to be simple medical knowledge is anything but simple when it is understood in its social and political context. We will investigate the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, examine why polio persisted in Nigeria, and compare how the HIV epidemics unfolded in South Africa and Uganda. In addition to infectious diseases, we will ask questions about the social experience of disability in Africa, investigate hospital care, and draw comparisons with western perspectives.

What are the cultures of medicine? How does belief create possibilities for healing? How do cultural, social, and political forces shape experiences of illness? When can care be a form of violence? How can histories of oppression make you sick? Medical anthropology is an expansive field of research concerned with the study of medicine, affliction, and healing in historical and cultural context. This course provides an introduction to topics in medical anthropology, from classical texts on belief, illness experience, and structural violence to contemporary work on disability, care, and critical global health. Over the course of the semester, students will gain experience in methods, critical thinking, independent research, and public communication as we collectively explore what medical anthropology can contribute to the urgent health challenges that we face in the contemporary world today.

The ancestors interrelated with the environments we live in today and will interact with in the future. This course explores indigenous cultures and perspectives on the importance of traditional knowledge and the environment. In this seminar-style course, we will learn about how indigenous groups in the Americas, both past and present, think about the world around us and how their cultural livelihoods are threatened by climate change and ongoing development. The goal is to provide students with a strong foundation in indigenous environmental issues. We will cover a range of topics that intersect with traditional ecological knowledge, land use and perceptions, reciprocity, sense of place, memory-making, and environmental justice.

This is not an easy topic and has no easy mode of analysis. Yet, understanding Race and racism is one of the most pressing matters for our society. In order to do this we engage contemporary issues of race and racism through the lens of anthropology. We'll tackle human diversity via biology, history and contemporary society in order to see what Race is and what it is not...demonstrating why racism matters. Examining the processes, structures and impacts of racism enables us to dive deep into the complexities of systemic violence, and engage the diverse histories and complicated issues and practices of our very problematic contemporary reality.

What are the contributions of anthropology to the study of contemporary science and technology? In this course, we will respond to this question by examining the history of anthropological studies of the technosciences from the post-war period to the present. We will cover the history of ethnographic engagements with the biological and natural sciences, the debates about the nature of knowledge production, and the contemporary studies of computing and engineering with a focus on Artificial Intelligence. We will organize the class as a seminar, so be prepared to engage in close readings of the material and workshopping a research project of your own.

How is race embodied and how are bodies racialized? How do gender, sexuality, class, size, perceived beauty, and ability mutually influence embodiment? This course considers anthropological and historical studies of the body, with a critical focus on Blackness. We investigate how Black human bodies are othered, valued, dehumanized, and experienced, across time and space, with a particular focus on the United States. Euro-American philosophies have constructed Black people as transgressive, in a variety of ways, and all these ideas have been inscribed on and through their physical bodies. This normative discourse shapes how Black people interact with the social world, so we will discuss, challenge, and critique these narratives and also consider how the body can be used as a site of resistance. We will engage topics like athletic training, bodily modification and perceptions of beauty, biomedical technologies, labor, disability, and illness, through texts like academic writing, music, podcasts, essays, news media, and social media. Overall, this class demonstrates how bodies are key sites for understanding politics, power, social hierarchies, economics, and social change in our contemporary world.

In the anthropological study of religion, does having a religious background benefit a researcher or does it introduce bias? Where does theology belong in the anthropology of religion, and what might the two learn from each other? Can one critically study a faith and live it at the same time? This course addresses these questions through a review of the lives and work of prominent anthropologists who identified as Catholic and drew inspiration from their Catholic faith. In examining how these anthropologists shaped the discipline, students will learn about the wide breadth of the anthropological study of religion, an endeavor that stretches from the origins of our species to the high-tech world in which we now live. This disciplinary survey will also lead to questions of how, through these particular anthropologists, insights from the anthropology of religion intersect, complicate, and enrich the Catholic intellectual tradition.

This course offers an ethnographically grounded understanding of contemporary European cultures and societies. We start by presenting a brief history of the idea of Europe. Then, we define its geographical focus: where are the boundaries of Europe? Are Israel and Turkey part of Europe? Who gets to decide? Are there European Muslims? We will then read recent works focusing on selected regions and on diverse urban populations. We will explore and discuss socio-cultural facets of European everyday life; trends and challenges in technology, the environment, popular culture, demography, and politics; and the diversity of urban/rural, north/south, and more generally intra-European ways of life. The course will be of interest to students of contemporary global issues, and in particular to students who intend to spend a semester in Europe; are back from the field; or intend to write a related senior thesis.

Anthropology is a social science with a holistic perspective on the human condition. It attempts to understand any aspect of humanity in the broadest sense anywhere and anytime. Anthropological perspectives can be used to speculate on what it meant to be human in the distant past, or what it may mean in the far distant future. While we cannot travel into the past, future, or an alternative universe to visit other societies or contact alien civilizations, we can imagine what those trips would be like. In our own culture, science fiction has moved from a fringe literature to an essential part of modern art and entertainment because it allows us to imagine alternate realities, and to speculate about the past, present and future as way to learn about ourselves and others. This class will introduce you to the basic principles of anthropology as a social science using science fiction text and video to illustrate various anthropological principles. You will learn how to critically evaluate anthropology's diverse applications and how they are reflected in popular culture (sometimes accurately and sometimes not). You will also sharpen your writing skills by using anthropological principles to critique science fiction.

This class introduces students to Irish traditional Sean-nós ("old style") dancing, a vernacular solo form of dancing done to Irish traditional (folk) music. No experience is required or necessary.

Irish Music: Tin Whistle and Tunes will introduce students to playing the tin whistle (penny whistle), teaching simple, popular tunes, as well as to singing Irish traditional songs.

Anthropology, the holistic study of humans and their societies and cultures, is the focus of this seminar course. Through discussion and analysis of a variety of anthropology texts, this seminar course aims to develop writing skills among first-year students while exposing them to some central problems and issues within anthropology. Adopting an approach that reflects the four-field character of anthropology, the seminar will encourage students to explore topics such as: (1) anthropology as a way of knowing; (2) anthropology as an encounter with, and effort to explain, human diversity; (3) anthropology as a discipline that uniquely contributes to our understanding of the symbolic dimensions of human behavior and communication; (4) anthropology as a discipline that uniquely contributes to our understanding of human strategies for subsistence and survival; and (5) anthropology as a discipline that uniquely contributes to our understanding of human biological and cultural origins. As a university core curriculum way of knowing in social science (WKSS), this university seminar investigates topics in depth through the lens of anthropology as a social science discipline.

Humans deeply affect their social and natural worlds. Their impact reverberates across time and space making it difficult to understand the long-term ramifications of our daily decisions and actions. This seminar enhances our understanding of the complex web of relationships between humans, resources, and climate by exploring the concepts of sustainability and collapse from an anthropological perspective. Key questions guiding this exploration include: What do we mean by sustainability? What is it that want to sustain? How can societies be "sustained" when we know societal collapses happen time and again? Through readings, media, debates, and analysis, we will learn how our culture shapes and promotes both sustainability and collapse and assess whether they can be attained or prevent. And, we will all gain a better understanding of our place in the world around us.

Building upon a fundamental exploration of the nature of human language, this course will delve into the closely interlinked notions of language, communication and society as manifested in our daily life, in the context of globalization and increasing border-crossing and intercultural exchanges.

This course looks at both artifacts and the museums that display them. In this course you will learn how to handle and analyze artifacts, and how to recognize, date and record them the way professionals do. You will also learn how to 'read' an object from the point of view of how it functioned, practically and socially.

The module introduces students to basic concepts and theories in anthropology, with a view of fostering their ethnographic imagination and their critical take on the present challenges faced by human societies. It critically explores topics under the rubrics of culture, language, kinship and family, race and ethnicity, gender, economy and subsistence, power and politics, religion and ritual, and globalisation. By drawing on studies of the day-to-day experience of people in both western and non-western societies, the module provides students with a fresh and stimulating perspective on the way in which human behaviour and thought are grounded in larger social and cultural processes.

The spectacular archaeological heritage of Ireland indicates that people have been living on this island for at least 10,000 years. This module explores how Ireland's rich and diverse archaeological record of monuments, landscapes and objects tells the stories of those people and their ways of life from early hunter-gatherer times to the present. You will study the first settlement of the island, the establishment of farming and the building of monuments like Newgrange. We explore Ireland's place in the 'Celtic world' and the lasting impacts of the introduction of Christianity, life and society in medieval times and the emergence of modern Ireland.

How do we acquire language? How are we to interpret the fact that language use varies according to geography, social class, gender and context? Why do languages die? What is the impact of immigration on language attitudes, language acquisition and language transmission? This module attempts to provide the beginnings of answers to such questions, as well as many others relating to language, the individual and society. In the process, a range of theories and evidence in the fields of Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics will be explored and tested.

This unit examines the often contested historical realities of Aboriginal experience in postcolonial Australia. Significant eras in shaping an Australian national identity are deconstructed in order to highlight the cultural, social and political impact on, and from, the Aboriginal nation. The unit also explores how collective historical experiences transmit and transform over time. Unit Learning Outcomes On completion of this unit students will be able to: (1) use critical thinking skills to incorporate new information about the construction of knowledge; (2) demonstrate an understanding of Aboriginal history and how these narratives inform contemporary issues in Australian society; (3) understand the unity of Aboriginal people yet recognise divergence in the narratives of Aboriginal people; (4) develop an understanding of Aboriginal demographics; and (5) imagine a 'third space' for sharing Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal histories. PA - Perth, Australia UWA Aboriginal Encounters looks at the impact of post-colonial Australia and the lives and traditions of the Aboriginal Peoples. This course also critically analyses primary texts of the time, as well as reflects upon cultural artifacts of the Aboriginal Peoples.

This unit introduces students to Indigenous Australia in a stimulating, in-depth study of traditional and contemporary forms of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural expression. Ranging from the Dreaming and ancient knowledges, ceremony and lore, to the lives and societies of Indigenous peoples today, students learn in areas such Aboriginal kinship, language, story and art, Indigenous agriculture, aquaculture and astronomy, and contemporary Indigenous cultures and cultural currents.

Cultural studies explores everyday life, media and popular culture. It shows us how we can make sense of contemporary culture as producers, consumers, readers and viewers, in relation to our identities and communities. How do cultural texts and practices convey different kinds of meaning and value. Students will be introduced to some key thinkers and approaches in cultural studies and will learn how to analyse cultural forms such as advertising, television, film and popular music.

This unit is the foundation unit in Aboriginal Studies. It aims at promoting, from an historical perspective, an understanding of Aboriginal people of modern Australia. It focuses on a broad range of ideas including Aboriginal and European contact and the ensuing disruption of traditional culture, interracial conflict and government legislation. The unit provides an introduction to a number of current issues affecting Aboriginal people, including health, education, law, business, cross-cultural relationships, land rights and Aboriginal self-determination.

The course orients itself to the understanding of different elements and factors that have intervened in the structure of the national territory, both the environmental and cultural, with the idea to enter the fundamental notions that facilitate the analysis of physical, social and economic aspects that explain the diverse forms of occupations and use of Chilean land for man.

An exploration of early historic and medieval Ireland in its European context, including Roman influences, the archaeology of the Christian church, the exciting developments associated with the Viking Age in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic, the impact of the Norse on Ireland, and the transforming influence of the Anglo-Normans in castle building, town development and rural villages in the Irish landscape.

By the end of the course students will possess a basic knowledge of the main sources and crucial issues in the history of (largely) European archaeology from the 18th-century antiquarian interest down to the meaning of archaeology in contemporary culture. They will be able to search for the basic information and methodology enabling them to understand the notions of cataloguing, appraisal, dissemination and conservation of the historical and cultural heritage. They will be familiar with the main issues and lines of research; they will be able to judge for themselves the sometimes complex issues surrounding the development of a research method in archaeology. They will be capable of collecting, selecting, logically arranging and clearly outlining complex documentary data and information, analysing a range of sources critically from different historical periods. They will have learnt how to gain insights from experts in other fields and spot relations with other subjects. Working independently and in an orderly fashion, they will have acquired self-criticism and an ability to learn from mingling with others; they will also know how to choose the learning tools best suited to their own skills and purposes. Course contents The course contest is organized in two didactic sections, both of theoretical character: the first one on meant and the function of the archaeology beginning from the ancient world and the conquest of the method; the second on the theoretical and interpretative developments, been born within the prehistoric archaeology, today wide to the different sectors of the discipline, and on the new fields of interest. - Meaning of Archaeology: connection Present/Past The awareness of the Past: since archetype to "antiquaria" from the naissance of the modern archaeology The "different archaeologies"and the "archaeologies differents": the studies between the XX and XXI century The methodology of the seventy years: the construction of the an archaeological science The present situation: Archaeology and Cultural Heritage policies. Society in comparison of the Cultural Heritage The archaeology meaning and impact in the contemporary culture: media exploitation and cultural tourism Which future for archaeology? New laws, provisions and rules in field archaeology; the professional training of the archaeologist and his role in contemporary society

Course asks the questions "How does the physical environment influence development?" and "How does development influence the physical environment?" Five perspectives are used to analyze global development: Climate & climate change, Land pressure and degradation, Water resources, Natural hazards and disasters, Migration & urbanization.

This unit is both practical and thematic. In the practical component students are trained to use traditional methods to make an artefact selected from a past human culture. Hands-on tutorials teach students about the properties of stone, wood, clay, fibre and other materials that people have used to make artefacts. These artefacts show how people met challenges such as climate change and social unrest by using innovation to shape the world around them. In the thematic component we look at how archaeologists go about their work, examining 'big issues' such as identity and DNA, gender, cross-cultural contact, climate change, human use of symbols, technology and contemporary issues such as homelessness, graffiti and how war affects the world's cultural heritage treasures. We train students in global cultural awareness and appropriate ethical conduct when engaging in cross-cultural research.

In this course you will explore and analyze the great mythical narratives that have accompanied humanity since ancient times. You will have the opportunity to question them, value their contributions as a germ of knowledge and discover the validity they hide behind contemporary masks. Based on four problem situations, you will travel from the cosmogonies that give meaning to the universe to the otherworldly stories that seek to alleviate the anguish of finitude and death. Get ready to embark on a journey full of gods, monsters and heroes.

As an international exchange student, you will no doubt experience some level of culture shock when first arriving in South Africa. During your stay you will be interacting with locals from very diverse backgrounds in terms of language, culture, ethnicity and social class. All of these things play a role in how people construct their identities. This module draws from different disciplines - history, hip-hop and other popular music studies, post-colonial studies, sociology, and more - to give students the necessary context(s) to not only better understand contemporary South African society, but to also gain knowledge about people, popular culture and identities against the backdrop of major historical shifts.

By the end of the semester, students will be able to give a nuanced answer to the core question: How did modern South Africa come to be?

This course introduces students to Chinese Wushu (martial arts), which is a representation of the broad and profound subject of traditional Chinese body culture.

An introduction to Chinese society, traditions, and culture.

Understand the secrets of the human body in the lecture 'Physiology in Health and Sports'. Dive into the exciting world of physiology, where you will not only gain a solid understanding of how our body works, but also discover the vital connections between physiology, health, and sports. Why Choose This Course? 1. Relevance Across Disciplines: This course offers a multidisciplinary exploration of physiology that applies to various academic fields and interests. Due to the focus on health and sports, physiology is embedded in a context everyone can relate to. 2. Practical Insights for Well-being: Learn how understanding physiology can directly impact your health and well-being. 3. Enhancing Athletic Performance: This lecture helps you to uncover the physiological principles that drive sports performance. From endurance to strength, understand how your body can excel in athletic endeavors. 4. Real-world Applications: Explore case studies, practical examples, and contemporary research demonstrating how physiological knowledge is applied in v healthcare, fitness, and sports. 5. Interactive Learning Environment: Engage in stimulating discussions, hands-on activities, and collaborative projects that foster a dynamic and enriching learning experience. In summary, this course is targeted at all students who want to learn more about human physiology and it's relevance for health and sports.

In this course, you will explore major subfields of linguistics, including sociolinguistics, phonetics (the sounds of language), phonology (the sound systems of language), morphology and lexicon (structured meanings in words), morphemes (units of meaning), syntax, and semantics. You will investigate the scientific study of language (a.k.a. Linguistics), with an emphasis on developing the basic vocabulary and analytical skills associated with the major branches of linguistic research.

This interdisciplinary course explores the challenges of environmental sustainability through social, economic, scientific, and ethical lenses. Taught jointly by professors from the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences, the course aims to instill broad, integrative and critical thinking about global environmental problems whose solutions will depend on multidisciplinary approaches. This gateway course to the Minor in Sustainability is open to all students interested in a deep exploration of these critical issues. Students considering the Minor in Sustainability are encouraged to take this course during their sophomore year.

'Irish Folk Custom and Belief' is both the title of a popular work from 1967 by Seán Ó Súilleabháin (1903-1996), archivist of the Irish Folklore Commission, and an approach to the study of rural Irish popular religion. That approach was long dominant among Irish folklorists. It tended to frame rural popular religion ahistorically and to fudge the issue of its relationship to specific social groups. At the same time it led to the recording of extraordinarily rich data, mostly from the Irish-speaking population of the West. Concentrating on the work of 19th century antiquarians and 20th century folklorists and anthropologists, the course will examine the study of rural popular religion in Ireland. It will contextualise it both in terms of historical, sociological and anthropological knowledge of Irish rural society and specifically of Irish peasant society, and in terms of the scientific study of religion. Specific topics often identified under the headings of 'folk custom and belief' will be discussed, in particular ritual, festival, magic, supernatural beings, sacred places and the oral narratives that deal with them. Specific scholarly texts, including texts by leading contemporary scholars of Irish rural popular religion, will be discussed as well as ethnographic texts recorded by the Irish Folklore Commission.

This course will discuss the 19th century concept of folklore and its application in Ireland. "Irish folklore" is usually understood in terms of three main and related domains: "folk narrative" (or oral literature), "folk belief" (or popular religion) and "material folk culture." These will be examined with special emphasis placed on narrative. Representative oral narrative texts from the Gaelic tradition will be studied in translation.

This class provides an educational and entertaining reconfiguration of the historical spread and cultural importance of the Irish as part of the 2st-century transnational world. Based on comparative perspectives with other emigrations, such as people from 19th century Italy and Germany into the New World, our study of the Irish helps students to understand the human narrative of resettlement, the national and global policies of settlement and resettlement, and the global impact of the spread of the Irish into many areas of the world. Based on lectures, films and presentations, we explore some fundamental historical questions, such as how are the Irish Famine, emigration, and economic developments of the 18-20th centuries interconnected, and how did the Irish diaspora shape the historical and cultural trajectory of America. We explore a range of themes relevant to other large-scale population migrations, such as the impact of the Irish spread on trans-Atlantic social memory and global economies across time and space.

This course explores topics related to language and identity in teaching, literacy research, theory, and practice. This course specifically foregrounds issues related to the Latinx experience in American schooling contexts with a focus on gender, and other identity markers that intersect with gender such as race, class, ethnicity, and (dis)ability. From an educational perspective, Latinx student populations in schools are increasing across the nation and yet far too often school curricula, quality bilingual and dual language educational offerings, and teacher preparation programs are slow to catch up to the demographic shifts. This course will further explore how Latinx identities factor into conceptualizations and practices of children's play, literacy activities, language use, and classroom behaviors of both teachers and students. By exploring culturally sustaining pedagogies and a "funds of knowledge" approach, we will seek to answer the following questions: How might we learn approaches to language and literacy education that narrow the achievement gap as they extend to the language and literacy development of Latinx learners? Moreover, what is the impact upon students when we view identity differences not as deficit, but as resource, thus creating schooling experiences that engage students, foster growth and inform equity? This course will engage students with children's literature, ethnographic exercises, linguistic autobiographies, as well as media and film depictions of contemporary issues facing Latinx students in schools.

Design thinking has emerged as a powerful methodology to catalyze breakthrough innovation for an array of complex business, social and humanitarian challenges. Business and industry have embraced design thinking as one of the most potent drivers of innovation, growth and prosperity for its’ deeply human-centered approach to problem solving. During this fast paced, hybrid, hands-on journey through the design thinking process, students will immerse themselves in a series of overlapping modules that introduce the various phases in the design thinking process and familiarize students with the tools and techniques. This course will unleash your creativity and ingenuity in addressing problems through a human centered framework and mindset, applying this methodology to a vast array of human-centered problems, and complementing disciplines from science and engineering to business and the liberal arts. This course fulfills a Core Curriculum Liberal Arts 4 Way of Knowing (Arts) as well as the gateway to the Collaborative Innovation minor and cross-listed with other minors including: Sustainability, Computing & Digital Technologies, Education, Schooling & Society, Entrepreneurship and Anthropology.

Human ethology studies various aspects of human development, not just within our own culture, but also across diverse cultures. This science is most unique because it looks at both evolutionary processes and the behavior of monkeys and apes to more holistically understand contemporary human behavior. For example, using cross-cultural and cross-species data, this course conducts an exploration of the cultural and evolutionary origins of language, non-verbal communication, laughter, sleep, deception, morality, infant behavior, parenting, human aggression, sexual behavior, gender development, and human courtship rituals.

This course deals with the nature of anthropology as a broad and diverse area of study. The anthropological study of humankind will be approached from the perspectives of physical anthropology; prehistory and archaeology; and linguistic anthropology and socio-cultural anthropology. The diversity of humankind will be explored in all its aspects from times past to the present.

"Hacking" is one of the most pressing topics of technological and societal interest. Yet, it is one of the most misunderstood and mischaracterized practices in the public sphere, given its ethical and technical complexities. In this course we will combine anthropological and computer science methods to explore the digital tools, practices, and sociocultural histories of hacking with a focus on their context of occurrence from the late 1960s to the present. Our goal is to help students think anthropologically about computing as well as technically about the digital mediations that we depend on in our lives. Computer Science is a great partner for Anthropology: computational methods have been part of the discipline since the 1970s with the use of digital computers for the study of cultural phenomena. Likewise, archaeology is a powerful companion of computing: its approach to material culture is suitable for the study of the sociocultural aspects of tool-making that are fundamental for understanding computing expertise. One of the most important aspects of hacking today consists in creating a community around tools for the exploration of digital technologies. The interplay between social and technical aspects, however, is one of the most neglected in the existing literature on hacking and computer security. Our proposal is, therefore, to bridge a serious gap between social and technical studies of digital technologies with a focus on hacking.

Sexuality is a complex and multi-faceted suite of biological and cultural/behavioral components. It is an important part of the human existence, especially in modern day North American society. This course seeks to examine human sexuality in an anthropological context. We will review sexuality in an evolutionary perspective via a comparison of nonhuman primate sexual behavior and the theoretical constructs surrounding adaptive explanations for human sexuality. The physiology of sex and the development of the reproductive tract will also be covered. The remainder of the course will consist of the evaluation of data sets regarding aspects of human sexual practice, sexual preference, mate choice, gendered sexuality, and related issues of human sexuality.

This course approaches human evolution from a theoretical point of view that combines both biological and cultural processes into a cohesive bio-cultural model. It begins by tracing the development of modern evolutionary theory and the place of evolutionary studies in anthropology, especially in the sub-field of bioanthropology. These concepts provide the framework for understanding the many lines of evidence that anthropologists use to explore and explain human evolution. These include studies of our primate relatives, through the intricacies of the fossil record, to archaeological evidence for the invention of material culture from the simplest stone tools to the complex cultural world that we live in today. Modern human variation can only be explained as the result of evolutionary forces acting on the complex interplay of biology and culture over millions of years. We continue to be affected by these forces, and this course not only provides information about where we came from, it also provides the scientific backgrounds to help us understand where we might be going as our species continues to evolve.

This course is an introduction to the methods, goals, and theoretical concepts of archaeology, with a primary focus on anthropological archaeology practiced in the Middle East, North America, and Europe. The field of archaeology is broadly concerned with material culture (at times combined with textual information) that can be employed to generate interpretations about past human societies. The challenge of this social science is to interpret past societies and anthropological behavior using the fragmentary, but nonetheless rich and complex, data base of the archaeological record. Lecture topics will include the methods and goals of archaeological excavation; analytical techniques employed in material studies; and the problems and challenges in the interpretation of past human behavior. Case studies of survey, excavation, and analytical techniques will focus on recent or on-going investigations of archaeological sites in North America, Central America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.

This course introduces students to the field of social-cultural anthropology. Cultural anthropologists are primarily interested in exploring issues of human cultural diversity across cultures and through time. This course will explore key theoretical, topical, and ethical issues of interest to cultural anthropologists. We will examine diverse ways in which people around the globe have constructed social organizations (such as kinship, and political and economic systems) and cultural identities (such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, race, and class) and we will consider the impact of increasing globalization on such processes. Throughout the course we will consider how different anthropologists go about their work as they engage in research and as they represent others through the writing of ethnographies.

Language is fully embedded in human culture and society. It has both meaning and efficacy; that is, it both means things and does things. Our goal in this course is to become aware of some of the ways language functions in social life, often below the level of awareness of its users. Students will engage in a number of practical exercises that demonstrate some of the more astonishing features of language all around us. Topics include: the nature of language, including language origins, nonverbal communication, and electronic communication; language, culture, and thought (linguistic relativity); speech acts and what we do with words; conversational analysis; language and identity (class, race, gender); and language in the world (multilingualism, language endangerment and revitalization, language and education).

Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, smartphones, and automobiles? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1970s and 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.

This course is intended for students who have completed Beginning level Creole or who have attained equivalent competence in the language. In small-group teaching sessions, students will be prepared for conversational fluency with basic reading and writing skills, emphasizing communicative competence as well as grammatical and phonetic techniques. Our study of Kreyòl is closely linked to our exploration of how the language is tied to Caribbean society and culture. Evaluation of student achievement and proficiency will be conducted both informally and formally during and at the conclusion of the course. Those looking to develop or improve their language skills are welcome to the class. The program is designed to meet the needs of those who plan to conduct research in Haiti or in the Haitian diaspora, or who intend to work in a volunteer or professional capacity either in Haiti or with Haitians abroad.

This course is intended for students who have taken one semester of Intermediate Creole Language and Culture. In small-group teaching sessions, students will be prepared for conversational fluency with enhanced reading and writing skills, emphasizing communicative competence as well as grammatical variety and phonetic acumen. Our study of Kreyòl is integrated with an exploration of how the language is tied to Haitian society, culture, economy and politics and history. Evaluation of student achievement and proficiency will be conducted both informally and formally during and at the conclusion of the course. Those looking to develop or improve their language skills are welcome to the class. The program is designed to meet the needs of those who plan to conduct research in Haiti or in the Haitian diaspora, or who intend to work in a volunteer or professional capacity either in Haiti or with Haitians abroad.

How do the technologies around us shape our lives, our bodies, and our engagements with the world—and what hidden social dynamics shape them? In this course, we will explore the fascinating intersections of science, technology, medicine, and society, focusing on how contemporary innovations—like AI, smart algorithms, and new medical technologies—are deeply intertwined with issues of social power and control. Through case studies, social theory, and discussions, students will discover how technologies are never neutral, but instead reflect and reinforce issues of inequity, ethical dilemmas, and dynamics of uneven political and economic power. This course will challenge you to think critically about the power dynamics embedded within the tools we use to heal, to communicate, and to engage with the world around us. Prepare to question everything you thought you knew about science and technology!

Boston Celtics (baseball), Glasgow Celtic (soccer), Celtic spirituality, Celtic music, Celtic art... The word "Celtic" seems to cover a multitude, yet also has a more specific meaning. It refers to a people of the ancient world known to the Greeks and the Romans and who left their trace in many parts of Europe; it refers to rich medieval cultures in Ireland and Britain; and it refers to a group of living languages and literatures such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton. But "Celtic" also evokes certain qualities and characteristics such as passion, sensitivity, imagination, musicality and bellicosity, which have been attributed to the Irish and the Scottish Highlanders, for example, since the Romantic period. This course gives a concise introduction to the question of who were and who are the Celts.

This class will explore what anthropology can teach us about surgery, such as surgical processes, variability, and outcomes, as well as what these topics can in turn teach us about broader social issues. Questions to be addressed in class will include the history of surgery, what is surgery, how are surgeons trained, how does surgical practice vary across cultures and time-periods, outcomes and impacts of surgery, the impacts of resource scarcity, and dangerous/unnecessary/life-saving surgeries. Students will engage in questions about the aesthetics of scars, physician and patient decision-making, and how patient background (race, gender, class, identity) impacts access, experience, and outcomes. Types of surgery to be explored will include, plastic surgery, cesarean section, fistulas, organ donation, among others.

This course will examine the interactions of culture and biology within sports. The anthropology of sports can help us gain valuable insights into broader social and cultural phenomena, the role of ritual in society, and illuminate how sports have been used to bring people together, but also to exclude people. We will begin with studying the evolutionary origins and non-human examples of play. We will then move into the prehistoric and historic foundations for sport. We will also discuss how people change their bodies, in good ways and dangerous ways, for a greater chance at success, and how those bodies are often more harshly judged by society. Finally, we will explore the ways in which contemporary sporting and fan practices are culturally ordered and/or challenge social norms. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we will pay special attention to questions of gender, race, genetics, nationality, health, equality, and human variation. In addition, students will be encouraged to think critically about their own sporting experiences, both as active participants and as fans, and how sports impact their lives.

What does it mean to be Korean? How are definitions of Korea and “Koreanness” affected by recent waves of globalization and migration? This course investigates the social construction of race and nationhood within the context of South Korea. While many believe South Korea to be ethnically and racially homogeneous, the country has increasingly opened up its borders to foreign migration to offset the adverse impact of its rapidly aging society. More than one in ten marriages in South Korea involves a foreign-born person today, and growing numbers of racially mixed people consider themselves Korean. In addition, members of the Korean diaspora have started to “return” to their country of origin in recent years, only to find that they are marginalized because of their culturally different backgrounds. This course introduces students to sociological theories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood by analyzing how South Koreans define self and Other. We will learn how racial and ethnic identities continue to evolve as the contexts of migration change. We will also learn why it is difficult for individuals of particular backgrounds to find a sense of belonging in the societies in which they live and work.

This course examines the origins, causes, environmental settings and cultural factors within which natural selective forces converged throughout human evolution to create the human infant, one of the most vulnerable, slowest developing, and energetically demanding mammal infants of all. We consider who the caregivers are, and how and why they might "share care" which was needed to keep our highly vulnerable infants and children alive, and to nurture them throughout their exceedingly long childhoods. Specifically, we trace the origins of modern parenting systems from their mammalian base paying especial attention to the transaction between infant care practices themselves and how they relate to, if not depend on, the emergence of other characteristics that define us as human. These include bipedalism, empathy, learning, food sharing, and a "theory of mind". Here we will examine not only the unique roles that mothers and fathers and other important caregivers (allomothers) play but the underlying biology that both inclines that care but also responds to it biologically. We also emphasize the manner in which social values, ideologies, cultural expectations, social roles, and economic pressures assert critical influences on caregiver physiology and behavior.

When diseases emerge in Africa, the media presents a relentless tide of infection, with AIDS and Ebola, for example, claiming thousands of hapless victims of “backward” thinking and rejection of western medicine. Western journalists express disbelief that people suffer and die because they refuse to take appropriate steps to protect themselves, whether it is taking the sick to the hospital, or wearing condoms to avoid contracting HIV. We are led to ask why treatable or even preventable diseases are claiming so many African lives. Why does popular thinking about health and disease on the African continent appear to be impervious to biomedical models? This class uses an anthropological perspective to look beyond the simple popular and medical answers to questions of sickness to examine the social and political frameworks that inform people’s understandings of the health of their bodies and communities. This course will introduce students to cultural perspectives on disease through an investigation of how people around the continent understand and experience illness, and why what appears to be simple medical knowledge is anything but simple when it is understood in its social and political context. We will investigate the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa, examine why polio persisted in Nigeria, and compare how the HIV epidemics unfolded in South Africa and Uganda. In addition to infectious diseases, we will ask questions about the social experience of disability in Africa, investigate hospital care, and draw comparisons with western perspectives.

This course presents an introduction to the socio-technical study of knowledge infrastructures in the context of a rising quest for environmental sustainability. It examines the critical role of data in supporting scientific research, environmental action, and sustainability efforts. The goal is to critically discuss the central place of data in a changing world where the proliferation of new digital technologies supports new capabilities for sensing, sharing, processing, and visualizing rapidly accelerating environmental change. This course will bring forward the interconnected technical, cultural, historical, political, and social efforts that make environmental data possible. Applying socio-technical lenses to environmental data, we will go through the different stages of an environmental data workflow, all the way from data collection to visualization and reporting. The course will pay special attention to the local and global entities, past and present, that environmental data supports. We will focus on the implications of digital technologies for participatory and citizen sciences, open data, and data governance in the environmental space. Leaning on these critical tools, we will revise ongoing environmental struggles and data-fueled sustainability efforts to assess the implications of data in ongoing and future attempts to restore and reinvent the integrity of our planet and its life-supporting systems. The course will resort to practical examples using environmental datasets and a network of socio-environmental practitioners who will present selected topics throughout the semester.

What are the cultures of medicine? How does belief create possibilities for healing? How do cultural, social, and political forces shape experiences of illness? When can care be a form of violence? How can histories of oppression make you sick? Medical anthropology is an expansive field of research concerned with the study of medicine, affliction, and healing in historical and cultural context. This course provides an introduction to topics in medical anthropology, from classical texts on belief, illness experience, and structural violence to contemporary work on disability, care, and critical global health. Over the course of the semester, students will gain experience in methods, critical thinking, independent research, and public communication as we collectively explore what medical anthropology can contribute to the urgent health challenges that we face in the contemporary world today.

In a 1971 interview, Bruce Lee said "Martial arts has a very very deep meaning as far as my life is concerned because as an actor, as a martial artist, as a human being - all these I have learned from martial arts." By merging multiple aspects of human identity, artistic expression, and cultural activity, martial arts have a unique ability to access the human imagination. From Hong Kong cinemas, to Black Belt magazines and black light posters, to disco songs and shopping mall kiosks for ninja equipment, martial arts are intertwined with popular culture. After more than a half century of association with aesthetic violence, mystical secrets, and Orientalist mystique, the cultural phenomenon of martial arts lends itself to anthropological analysis and critique. This course synthesizes the global dissemination of martial arts with the anthropology of media and symbolic violence. By tracking the proliferation of the martial arts in popular culture, from muay thai action films to karate tournament supply catalogues and dojo iconography, students can simultaneously explore these arts' cultural origins. We will examine these origins in a range of styles from kung fu in China, to jujitsu in Japan, kali/escrima in the Philippines, pencak silat in Indonesia, and savate in France. In this way, the course crafts informative linkages between the cultural variations of martial arts, and their global influence in popular consciousness.

What are the contributions of anthropology to the study of contemporary science and technology? In this course, we will respond to this question by examining the history of anthropological studies of the technosciences from the post-war period to the present. We will cover the history of ethnographic engagements with the biological and natural sciences, the debates about the nature of knowledge production, and the contemporary studies of computing and engineering with a focus on Artificial Intelligence. We will organize the class as a seminar, so be prepared to engage in close readings of the material and workshopping a research project of your own.

This course will serve as an introduction to the field of international development, with particular focus on the various disciplines that have contributed to and shaped the development discourse over the past eight decades. Readings and lectures will draw from economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, environmental and technological sciences, public health and epidemiology, area studies, ethnic studies, and gender studies. A large component of this course will focus on in-class discussions and presentations that engage the broader debates within development studies to critically evaluate the development discourse/process, as well as understand emerging critiques of international development. Required course work will include group or individual student projects that critically investigate ongoing development issues and propose engaged solutions that include restoration and social justice and human dignity.

How is race embodied and how are bodies racialized? How do gender, sexuality, class, size, perceived beauty, and ability mutually influence embodiment? This course considers anthropological and historical studies of the body, with a critical focus on Blackness. We investigate how Black human bodies are othered, valued, dehumanized, and experienced, across time and space, with a particular focus on the United States. Euro-American philosophies have constructed Black people as transgressive, in a variety of ways, and all these ideas have been inscribed on and through their physical bodies. This normative discourse shapes how Black people interact with the social world, so we will discuss, challenge, and critique these narratives and also consider how the body can be used as a site of resistance. We will engage topics like athletic training, bodily modification and perceptions of beauty, biomedical technologies, labor, disability, and illness, through texts like academic writing, music, podcasts, essays, news media, and social media. Overall, this class demonstrates how bodies are key sites for understanding politics, power, social hierarchies, economics, and social change in our contemporary world.

How and why do some of the roads taken by migrants (including refugees) lead to Rome and Italy? What are the challenges faced by migrants upon their arrival, and on their path to citizenship? How does civil society intervene to mitigate those challenges, and to facilitate mutual integration and engagement? What are the distinctive features of Roman lay and Catholic approaches to migration? The course addresses such questions, building on contemporary Rome both as a compelling case study and as a gateway to the causes, lived experiences, and consequences of global migrations. Migrants' reception and integration happens at the local level, and in interaction with residents and existing communities. Attention to the realities of the host civil society is therefore fundamental: migration is not an issue that can simply be delegated to experts, bureaucrats, and politicians. Students investigate how the experience of the city is at the same time the experience of globalization, embodied in older and new residents' everyday life in the built environment; and they appreciate situated social engagement and its potentialities.

What is college? How do students experience it? How is it structured? How does it contribute to the development of adulthood or, possibly, to the extension of childhood? How do different types of colleges differ, and how does higher education vary around the world? We’ll investigate the goals of college, student life, learning, athletics, entertainment, social and racial inequality, gender and sexuality, mental health and wellbeing, drawing on published research, our own experiences, and our own research findings.

In the anthropological study of religion, does having a religious background benefit a researcher or does it introduce bias? Where does theology belong in the anthropology of religion, and what might the two learn from each other? Can one critically study a faith and live it at the same time? This course addresses these questions through a review of the lives and work of prominent anthropologists who identified as Catholic and drew inspiration from their Catholic faith. In examining how these anthropologists shaped the discipline, students will learn about the wide breadth of the anthropological study of religion, an endeavor that stretches from the origins of our species to the high-tech world in which we now live. This disciplinary survey will also lead to questions of how, through these particular anthropologists, insights from the anthropology of religion intersect, complicate, and enrich the Catholic intellectual tradition.

This course offers an ethnographically grounded understanding of contemporary European cultures and societies. We start by presenting a brief history of the idea of Europe. Then, we define its geographical focus: where are the boundaries of Europe? Are Israel and Turkey part of Europe? Who gets to decide? Are there European Muslims? We will then read recent works focusing on selected regions and on diverse urban populations. We will explore and discuss socio-cultural facets of European everyday life; trends and challenges in technology, the environment, popular culture, demography, and politics; and the diversity of urban/rural, north/south, and more generally intra-European ways of life. The course will be of interest to students of contemporary global issues, and in particular to students who intend to spend a semester in Europe; are back from the field; or intend to write a related senior thesis.

Understanding religious communities and their values are crucial to understanding human societies and global affairs. One particular group of interpreters of Islam, namely the traditional or orthodox religious scholars called the ulama and their institutions, are often hidden from contemporary accounts of Islam when in fact they are critical players. This course will provide historical contexts in order to explore how traditional Muslims navigate the discourses of modernity and how they resist it. We will read original texts in translation and secondary sources of descriptions of representatives of the orthodox tradition in regions of Asia, the Middle East and in the West. The course will pay particular attention to the institutions of learning known as madrasas, jami` and hawzas. Of course, the orthodox views are challenged by other Muslims and some of those debates will also be channeled in the class while the focus will remain on the Ulama. The course aims to equip students with analytical skills and the resources to understand how religious ideas impact religious communities and global affairs.

What are cities, and how do they work? How do present (and how will future) societies respond to the challenges of pollution, sustainable development, exploitation of natural resources, equal access to infrastructure, education and welfare, human rights, food production and distribution, and energy consumption? This course welcomes students to reflect on these questions and respond to these challenges through the emerging field of urban ethics. Through lectures and readings, we will ask: 1.) Can we define an “ancient urban ethics?" 2.) Which disciplines are involved in urban ethics, and what strategies—from environmental to social ethics—should inform it? 3.) What policies, planning documents, and environmental and information technologies from the past and present can we avail from around the world to understand urban ethics? To ground our discussions, we will read excerpts from classical literature, philosophy, and cross-disciplinary works. We will also engage resources including maps, drawings, art, photographs, and videos. As we will discover through discussion and participation, urban ethics is a field in which everyone is involved.

This introductory course uses popular film as a primary text/medium to explore fundamental questions in the academic study of religion. In particular, we will be concerned with the ways that faith, spirituality, religion and religious experience are constituted and defined on film as well as through film viewing. Emphasis will be placed on film's reflecting African Diaspora culture and the inclusion of religions outside of the Judeo-Christian canon for context and comparison. In discussing films from across a range of subjects and genres, we will engage in the work of mythical, theological and ideological criticism, while examining the nature, function, and value of religion and religious experience. We will also consider significant writers and traditions in the field of Diaspora Religions and develop the analytical and interpretive skills of the discipline. Given the depth and breadth of religious orthodoxies and faith-based practices existent throughout the Diaspora, students will be exposed to a variety of film genres including silent films, anime, documentary, drama, biography, comedy and horror. Based on availability, and the student cohort's familiarity or lack of material the scheduled films will include twelve to fifteen selections from the lists below. Weekly readings, writing assignments, and screening sessions are required.

In 1969 Nina Simone and Weldon Irvine wrote the anthem, To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Yet too often, to be Black has been seen or depicted as a predator, a thug, a fetish, or a threat. What are the implicit and explicit messages present in plain sight that contribute to how Blackness and Black people have been defined? This course critically engages with the “longue durée” of film narratives where Blackness is displayed or demeaned, and where the politics of identity, or its discrimination is present or foundational to the arc of a narrative. Relevant critical literature and material topical to the films themselves will complement the visual media, allowing for the potential to subtly illuminate aspects of the human experience, ritual practice, and socio-cultural, religious, or gendered behaviors. Attention will be given to cross-cultural mores, the distinction of communication modes, and references to ethnicity, race, class, and gender as relates to the cultures depicted in each film. This course has a co-req associated with it. You must register for both to be in the course.

Anthropology is a social science with a holistic perspective on the human condition. It attempts to understand any aspect of humanity in the broadest sense anywhere and anytime. Anthropological perspectives can be used to speculate on what it meant to be human in the distant past, or what it may mean in the far distant future. While we cannot travel into the past, future, or an alternative universe to visit other societies or contact alien civilizations, we can imagine what those trips would be like. In our own culture, science fiction has moved from a fringe literature to an essential part of modern art and entertainment because it allows us to imagine alternate realities, and to speculate about the past, present and future as way to learn about ourselves and others. This class will introduce you to the basic principles of anthropology as a social science using science fiction text and video to illustrate various anthropological principles. You will learn how to critically evaluate anthropology's diverse applications and how they are reflected in popular culture (sometimes accurately and sometimes not). You will also sharpen your writing skills by using anthropological principles to critique science fiction.

This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies. Our concern will be with science and technology (including medicine) as social and historical, i.e., as human, phenomena. We shall examine the divergent roots of contemporary science and technology, and the similarities and (sometimes surprising) differences in their methods and goals. The central theme of the course will be the ways in which science and technology interact with other aspects of society, including the effects of technical and theoretical innovation in bringing about social change, and the social shaping of science and technology themselves by cultural, economic and political forces. Because science/society interactions so frequently lead to public controversy and conflict, we shall also explore what resources are available to mediate such conflicts in an avowedly democratic society.

This course seeks to explore connections between environment and culture change by introducing students to the diversity of cultures living in the Southwest. We begin by learning about indigenous people living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Cochiti, Acoma), Navajo, Ute, and Tohono O’odham using ethnography and contemporary native histories. We will then travel back in time to learn about the complex histories of these people, particularly the ancestral Pueblo, to places like Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, the Mimbres Valley, and the Phoenix Basin. Our explorations will cover from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to the 13th century Migrations to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. We will then bring this discussion full circle to today. Along the way, we will explore the impact of large-scale, long-term processes such as the adoption of agriculture, village formation, religious change, migration, and warfare on the rich historical landscape of the Southwest.

This course will examine the Latino experience in the United States, including the historical, cultural, and political foundations of Latino life. We will approach these topics comparatively, thus attention will be given to the various experiences of a multiplicity of Latino groups in the United States.

Introduction to Criminology provides students with an overview of the sociological study of law making, law breaking and the resulting social responses. In this class we not only look at a variety of crimes, but we also discuss the varying methods sociologists use to collect, interpret and evaluate data, as well as how we theorize about crime and punishment. We address questions such as "Why are some people or groups labeled as criminal, while others are not?" "Do laws in both their construction and enforcement serve everyone's interests equally?" "How can the communities in which people are embedded be considered as criminogenic?" "How are poverty, race, gender and other social factors related to crime?"

This course examines representations of race, ethnicity, and ideology in the American cinema through a sociological lens. We will focus on understanding how film reflects and directs prevailing cultural norms and attitudes surrounding racial and ethnic relations. One goal is to uncover how racial and ethnic relations are reified on the silver screen through storytelling techniques such as narrative, style, aesthetics, and mise en scène. We will analyze the sociological context of each film to better understand the evolution of cinematic representations of race and ethnicity and what they mean for race relations and inequality in the broader society. This course will cover the American cinematic treatment of Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Italian Americans through feature length screenings and clips of particularly poignant scenes.

This once weekly lab session is a mandatory requirement for students enrolled in the Design Thinking course. These sessions focus on practical application of the topics and materials presented in class with students working in teams to employ techniques and methodology on assigned projects. This hands-on lab will having students exploring the research, brainstorming, ideation, iterative prototyping and presentation techniques that lead to creative innovation and disruptive breakthroughs applicable to students of any discipline.

Humans deeply affect their social and natural worlds. Their impact reverberates across time and space making it difficult to understand the long-term ramifications of our daily decisions and actions. This seminar enhances our understanding of the complex web of relationships between humans, resources, and climate by exploring the concepts of sustainability and collapse from an anthropological perspective. Key questions guiding this exploration include: What do we mean by sustainability? What is it that want to sustain? How can societies be "sustained" when we know societal collapses happen time and again? Through readings, media, debates, and analysis, we will learn how our culture shapes and promotes both sustainability and collapse and assess whether they can be attained or prevent. And, we will all gain a better understanding of our place in the world around us.

Organized violence between human communities is one of the unfortunate realities of human existence, and its causes and consequences have consequently been of great interest. Is war an inevitable outcome of human nature, or the result of specific social, historical, and environmental circumstances? Archaeology is uniquely positioned to provide concrete insights into the history of human violence through study of its direct material correlates, including traumatic injuries on skeletons, fortified settlements, weaponry, and iconography. However, the archaeological record also documents the impacts of violence (reduced nutritional status and health, evidence for enslavement, cannibalism, and population decline) and can provide insights into why war occurred through examination of environment, population, and social conditions. In this course, we will explore what the archaeological record tells us about violence, human nature, and the veracity of claims for either a more violent or more peaceful past. We will examine theoretical models of war, anthropological studies of conflict, and archaeological case studies of both violent and peaceful times to understand the role that organized violence has played in human history and evolution.

Together with the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean have been among the most influential exporters of music globally since the early 20th century. This course traces these processes of musical production and consumption. Students will be introduced to important historical and stylistic musical developments as we survey various styles and genres with attention to their cultural significance - including the corrido (Mexican ballad), Caribbean-derived salsa, and cumbia, among others. Our approach, such that we are dealing with music-cultures, is at once anthropological and ethnomusicological. In order we achieve our aims, the course is organized along two axes: one chronological (so to speak), the other conceptual, neither complete. The chronological portion will allow us to survey various genres and ensembles of musical production. We dovetail this effort with a focus on important themes and concepts that aid in understanding the present and historical conditions of the terrain where performance, identity, race-ethnicity, gender, transnationalism, and commoditized publics intersect.

A cultural tour of the French provinces through a historical, artistic, and gastronomic approach. Readings at an intermediate level will help define the identity of each region, as well as their contribution to the national mosaic known as the hexagonal France of today.

This course studies and applies key concepts of linguistic anthropology as studied by people like Dell Hymes and Edward T. Hall and the University of Chicago. The course has lectures (CMs) and discussion sections (TDs) where we have learned about proxemics and cultural dimensions related to human communication. The course is evaluated through a midterm (taken in March) and a final research dossier, where me and two other group mates assume the position of ethnographers and analysts to present findings on a community of our choosing. We have selected the local train station as our object of study and meet with our discussion group where we present our progress on the project since our last meeting time. The grading scale is out of 20 points, as is the case for the french schooling system.

This course and associated field-trips are designed to introduce the student to the Settlement History and Anthropology of Ireland and the ways in which these have been driven and influenced by both the underlying geology of the island and the combination of physical and human geography left by preceding waves of settlement. The course will take a chronological approach, analysing and interrogating the six recorded migrations/invasions into Ireland since the Mesolithic (see summary of lectures below). The geological and glacial geography of the country had a profound impact on the extent and density of these settlements and their impacts will be woven into the lectures and field trips. Three of the recognised migrations into Ireland date from the Prehistoric Era and must be explored through the lenses of geology, geography, palaeobotany and archaeology while the remainder date from the Medieval period onwards, culminating in the Plantations of Ulster in the early 17th Century by Scottish and English settlers and can also be explored through the conflicting lenses of contemporary historical sources.

Archaeology is the discipline of things. This module explores how archaeologists think about material culture and things, and how they reconstruct how people made, used and discarded objects in the past. It provides students, through lectures and hands on experience, with an understanding of how archaeologists work with things.

This course looks at the diverse cultural language of food in Mexico, highlighting the ways that the food culture has been preserved since prehispanic times using the same tools and ingredients. It focuses on the importance of food in Mexican culture throughout history and also the ways that food differs from region to region and why that is. Further description of the class can be found in the syllabus.

The course aims to deliver a conceptual framework on cultural heritage, from a theoretical point of view and from the application of national and international legislation, to the reality of the expressions present in Chile today.

The Roman Empire (lasting from the 1st until, arguably, the 5th century CE) extended, at its territorial peak, from the Welsh coastline as far as the Euphrates and from Scotland to North Africa. It achieved cultural and political unification on an unprecedented scale. Its military might and administrative rigour enabled a highly-structured system of economic exploitation and cultural appropriation throughout its territorial reach. The Roman Empire covers one of the most important and iconic periods of European, North African and Middle Eastern history. This module moves thematically and chronologically from the Pax Romana established by Augustus to the rise of imperial cities in Africa under Septimius Severus. Themes of peace, triumph and conflict will be viewed through a series of core-and-periphery test cases. Themes will include Augustan Peace, The Wars in Judaea, The Spoils of Territorial Expansion under Trajan (looking at Dacia and Parthia), Territorial Consolidation under Hadrian (exploring Rome and Britain) and the Art of Ruling in Absentia (as exemplified by Marcus Aurelius¿ reign on the Danube). Students will analyse the Roman conceptualisation of events taking place on the fringe of empire and the nature of their portrayal at the administrative core in terms of Roman imperial expansion and later contraction and collapse. Imperial propaganda will be investigated through a reading of the most famous imperial architectural designs in Rome and tested against archaeological evidence for daily life in the related provinces.

This class will focus on how to understand traditional Taijiquan. Both philosophical and practical perspectives will be discussed and, hopefully, experienced through your own body.

This course will examine how cultural heritage calls a growing concern in China and why it is becoming a new social phenomenon. The course will discuss the conservation, management, uses, and social-political issues of China's cultural heritage.

This course is an introduction to the social and cultural complexity of Southeast Asia (SEA) region. This can be mapped as a part on mainland Southeast Asia includes the countries of Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia. Island Southeast Asia includes Indonesia, The Philippines, Brunei, and Timor-Leste. The course is taught as a seminar and discussions will organized around assigned readings and guest speakers from individual countries. The seminar will begin with historical background of the region, readings on the history of anthropology in the region, before moving onto strictly ethnographic accounts of individual countries. These cover belief systems, marriage and family, industrialization and urbanization, politics and government, and economic change. In addition to providing a broad and comparative survey of "traditional" Southeast Asia, the course will place special emphasis on the intellectual and practical challenges associated with modernization and development, highlighting the ways different Southeast Asian nations contend with the forces of globalization. The principle readings are drawn from a multidisciplinary range of fields covering anthropology, art, economics, geography, history, literature, and political science. No prior knowledge of Southeast Asia is expected.

What is Social Media? We all use it, some of us will even work to "make" the next platform, but to what extent do we really "get" it? How has social media changed the cultures that we live in? How do different cultures around the world use social media differently? What are some of the consequences of the rise of social media for the societies we live within? This course teaches students about the many ways in which social media interactions have become a central element in the everyday lives of humans across the globe in the 21st Century. The course is arranged around a series of readings and watchings, lectures introducing anthropological tools for understanding them and for sparking discussions, and a set of projects that lead students to get their hands dirty, experiencing and analyzing the real "e-world" of social media.

A sociological analysis of society often focuses on how that society is imagined, constructed and operationalized through the establishment and adoption of certain norms and ideologies which can also be seen in extreme terms as ideals. While ideals are often designed to guide action, they do not always create the intended effect in a homogenous fashion. As a result, they are challenged, and their inadequacies and impossible achievements are laid bare. In this module, we will approach the study of Singapore society with these concerns in mind. Our approach will subject some salient institutions of Singapore society to sociological inquiry and critique. We will use sociological perspectives to reflect on some taken-for-granted understandings of Singapore society that you may be familiar with, and subject them to sociological inquiry and debate. We will aim to do this through dialoguing with the readings, lectures and tutorial materials. We hope that you will be able to appreciate the diverse social, political, historical processes and legacies, problems and contradictions that have constructed Singapore society.

The course is an in-depth overview of qualitative research in the social sciences. This will involve both theoretical and practical exercises on the subject.

This is a foundational sociology course. As such, it will cover theory, phenomenons, and practical research from past to present.

The course will confront topics ranging from migration to religious minorities - including along the way areas of study such as economics, public health, and the environment. All of this will be analyzed from a perspective of human rights and dignity.

Italy's deep-rooted network of local food knowledge is an excellent example for students to understand what food culture is, how food scenarios changed with industrialization, and how they are evolving further today. This course presents students with the basic tools necessary for better understanding Italian food culture. Its broad perspective encompasses traditional farming and processing techniques, the industrial and global food economy and changing consumption habits.

Students will here engage several of the major questions we find in the contemporary literature. Some of these questions, dealing also with contemporary philosophy of mind, include personal identity and animalism, reductionism-physicalism, animal communication-language, ; metaphysics and human evolution; metaphysics of sex/gender; issues concerning human death; and mind-computer problems. Students will construct Thomistic frameworks and strategies for use in successful dialogue with some of the contemporary thinkers working in these areas.

Why do you behave and believe the way you do? How do people across the room or the globe think and act similarly or differently from you? How do we encounter these similarities and differences in our everyday lives, and what can we make out of them? Social and cultural anthropology asks what makes us human by exploring the similarities and differences among living societies and cultures. Anthropology is not just a collection of fixed theories and ideas; it also provides a way to interpret the world and imagine otherwise. Given the vast scope of its inquiry, anthropological thinking can be applied to a wide array of topics¿ from something as large as climate change and global migration to something as intimate as religious belief or sexual desire. Covering a diverse array of themes, this class offers a general introduction to the field of social and cultural anthropology. Through lectures as well as various activities (e.g., group discussions, interview assignment, etc.), we will examine key terms, ideas, and approaches in the discipline. We will focus especially on how knowledge is produced, such as the question of ethics and positionality in producing anthropological knowledge, the promise and the limitation of ¿objective¿ knowledge, and anthropology¿s role in shaping ideas of culture, race, gender, and science in the contemporary world. Various in-class and take-home activities will be introduced to apply our knowledge to the surrounding environment. Overall, this course aims to help you start developing anthropological perspectives and raise meaningful questions about the world we live in in an ethical and responsible way.

This course introduces the history and aesthetics of the visual arts in the West from ancient times to the early 20th century, focusing on developments in painting from the Renaissance (1400s) to the early 20th century that have come to define what is generally recognized as the Western tradition.

The aim of the course is one of encouraging students to view the rural as a combination of forces that interact within and between different systems to produce the complex environment in which we live.

This module explores the archaeology of the historically-documented past. It starts with the rise of Christianity in medieval Europe, passes through the eras of the Black Death, the discovery of the New World, and the Industrial Revolution, and ends with globalisation in the twenty-first century. Its case-studies are drawn from all corners of the world, mainly Ireland, Britain and the Americas. The module addresses specifically how the disciplines of Archaeology and History work together in helping us map and understand the development of the modern world.

This course critically examines the archaeology of Ireland during the high medieval period from c.1100 until the second half of the 14th century. The background to the coming of the Anglo-Normans to Ireland in 1169 and the impact they had on the landscape are discussed in depth in the first part of the course. Themes for this section of the module will include the role of castles, the manorial economy, trade, the foundation of villages, rural boroughs and towns by mostly English immigrants and the growth of certain cities. Dispersed settlement in Anglo-Norman parts of eastern Ireland will also be explored. In particular, in the first part of the course, the interplay between castle, town and countryside in Anglo-Norman Ireland is examined in detail.

This course focuses on cultural diversity in Mexico, highlighting the different food cultures, artistic cultures, indigenous populations, linguistic variation, and the historical roots of this diversity. The course also has a special focus on the ways to preserve and appreciate this cultural diversity. Another formal explanation of the course can be found in the syllabus.

This course looks at the diverse cultural language of food in Mexico, highlighting the ways that the food culture has been preserved since prehispanic times using the same tools and ingredients. It focuses on the importance of food in Mexican culture throughout history and also the ways that food differs from region to region and why that is. Further description of the class can be found in the syllabus.

Analyze the complex social reality experienced by specific vulnerable populations, through the study of their context, in order to identify problems and opportunities for intervention. Propose collaborative intervention alternatives that respond to a specific need, through the application of community intervention methodologies, to promote the improvement of the living conditions of a community or group and promote the construction of a more just, free and supportive society.

Perth course number ANTH 2224 - This unit is offered in partnership with the Berndt Museum of Anthropology and the School of Indigenous Studies. It introduces students to the anthropology of Australian Aboriginal visual art, focusing on various anthropological approaches to understanding the productions of individual artists within their respective socio-cultural contexts. Frameworks derived from the sub-disciplines of visual anthropology, cultural anthropology, the new museology and the anthropology of art provide analytical structure for approaching an understanding of Australian Aboriginal art within the broader Australian post-colonial setting. Several local Aboriginal artists and commentators participate in the unit as guest lecturers. Topics addressed may include rock art as a living tradition; regional perspectives and stylistic values; art and the transmission of culture; art and its relationship to land; cultural creativity and the maintenance of religious knowledge; art and the emergence of new identities; respecting cultural values; and appropriation and copyright. Perth course ANTH 2902: This unit introduces students to the anthropology of Australian Aboriginal visual art, focusing on various anthropological approaches to understanding the productions of individual artists within their respective sociocultural contexts. Frameworks derived from the sub-disciplines of visual anthropology, cultural anthropology, and the anthropology of art provide analytical structure for approaching an understanding of Australian Aboriginal art within the broader Australian postcolonial setting. Topics addressed may include art and its relationship to place; cultural creativity and the maintenance of religious knowledge; color and aesthetics; contemporary art; regional perspectives and stylistic values; appropriation, copyright and intellectual property. Students are able to (1) demonstrate an understanding of key concepts within the anthropology/sociology of art and Aboriginal art in particular; (2) demonstrate understanding of analytical approaches to an anthropology of art; (3) demonstrate an ability to understand the role of art in the transmission and maintenance of cultural knowledge and values and the emergence of new ideas, and apply this insight to the role of art as a marker of cultural process; (4) demonstrate an ability to understand the nature and characteristics of regional perspectives and stylistic values and apply this insight to the categorization of styles in Aboriginal art; and (5) demonstrate an ability to communicate anthropological and sociological ideas, principles and knowledge to specialist and non-specialist audiences using a range of formats (written, oral, visual etc.), and to understand issues of appropriation, copyright and intellectual property as these pertain to Australian Aboriginal art.

Taught as ANHB 2215 - 'Biological Anthropology: Human Adaptation and Variation' at a host institution. Biological anthropology is concerned with the nature of variation and the ways in which the biology and behaviour of humans are influenced by genetic, developmental, ecological and cultural factors. This unit looks at human variation in contemporary populations from the perspective of evolutionary ecology. It focuses on ecological principles as applied to human populations, the emergence of adaptations during the process of gene-environment interaction during development, and the interplay of cultural and biological factors in human behaviour. Topics covered include principles of individual and kin selection, principles of human ecology, genetic sources of variation (beyond mutation), evolution of human development, reproductive and parental investment strategies, biological approach to culture, and evolutionary and developmental perspectives on the human life cycle.

Taught as ARCY 1001 - 'Discoveries in Archaeology' at a host institution. By discussing in historical sequence some of the great discoveries in archaeology, this unit introduces the techniques and concepts that archaeologists use to construct the past and its relationship to the contemporary world. Students learn how artefacts, food remains and other evidence for human behaviour is identified, dated, analysed and interpreted to find out about the past. The unit uses examples from different time periods and regions such as Homer's Troy, ancient mummies and African sites of humans' earliest ancestors to learn how to think like an archaeologist.

Content The unit focuses on how contemporary socio-economic, cultural and political transformations in the Asian region intersect with forms and practices of popular culture. Specifically, it seeks to highlight the relevance of popular culture as a lens through which to analyse social, cultural, political and economic change, to understand how globalisation, inter- and intra-regional integration, urbanisation, consumerism, and shifts in how gender and sexual identities are articulated across societies in East and Southeast Asia. The unit also considers globalisation and lobal discontinuities in the context of the production, circulation and consumption of popular culture both from the West to Asia, and increasingly from Asia to the rest of the world. The unit examines these issues with reference to various spaces and practices of popular culture including film, television, and popular music; fan cultures and social media; fashion and beauty cultures; postcolonialism and nationalism; and urban design and street culture. The unit can be counted towards a major in either Anthropology or Asian Studies. Assessment Typically this unit is assessed in the following ways: (1) tutorial participation; (2) tutorial assignment; (3) essay; and (4) examination. Further information is available in the unit outline. Supplementary assessment is not available in this unit except in the case of a bachelor's pass degree student who has obtained a mark of 45 to 49 overall and is currently enrolled in this unit, and it is the only remaining unit that the student must pass in order to complete their course. Unit Coordinator(s) Associate Professor Joanna Elfving-Hwang and Associate Professor Romit Dasgupta Unit rules Prerequisites: any Level 1 ANTH, ASIA, JAPN, CHIN, KORE or INDO unit Incompatibility: SOCS2216 Popular Culture in Asia Contact hours lectures: 20 hours; tutorials: 9 hours

This unit examines the historical, political and social processes of colonization in Australia with a specific focus on four distinct northern areas of Western Australia - the Kimberley, Pilbara, Murchison and Gascoyne regions.

This unit aims to introduce students to anthropological and sociological perspectives on human engagements with the natural environment. It draws on case material from societies around the world to illustrate a variety of environmental beliefs and practices. The unit familiarises students with the main theoretical currents in environmental anthropology and provides them with a selection of frameworks for thinking about human interactions with nature. It encourages students to think analytically about the values and knowledge that human communities, urban and rural, hold about landscapes, plants and animals. The unit is relevant to students from a range of disciplines including agriculture and the environmental sciences. It provides students with insights into the range of skills and background knowledge necessary for applying anthropological training to environment-related research topics.

This unit aims to introduce students to anthropological and sociological perspectives on human engagements with the natural environment. It draws on case material from societies around the world to illustrate a variety of environmental beliefs and practices. The unit familiarises students with the main theoretical currents in environmental anthropology and provides them with a selection of frameworks for thinking about human interactions with nature. It encourages students to think analytically about the values and knowledge that human communities, urban and rural, hold about landscapes, plants and animals. The unit is relevant to students from a range of disciplines including agriculture and the environmental sciences. It provides students with insights into the range of skills and background knowledge necessary for applying anthropological training to environment-related research topics.

LING 10010 Language Use and Communication at UCD; This module introduces the area of linguistics that deals with language use in social and cultural contexts (Sociolinguistics). It examines how language is used and perceived in relation to a number of social and cultural variables including the following: regional and social variation, gender differences, bilingual and multilingual settings, language choice, languages in contact, language change, language and thought, and language attitudes and stereotypes.It investigates how language is used and manipulated to achieve desired effects in communication, taking into consideration the medium of delivery, the setting, the nature of the audience. This module forms part of the BA programme for Linguistics. HT The objectives of the course are for communicative capacity building through humanities knowledge and for enrichment of values and perspectives corresponding to the mission and vision of UST, rather than for enhancement of knowledge in specific branch of humanities. Values explored in this course will be drawn from those closely related to the mission and vision of UST like humanistic concerns of others and the environment, respect of differences and justice, communicative sensitivity, complexity of humanity, potential bias and fallacy in popular perceptions, values, and stereotyping, among others. The humanities disciplinary approaches will be drawn from history, philosophy, literature, anthropology, linguistics and art. The course is offered in separate sections, each has its specific values and approach identified by the teacher.

This unit examines the historical, political and social processes of colonization in Australia with a specific focus on four distinct northern areas of Western Australia, the Kimberley, Pilbara, Murchison and Gascoyne regions. The unit illustrates the global importance of these areas in terms of industry and tourism and how these often compete with obligations to land from local Aboriginal groups.

This unit will engage with questions surrounding the role of heritage in society today. Contrary to popular imagination, the engagement with heritage is not about the past. It is fundamentally directed at the future. The study of heritage is about the preservation of the past for the future.

This unit explores physiology in respect to exercise. Topics covered include pulmonary ventilation, gas exchange and transport, as well as the cardiovascular system. The oxygen capacity of blood and blood flow during rest and exercise is also considered. Other topics include energy systems and how macronutrients contribute to energy during rest and exercise, with a focus on ATP production.

This unit aims to provide students with the basic knowledge and skills required to research and write life stories in a global and culturally diverse context. Through collaboration with the State Records Office of Western Australia and the State Library of Western Australia, which hold many relevant records and provide access to users, the unit will comprise a series of case studies including hands-on workshops, giving students work integrated and practice-led experience. Students explore both 1., how to do biographical research and write their own family history and/or a globally and culturally diverse biography, as well as 2., how to use these skills in producing other forms of history, including public history. Students are introduced to the relevant sources, information, and techniques employed by family historians in constructing genealogies, including oral interviews, historical records, and photographs, to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship of its members. Key themes are the exploration of global and historical processes of migration and identity-building through tracing family histories, from local to global.

This unit introduces students to the application of science to a key public area, solving crime. Students experience the contextual application of each discipline to problem solving in forensic case work.

Dublin is one of Europe's oldest and greatest historic cities, and one of the fastest-growing. This module explores that long history, from the late first millennium AD when Vikings began a formal process of settlement to the early 21st century when global migration patterns enlarged its population and enriched its culture. The module's focus is the city's history as represented in its layout and physical fabric, two concerns of interest to archaeologists. It is intended to inform students about Dublin's history, but it also to equip them to read the evidence for that history in the physical character of the city. The module has three main components: the medieval city (to 1600), the early modern city (1600-1800), the modern and contemporary city (1800 to the present).

This module explores stories passed down from Mesopotamia and other ancient near eastern/western Asian societies that were long in contact with the Mediterranean world. Lectures will situate the mythology and divine pantheon of Mesopotamia in its various historical, religious, political, and geographical contexts during the second and first millennia BC. During that time poets crafted literature that was still copied, retold, and even adapted under the rule of Hellenistic kings and even Roman emperors. These traditions reflect concern about the nature of the gods and humanity and what made us 'human'; they preserved traditions about the creation of the universe, of great floods and battles, of friendship, of love and loss, the qualities that make a leader great, as well as a few quests to the edges of the known world. As we explore each tradition we will delve into wider debates about the nature of myth, folklore, and story telling across cultures, as well as how stories might relate to longstanding rituals and local traditions or adaptation to shifting political realities. We will try to come to grips with the types of big questions that such stories asked of, and suggested about, their ancient audiences and why some of them still resonate today. You will gain experience analysing ancient texts, material culture, and iconography. In so doing, we will explore how the ancient Middle East was connected to and distinct from more familiar Greco-Roman mythical traditions, as well as how foreign rulers from the Mediterranean engaged with these traditions. There are no formal prerequisites, though a desire to explore the themes of love, war, life and death, who we are and where we come from, will be a plus!

ARCH 20170 Discovering Ireland: Landscape at UCD; This module, intended for students new to Ireland and so largely unfamiliar with Irish archaeology and indeed Irish history, shows how the Irish landscape can be read as a document in which is locked many clues about Irish identity, ancient, medieval and modern. The module is focused on the idea of heritage: cultural landscape as a key element of irish heritage. The module is based not on classroom work but on fieldtrips and Blackboard-presented materials, the logic being that the best way to understand landscape is to visit it, reading about it in advance and reading about it again having experienced it. Two fieldtrips are planned, both concentrating on ancient and medieval landscapes within reach of Dublin by coach (one is to west Wicklow and Carlow, and one to Meath, in both cases looking at megalithic tombs, medieval castles, and other archaeological treasures). Students will be provided with handbooks to faciliate their own (self-led) field-trips to parts of Dublin. The first field trip will be Saturday October 13 (full day), and the second will be October 21 (full day).

The city of London is a palimpsest, a place of many layers of time, archaeology and history. As an international global tourist venue London heritage is rich and textured with tales of events and stories of the many people who have dwelt within the ever changing fabric of the architecture and landscape of the urbanscape. Our engagement with the city as heritage will be the lens through which we might understand the complexities of human realities and how we can compassionately respond to them. This will include fieldtrips to museums, archives, galleries, the Thames foreshore, places of ritual as well as the quotidian heritage of the wonderfully evocative everyday life of past London inhabitants. Our coverage also includes contemporary resonances such as the current trend for the removal of statues and the politics of contemporary art installations. With research methods and writing techniques embedded into the course, our coverage will include discussion, debate, presentations, individual and small group work, critical thinking and lively conversation.

One of the most significant topographical features in the landscape are great rivers such as the Amazon, Nile and Ganges whose hydrology and liquid waters flow through vast landscapes and offer an insight into sustainability from fluid standpoints. The environment of these rivers is central to human existence for nourishment, agriculture, mobility and commerce, for example. In this course, we take the River Thames as a case study and chart the biography of the river from its earliest beginnings to the present day. We will draw upon a range of sources from ancient fish traps and trackways, the remains of ships and boats, foreshore archaeology, literature, material culture, museum collections, maps and the environmental water-worlds that ebb and flow with the ever-changing tides. Through classroom discussion and written work, you will develop the ability to articulate clear, well-supported, and engaging commentary on the role of rivers in our work on the environment and sustainable practice. The course will have a strong focus on group discussions with a mixture of lectures, excursions, and small group projects. By the end of the course students will be familiar with the environmental and social history of the River Thames and be aware of the potential a case-study approach offers to sustainable thinking.

At the end of the course, the student will learn tools and advanced methodological skills to critically analyze the main approaches to museum collections and patrimonialization processes. He/she will also be able to apply such skills in projects aimed at heritage valorization. He/she will employ an appropriate language to foster the public fruition of heritage.

This course examines the social and cultural transformations of contemporary China from 1949 to the present, with a focus on the tensions between modern development and sustainability. The goal is to engage in critical analysis of diverse topics, including urbanization, gender relations, and politics, through a combination of readings, film analysis, and research essays.

We will explore the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as they apply to Hong Kong, addressing issues of population and urbanization, materials resources, and human systems, as a way of understanding what is a sustainable future might look like.

This course studies how the built environment and visual culture of Rome provides for an examination of the city's religious, political, and social functions in order to give a deeper understanding of the local Roman population and its culture.

This is an introduction to the major cultures of the classical world, ca. 2000 BC to AD 400, with archaeology as the primary body of evidence. Following an introduction to the history of classical archaeology and current archaeological theory and methods, the course traces the development of society in the Mediterranean basin from the Minoans and Mycenaeans to the complex system of the Roman Empire. The course involves lectures and museum visits and integrates information from current archaeological projects.

This onsite course focuses on the vast transformations in the architecture and urban development of Rome 1870 to 1945, when the status of the city changed from papal capital to capital of Italy as a nation state. The course offers a view of the city that includes both grand public buildings, like the huge Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II at Piazza Venezia, and the Fascist era buildings of the EUR district, and investigation of particular urban characteristics. It will consider aspects like Romes experiments in social housing, the development of elite residential districts, the revelation of ancient monuments along wide new avenues of the Fascist era, as well as contemporary architectural additions to the citys monuments.

This course presents the landscape approach through interdisciplinary research and field work. The course provides an introduction to landscape-based study and its applications; a main goal is building an appreciation for landscape literacy.

Globalization has been economically transforming the world, as national borders become increasingly irrelevant before the global flow of money and goods. But globalization also has a great impact on cultures across the globe, as products from Coca-Cola to Facebook, and ideas from human rights to standards of beauty to ideologies of terrorism and viruses such as covid-19, intrude everywhere. This transforms the meanings of culture, as increasingly we no longer belong to a society based in a certain place, but to a global society, and a global cultural supermarket. This course examines how globalization has been transforming the meanings of culture in today's world.

This module focuses on the everyday experiences of children and young people on a local and global scale. Emphasis is placed on both traditional and non-traditional concepts of place and space and how these leave an impact on children and their development.

This course is an introduction to the prehistoric communities who inhabited Ireland, Europe and Western Asia from about 150,000 BC to AD 400. Archaeologists divide this long period of time into the Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age), Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), Neolithic (New Stone Age), Bronze Age and Iron Age. We begin with the earliest modern human inhabitants of Europe and Western Asia, their hunter-gatherer way of life, their art and their relationship to the Neanderthal communities who preceded them. We look at evidence for the first hunter-gatherers who settled in Ireland and later the settlements and rituals of the first communities to develop agriculture and build megalithic tombs. We move on to examine changes in how these communities organised themselves and their rituals over thousands of years, including their adoption of bronze and iron metalworking. Learning Outcomes: This course enables students to: Describe in detail the range of evidence for the development of prehistoric communities and societies in Ireland Place evidence for the development of prehistoric societies in Ireland in a wider context with particular reference to Europe and Western Asia Recognise all of the major artefact and site types from the relevant time period in Ireland and selected key artefacts and site types from the same period in Europe & Western Asia Discuss and compare interpretations by archaeologists of this evidence Demonstrate critical understanding of the nature of prehistoric evidence, its chronology and classification including awareness of problems in the use of classification tools Assemble and comment on evidence for key issues and questions in the study of prehistory.

This module is designed to further student understanding of key concepts and issues associated with the ever-growing body of work within the geographies of children, young people and families. In particular the course explores the everyday experiences of children and young people across local, national and global contexts. The course engages contemporary geographic perspectives relating to how understandings of childhood and youth are socially constructed, and in-doing-so provides a platform for exploring geographic research relating to mobility, migration, in/exclusion and identity at a variety of scales.

The question of identity and difference has become one of the central questions that societies face today. Women, sexual minorities, national minorities and ethnic groups are increasingly demanding and making a case for the acceptance, recognition of and respect for who they are. From the Black lives matter (BLM) movement, which started in 2013 in the U.S, to the Me too movement which gained incredible ground from 2006, we are witnessing the powerful impact that the question of identity has on politics, society and for each of us who are seeking answers. This movement which entails bringing hidden stories of injustice and abuse to the surface, is bringing into light the challenge that our societies face today - how can we develop a new form of social justice and a new conception of what it is to be human, to belong, to accept ourselves and others, to understand and to live together with our similarities and differences. This interdisciplinary course, which draws on social psychology, political and social theory and sociology will explore what it is to live in a multicultural world where identities are in flux. What does it mean to be me? What does it mean to be different? In the first part of the course, we will study multiculturalism, diversity and gender by introducing the main debates. The objective is to explore how categories of difference - race, gender, ethnicity, nationality and sexuality are complex and interrelated. The concept of culture will be explored in depth and we will draw on sociological studies that try to help us better understand cultural differences. We will then go onto consider the question of intercultural dialogue and how it can be used as a resource to facilitate communication between different cultural groups. In the second part of the course, we will consider how gender and other categories of difference interact with modern institutions in contemporary society. Throughout the course we will analyse different ways of looking at power and political culture in modern societies with the objective of developing our ability to think critically about mechanisms for change. Students will be guided to read relevant texts from a wide diversity of literature. In each weekly two-hour conference, we will focus on a particular theme. During the conference two students will give a presentation (lasting ten minutes for each student) before the class. The main goal of the presentation is to communicate and argue persuasively one's viewpoint on a topic. Following there will be feedback on the presentation and a class discussion.

Nationalism manifests itself as a modern ideology, whose relations with democracy and the state must be carefully explored. It also appears as something almost undefined, given its various connections with the left and the right, traditionalist and modernist views, local and global perspectives, and cultural and political realities. This course is about nations and nationalism since the 18th century. It will provide basic concepts and historical examples. Nation and nationalism are presented in a rather neutral way, which means neither nationalist nor curative. This approach reflects today's global understanding of national realities, nationality and nation-states. As the scope of the course is more international than French, nationalism will not be presented as nationalisme, which is often understood as a social disease in current French debate. Examples will be taken from world history and issues will be addressed on a world scale. The course will also compare the different paths of state-building - the city, the empire and the nation. Main topics - Founding fathers of the modern nation. Founding fathers of nationalism. Relevance of the nation in the 19th and 20th centuries. The dominant feature - equality or liberty. Modern nationalism. Wars, nations and empires. History vs sociology. Ethnocultural reality vs political myth. From resistance to unity. New types of nationalism.

Upon completion of this course, the student is able to: - Clarify the interplay between culture-formation, migration, and mobility in a number of different empirical domains of transnational practices; - Apply concepts, insights, research tools and methodologies deriving from the human and social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, to this field of study; - Critically analyse and interpret the complexities of the phenomena of culture-formation, mobility and migration in the context of globalization from an anthropological point of view. These objectives will be communicated to the students at the start of the semester. This course focuses on anthropological research, concepts and case-studies dealing with the complexities of the phenomena of culture-formation, mobility and migration within a context which is generally identified as globalization. Students gain a broad as well as in-depth understanding of the interplay between processes of culture-formation related to complex forms of migration and mobility. The guiding questions of this course are (a) How is culture constituted through processes of migration, circulation and mobility?; and (b) How are migration and mobility signified and imagined and construed through the lens of (changing) cultural ideologies and practices? The key theoretical concepts dealt with in the course are, among others, super-diversity, transnationality, multi-sitedness, complex migration trajectories, the multiplication of borders, transnational popular culture/heritage, diaspora, regimes of diversity and mobility, autochthony and indigeneity . The disciplinary range of the course occasionally exceeds Anthropology and ventures into Cultural Studies, Urban Studies, Social and Cultural Geography, and Sociolinguistics. The geographical focus is eminently global with a slight bias towards Europe and Africa.

In this course, participating students will analyze how ideas about gender and sexuality influenced the left-wing revolutionary movements and right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America since 1959, considering both the political history and the lived experiences of contemporaneous individuals in cases such as Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua, among others. The class methodology is based on lectures, reading of bibliography and historical documents, and analysis of historical films and documentaries. Students in this course will demonstrate their understanding and analytical interpretation skills through writing reports on the course material, and as a final project, the creation of a scrapbook of a historical figure, recounting their experiences in terms of gender and sexuality.

The course offers conceptual and empirical elements of the social sciences aimed at placing health-disease processes in a complex sociocultural environment. A plural vision of medicine and its history is offered, considering different medical systems and delving into traditional Mapuche medicine and its worldview. The tensions and exchanges between globalization processes and local practices and identities are analyzed and the intercultural approach is presented as an analytical perspective and practical strategy in health systems. The student is expected to recognize attitudes and ethical values of openness and respect for cultural diversity. For this, participatory classes, group workshops, guided readings, research work and searches for evidence will be used, favoring teamwork through group evaluations, as well as individual performance.

This course examines key issues in Singapore society through the lens of sociological analysis,. The inherent complexities and challenges of these issues and sociological factors that explain how they have persisted and changed over Singapore's recent history will be highlighted and explored.

Southeast Asia is many things. Through a series of fascinating lectures and tutorials, SE1101E explores this region in all its diversity: historical, cultural, economic, aesthetic, political, religious, gendered, environmental, and more. The module focuses on human experiences in Southeast Asia and how Southeast Asians engage with global processes.

This course is a critical analysis of the rhythms and transformations of everyday life in Singapore from the colonial period to the present day. Through this course, students are encouraged to observe and reflect on the everyday life and how it is structured by broader social and political dynamics but also allowing for individual contingencies and singularities.

This course will examine phenomena often viewed as irrational and superstitious to see how they can be understood in cultural terms. All societies have some beliefs in another world, yet beliefs vary widely between societies. The course will examine traditional anthropological topics such as magic, traditional healing, divination, fengshui, witchcraft, and ghosts, as well as more recent issues such as ESP, psychokinesis, qigong, vampires, zombies, monsters, UFOs and alien abduction. The role of myth in modern society and the cultural creation of reality will be highlighted. The power of a cultural approach in explaining the supernatural and the limits of what science can explain will also be discussed.

This course will examine the role and importance of sports in different societies and cultures, in the present and the past. Sports are often thought of as trivial, or as unimportant games to amuse young people. But in the wealthiest countries, sports represent huge portions of GDP and are important topics of daily conversation. Almost half the world watched the 2010 football/soccer World Cup. Sports have been compared to religions in their ability to unite people and to inspire fanatical devotion. The academic study of sports is interdisciplinary, with contributions from psychologists, historians, gender studies scholars, sociologists and anthropologists. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach while emphasizing anthropologys focus on culture, on the experience of participants, and on both symbolic and political-economy aspects of sports. Topics will include Race and Performance, Sports and Rituals, Sports as Moral Education, Gender and Sexuality in Sport, Sports and Nationalism, Globalization of Sport, the Olympics, and Sports Stars and the Media. Students will be expected to do a research project for the course.

What is ethnography, broadly defined? How is a scholar's ethnographic product shaped by their racialized experience? We will use books, articles, podcasts, documentaries, music, dance, and poetry for an in-depth study of the various ways that Black intellectuals in the social sciences have used ethnography to make sense of and theorize our and their everyday social worlds. We will pay special attention to questions of sexism, anti-Black racism, white supremacy, and colonialism, as these become relevant to the scholars' work, relationships to their disciplinary homes, and lived experiences. This course will also create space for students to think critically about their own positionality and subject positions, as we consider the ways that scholars take these into account when conducting research and presenting their scholarship. This course will reference texts over time and across academic disciplines, though focused in Anthropology, to consider genre, style, audience, and purpose when engaging with this social science research method. But ethnography implies a duality, as it can exist as process and as product. The term can refer to the action of conducting fieldwork and spending immersive time with a particular population in a particular place, as well as to the tangible product that the anthropologist produces after organizing and managing data collected from their fieldwork. Therefore, over the course of the semester, students will learn different ways that this theory, method, and practice is central to Anthropology and then will integrate this knowledge into their own ethnographically based final project. This project can result in a creative analytic text, like a podcast or autoethnography or curated playlist, but this product must be based in empirical information gathered and analyzed over the course of a student's own fieldwork, after they have identified a key question they would like to answer ethnographically.

What is the meaning of identity in a transnational space straddling the United States and the Caribbean? MIgration, settlement and return are central to the historical experiences and the literary and aesthetic expressions of Caribbean societies. This course combines literary and anthropological perspectives to the study of novels and historical and anthropological texts in which themes of migration, immigration and transnationalism play central roles.

This course will examine notions of history in oral cultures with special reference to Ireland. Who were those who transmitted oral traditions about historical events? Which genres shaped oral historical traditions? In which contexts were these traditions transmitted? What was the nature of the traditions? What was their content? What relationship did they have to the written record, to counter-hegemonic histories and to official histories? To what extent, if any, can they be said to articulate a national perspective? These are some of the questions that will be addressed, and case studies that illuminate special aspects of the subject such as oral traditions of the Vikings, of 1798, of the Famine and of landlords will be discussed in some detail.

Where do regional and national identities collide? Has the rise of the internet and globalization made national borders increasingly obsolete? Or, has it ironically caused people to embrace ultra-nationalism and xenophobia? This class analyzes these questions within the context of East Asia. We will study the growing impact of cultural hybridization—and in particular, the soft power of K-Pop boy bands and Korean soap operas—on fan culture, online communities, and migratory patterns. We will then juxtapose these trends with more sobering evidence of the lingering effects of Cold War politics, the Japanese empire, and territorial disputes in Korea, China, and Japan in the past decade. By using materials from history, anthropology, and literature, students will explore the influence of colonialism, nationalism, and globalization on everyday life across the continent. All majors and backgrounds are welcome. No prior knowledge about Asian languages or topics is required.

Research for Impact is an engaging and dynamic course that investigates wicked problems through creative research methods that provide insights and opportunities for project stakeholders to produce lasting change. Students are equipped with essential quantitative and qualitative research skills and methodologies, empowering them to explore, analyze, and help confront complex design challenges. Students will craft inventive research toolkits, which they will utilize in real-world scenarios to uncover deep needs and foster opportunities for a more inclusive design and research process.

This class is dedicated to the contemplation and analysis of American (in the hemispheric sense) narratives that trace the trajectory of outbreaks of widespread illness to their subsequent mitigation. A major source of reflection and analysis will be the instructor's experience nursing in an ICU during the first and second COVID-19 surges in New York City. Drawing upon literature, film, philosophy, history, and medical science, the focus will be on medicine and healing as a hinge point between politics and life. The class will analyze medicine as power; specifically, in what Michel Foucault described as "biopower or making live and letting die". In short, we will study theories, practices and stories of healing. However, instead of focusing on European texts such as Bocaccio's The Decameron (1353), Shelley's The Last Man (1826), or Albert Camus's The Plague (1947), this class draws on the tensions between the Eurocentric canon and its deconstruction in the Americas (Machado de Assis, Bellatin, Cuarón, Poe, Cazals, Porter). These tensions manifest at the points where bare life and political life converge, where class, race, geography, and the economics of healing complicate an intervention so simple as quarantine. Nevertheless, and as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us, some whose daily circulation provide essential goods and services to society cannot afford to quarantine, and it is their stories that fall outside the scope of Europe's literary grasp.

Native Americans have long been trapped in a betwixt and between state, caught by the forces of past and present, tradition and assimilation, romanticization and caricature. Yet through it all, Native voices have continued to speak of the Indian experience with great power and eloquence. This course will introduce Native American literature as a distinctive contribution to American and world literature. We will examine a wide range of expressive culture from the last century, including novels, poetry, graphic stories, children's literature, film, digital media, autobiographies, performances of oral literature, and music. Through the passion, creativity, and humor of Indian authors, we will learn something of the historical experience of Native men and women, and how they have reacted to massacres and mascots, racism and reservations, poverty and political oppression. Above all, we will try to understand how indigenous authors have used literature to engage crucial issues of race and culture in the United States that continue to influence their lives: identity, self-discovery, the centrality of place, cultural survival, and the healing power of language and spirituality. Class discussions will incorporate literary, historical, and ethnographic perspectives of Native expressive culture and the agency of authors as artists and activists vis-à-vis the wider American literary tradition. Authors include Sherman Alexie, Nicholas Black Elk, Louise Erdrich, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Winona LaDuke, and Leonard Peltier.

This course studies the intellectual origins, political developments and social and cultural manifestations of nationalism and national movements in the Middle East. We will begin with a theoretical survey of nationalism in general and then proceed to discuss specific cases of national movements (Zionist, Arab, Lebanese, Iraqi, Turkish, Iranian, Egyptian). We will use these cases to analyze themes such as historiography and nationalism, anti-colonialism, gender, religion and art as they have been manifested in these national movements.

This course will focus on exercises, research and reading from a diverse range of historical and current influential environmental writings from philosophers, economists, environmentalists, theologians, political scientists, naturalists, and practitioners. Learners will analyze the impact that human actions have on the natural world–particularly through foodways, or the social, cultural, and economic practices of producing and consuming food. This course will also explore how our understanding of race/ethnicity, nature, and the environment influences human choices around food. And it offers alternative courses of action toward viable, ethical, and antiracist solutions to questions about sustainable farming, global economic inequality, and world hunger. Throughout the semester, participants will use the lens of race and ethnicity to study and discuss how these two concepts affect access to agricultural land, foodstuffs/ foodways, environmental justice and nature. A fundamental objective will be to create podcasts focused on student’s engagement with the course themes.

This course offers an interdisciplinary survey of African-American and other African descendant women’s indigenous knowledge, development and maintenance of social structures, cultural preservation and spiritual engagement within their respective communities. Unfortunately and unconscionably Black women have been derogatorily referred to as “the mules of the world”. Valued for their work, and often not much else. They are venerated for their fertility and their central role they occupy as strong mothers and caregivers in the domestic sphere. Yet, concurrently they are often denied opportunity outside of the home. “Crossing over” occupying a position in more than one realm, much as Sister Rosetta Tharpe moved between secular and sanctified music often became the modus for survival. Maligned as jezebels, or sapphires, lazy and usury, as witches, or relegated to menial, semi-skilled labor. This course aims to interrogate and dispel some of the tropes and caricatures, by utilizing womanist and feminist theory to look closely at the role of Black women as agentive, sage and entrepreneurial. Alice Walker coined the term womanist in the 1980s. As Walker outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. These are women who occupy several subject positions in society. By harnessing their “intersectionality” of race, gender, sexuality, class, and transnational identity we can interrogate the historicity and cultural specificity that they have faced in and outside of their communities. With particular emphasis placed upon the subordination that Black women face; and the effects of racism, colonialism, unequal forms of economic development, and globalization on Black Communities, the course aims to see and illustrate where and how Black women have risen above the limitations imposed upon them. To do this, students will engage in critical reading of a range of diverse texts—from memoir, essay, fiction, prose, cultural criticism and sociopolitical analysis. We will look historically and currently at black women’s roles in the home, their religious institutions and in some of the workplaces they occupy as sole proprietors, cottage industrialists, and street vendors. For an undergraduate student body this course will pull excerpts from several core texts that would tend to be read in full if offered on the graduate level.

This course will examine the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in global contexts. From the 1920s to the 1990s, Black Americans' activism, organizing, and political efforts shaped their relationship with the Black Diaspora and U.S. Foreign Affairs. This class will cover an array of topics and historical moments such as Communism and the Red Scare, WWII, the Cold War, the formation of the United Nations, African Independents Movements, and Apartheid. We will study various activists, scholars, celebrities, and Black travelers whose movements around the world transformed how they viewed the United States' treatment of its Black citizens. By the end of this semester, students will know how Black Americans understood civil and human rights on U.S. soil and abroad.

In this course we will examine how different kinds of organizations and institutions (corporations and firms, NGOs and non-profits, economic development organizations, social movement organizations) respond and adapt to cultural differences in a globalizing world. We will begin by analyzing the processes by which the children's educational television program Sesame Street is transformed and spread around the world, and how the organization that creates it builds relationships with its international partners and counterparts. We will then compare Sesame Street to other organizations that translate, locally adapt, and diffuse various kinds of innovations around the world, from products (toys and soap operas) and policies (health care and anti-discrimination laws), to norms and ideas (human rights, peace building, and democracy).

Mainstream American narratives about feminism and women's rights often assume that the varied social movements gathered under the label "feminism" first emerged in Western Europe and the United States, spreading outwards over the course of the 20th and 21st century. However, scholars have long critiqued this story. In this course, we will read texts from gender studies, history, anthropology, and women's rights activists around the world that complicate this narrative, showing that global feminisms have many roots and many branches. In turn, we will explore how these alternate genealogies complicate how we think about the concepts that have historically been central to feminism, including gender, rights, equality, independence, freedom, and agency.

The United Nations estimates that an unprecedented 71 million people around the world have been forced to flee from their respective homes. Among them are nearly 26 million refugees, half of whom are under the age of 18. Media and social science scholarship represent refugees as passive recipients of western aid and avoid critical examination of the global and historical conditions that create "refugees."This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies (CRS) to re-conceptualize the refugee not as a problem to be solved but as a site of social and political critiques. CRS illuminates the processes of colonization, war, and displacement. This course examines militarism and migration as well as refugee voices written in their own words. We will assess a variety of sources, including oral history, ethnography, art, graphic novels, and interdisciplinary scholarship from humanities and social science.

This course provides students with a critical understanding of how South Korean society is organized, the major social issues that have dominated the contemporary era, and how systems of social inequality have changed since the postwar period. We will analyze in particular, three major periods of social change, including 1) the democratization movement of the 1970s and 1980s, 2) the Asian financial crisis and its impact on social inequality and poverty, and finally, 3) South Korea’s aging crisis and its implications for the future. No prior knowledge of Asian languages or topics is required.

This course offers a critical examination of what it means to be an immigrant or child of immigrants through scholarly works, memoirs, blogs, and popular journalism. Since the liberalization of immigration policy in 1965, immigrants from Latin America and Asia are becoming an increasing and emergent demographic of American society. In major American cities such as Los Angeles and New York, they comprise over 50% of the population. This course focuses on how immigrants and the children of immigrants experience the United States. How are immigrants changing the US racial and ethnic structure? How do their experiences differ given varying legal statuses? How is the second generation becoming American? We will explore these questions through readings that focus on family, religion, education, dating and sexuality. This course will include a community based learning component where students will work with immigrant serving organizations. Students will have the option to teach citizenship classes or to work with immigrant children. Service will be 2-3 hours per week outside of class.

How did the most divisive war in American History shape the nation's biggest church community? This course explores Catholics as both supporters and detractors of the Vietnam War. American Catholics wished to see America defeat Communism but, importantly, the power of faith motivated many to criticize the states escalation of the conflict. Students will explore the tensions and transformations of this important moment in American life. Lectures and classroom discussions will address decolonization, the global and national nature of American Catholicism, the power of the liberal state, conscientious objection, the Spirit of the Sixties, sacramental protests, the rise of human rights, geopolitics, and the Cold War. Course readings will include the latest scholarship, but also primary sources like poems, films, songs, letters, prayers, newspaper articles, and art. Students will have access to the rich materials of Catholic peace activists found in the University of Notre Dame Archives.

In a religiously diverse and vastly troubled world, how do religious traditions motivate believers to work toward the common good? "Engaging World Religions," the course title, refers to three things we will examine. First, it describes how religions are intrinsically engaging: they draw in adherents by fulfilling their material, intellectual, and spiritual needs. Second, it specifies what various secular institutions like governments and development organizations must do in pursuing the common good across our planet -- most of whose inhabitants are religious. Finally, it characterizes our work in this class: exploring how various religious traditions conceptualize and work toward the common good in a global context. We will read historians, social scientists, philosophers, and critical theorists on how to analyze and interpret the role of religion in contemporary life, while examining case studies of how religious practices, beliefs, and identities intersect with issues in global affairs such as inequality, armed conflict, and climate change. In doing so, we will engage how religious traditions from the East and West -- from Asian and Abrahamic "world" religions, to a variety of indigenous "local" religions -- complicate or complement modern Catholicism's emphasis on Integral Human Development.

Introduction to Forensic Anthropology provides a broad overview of one of the applied fields of biological anthropology. Forensic anthropologists use knowledge of skeletal anatomy to answer questions of medico-legal significance, and students will gain an understanding of what this requires. This includes the identification of human skeletal remains and the interpretation of the circumstances surrounding their death. While this course does not teach laboratory proficiency in the techniques of forensic anthropology, it outlines the concepts underlying the recovery and analysis of human remains, the determination of the biological profile (including age, sex, ancestry, and stature), and the interpretation of skeletal trauma and pathology. Course material will be presented in lecture format, supplemented by videos, daily in-class discussions, team-based activities and projects, and collaborative student presentations.

Why do weight lifters wear lifting belts? How does athletic training and diet differ between endurance athletes and strength athletes? What are the sex-based differences in athletic performance? What impact do supplements and performance enhancing drugs have on athletic performance? Through the use of peer reviewed research, popular media articles, podcasts, and film we will answer these and many other questions within the field of exercise physiology. The course will be split into two broad units: 1) Powerlifters and 2) Marathoners. Topics covered will include cellular metabolism, muscle physiology, training programs, response to training, basic nutrition, body composition, some methodological exercise testing, supplements and performance enhancing drugs, recovery, fatigue, and activity in extreme environments. Through this use of mixed media, we will also discuss how the media misrepresents and misreports exercise physiology studies, making us all more discerning consumers of information.

This course is an overview of Primatology, the study of the evolution of primate behavior, social systems, and mating systems. We will cover topics central to primate lives including finding food, fighting over resources, and navigating friendships. The course takes as its basis the principles of evolutionary biology and the processes of natural and sexual selection, which act to increase the success of individuals in surviving and reproducing. We will consider several themes throughout the course: primate biology and taxonomy, natural selection and social systems, sexual selection and mating systems, cognition, health, and conservation.

If you were to perform a Google image search of “human evolution,” you would see endless pictures of men linearly evolving from apes to modern humans. These overwhelmingly one-sided depictions are because much of our human evolutionary story has been written by and about men to the exclusion of women. Consequently, many of the key theories explaining the unique suite of human features seem to assume that evolutionary forces act only upon men, and women are merely passive beneficiaries. Not only is this exclusion of roughly half the population sexist, it is also bad science – bad science that to this day has been repeated and perpetuated to justify the status quo. In this class, we will explore human evolution from a feminist perspective intellectually drawing upon human biology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, exercise physiology, and reproductive health to demonstrate that women were and still are a driving force in human evolution. Using non-traditional learning methods and assignments, we will cover: 1) foundational feminist human evolutionary theory, 2) the pervasiveness of estrogen, 3) physical/athletic performance and sexual division of labor; 4) the significance and frequency of alloparenting; 5) multiple orgasms and the control of women’s sexuality; 6) cooperation and competition among women; 7) concealment (or not) of human ovulation; 8) evolutionary reasons for the difficulty of human birth; 9) the physical and mental resilience of women; and 10) the crucial role grandmothers and menopause. It is my hope that this class not only provides an alternative perspective to current thinking in human evolution, but also encourages students to bring their experiences and perspectives to bear. Because who asks the questions matters, and a greater diversity of views can only improve and enrich our holistic understanding of human evolution.

The Arctic Circle, Mount Everest, the Sahara Desert, poverty, and obesity, and even space! These are all extremes some humans experience. Using primary literature and pop culture resources, this course will explore how humans have biologically, culturally, and technologically overcome these extremes. Through this use of mixed media, we will also discuss how the media misrepresents and misreports scientific studies, making us all more discerning consumers of information. You will be expected to compare and contract different types of resources for each topic covered. You will also be expected to work within a group to explore a human extreme of your own choosing and present it to the class.

By verbal arts is understood storytelling as a practice and the various kinds of narrative -folktales, legends, heroic lays, etc. - that were usual at storytelling events.Not all genres of the verbal arts are narratives, however, but there are also such genres as lyrical songs, proverbs, riddles, etc. This course will examine the Irish verbal arts - in Irish and in English - in a comprehensive way and will study specific texts.

It has been 20+ years since the first draft sequence of the entire human genome was published, spurring development of genetic technologies that were previously impossible, such as CRISPR genome editing. These technologies carry potential to identify, treat, or even prevent genetic conditions; at the same time, they often rely on assumptions that genes determine one’s fate and are shaping contemporary ideals of health, wellness, and disability. This course will examine how genetics and genetic technologies raise a host of complicated ethical questions, such as concerns about “new” forms of eugenics and genetic determinism, the ownership and commodification of genetic material, the ethics of genetics research in marginalized communities, legislative efforts to prevent genetic discrimination, and more. We will use a case study approach, pairing examinations of the biological and technical bases of specific genetic technologies with bioethical analysis to consider costs and benefits from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. This will entail engagement with perspectives from the history of science, genetics, bioethics, genetic counseling, etc. to explore complicated questions about the relationships between genetics, research, medicine, and society.

This course aims to change the way you think not only about the way that we play games, but also about the way that video games teach their players to behave within their digital worlds. This course will encourage students to reflect on and utilize their lived experiences as players, and utilize these experiences to locate themselves within their analysis and writing as well as their design practices. This course will undertake an intensive, interdisciplinary focus on the history of video game development, representation in video games, and the languages that digital games work in as well as decolonial theory and diverse theories of design. This class will engage with a variety of scholarly texts, video games, media posts, videos, and design exercises, in order to illustrate the ways in which video games have shaped the ways we play, think, and behave within their spaces. Students will be required to write and design around these lessons and address and push back against the problematic behaviors and colonial narratives around violence, race, gender, sexuality, and relationship to the land that these gamic languages and lessons have created.

This course will examine the global field of Indigenous Cinema. This class will utilize screenings of Indigenous film along with accompanying lecture, reading, and discussion, to examine the ways in which Indigenous filmmakers, actors, and communities are subverting genre and decolonizing the industry to tell and reclaim Indigenous stories and make room for Indigenous futures.

The class begins by exploring the concepts of gender, politics, and power, and related concepts such as intersectionality, patriarchy, sexism, and stereotypes. With that foundation, we turn our attention to two arenas in which gender and politics interact in the US: social and political movements and women as political actors. We will examine how women negotiate movements and how gender shapes structure, tactics, and outcomes for both women's movements (e.g., suffrage, feminist, conservative, #metoo) and other movements (such as the Progressive and civil rights movements). Finally, we will consider the constraints, opportunities, and impact of women in political roles, such as voter, candidate, and office-holder, with special attention to the 2022 US midterm elections. While grounded in political science, the course engages substantially with philosophy, history, sociology, and economics as well.

In the 20th century, the “Mall” was an indelible component of the American Dream. It was a social, economic, and cultural space that signified American prosperity alongside automobile and home ownership. However, in the 21st century, the mall is no longer the center of conspicuous consumption in the US. Instead, it has become a site of fiscal crisis, it has been dislodged from the cultural imagination, and it has firmly been replaced by Amazon and Instacart as the premier intermediaries of consumption. While its physical “ruins” have become a dystopic reminder of decline, stagnation, and obsolesce illustrating what happens when capital is injected and then forcibly extracted from the landscape. This course will examine the complex relationship between the “Mall” and American culture through popular culture, print media, digital media, planning and zoning ordinances, retail practices, and technological innovation. From the Mall of America in Minneapolis to The Grove in Los Angeles to The Galleria in Houston, the “Mall” will serve as an entry point to think about America at its current moment. Central to this course will be understanding the roles that technology, consumer culture, and capital accumulation and dispossession play in contemporary US culture.

How has religion shaped American culture and politics? According to one story we tell, the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution declared the separation of church and state, but that wall of separation has always been more porous than many have expected–or desired. And it never separated religion from American culture. Indeed, some historians argue that the separation of church and state spurred Americans to become even more religious in their daily lives and in public culture. And the United States has become one of the most devout–and most religiously diverse–countries in the modern world. Religious people, ideas, and practices have shaped how Americans understand politics, identity, race, gender and sexuality, immigration, community, democracy, and freedom. Religion animates our visual art, literature, music, and film. It moves people to take up arms against perceived enemies and to call for nonviolent civil disobedience. It provides moral comfort and spiritual frustration in turn. Thinking across American history and culture, this course asks how we ought to understand the role of religion in the United States. We will read leading scholarship in the study of U.S. religion alongside a broad range of historical and contemporary sources, including material culture and film. Students will also have the opportunity to pursue their own research on topics that interest them.

This course examines the histories, politics, and lived experiences of deportation and detention in the United States. Drawing on scholarship from ethnic studies, sociology, and law, the course explores how immigration enforcement and removal policies have been shaped by race, empire, and global migration from Chinese exclusion to the current moment. Particular attention is given to Asian American deportation experiences, including those involving communities from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, alongside Latine, African, and other migrant communities. The course also examines transnational lives after return, including family separation, health, labor integration, and community organizing across borders. Through analysis of memoir, oral histories, policy, film, and media, students will consider stories of resistance and abolition, as well as how deportation reshapes families, social mobility, and identities.

What is psychic life? The word psyche has encompassed a range of definitions as it has travelled through time, from notions of mind, soul, spirit, and the conscious and unconscious mind, to a mirror, an asteroid discovered in 1852, a moth or butterfly, and anima mundi, "the animating principle of the universe" itself. Today an additional constellation of concepts may also be drawn into psyche's orbit, including brain, emotion, feeling, affect, self, subjectivity, person, ego, and experience. As opposed to terms like "mental health," the concept of psychic life provides a language with which to speak about a range of phenomena across multiple traditions, epistemologies, and histories, without prioritizing any one conceptualization over another or locating the psyche within the boundaries of an individual mind, as distinct from the body and the world. Instead, in this course we will explore psychic life through the various ways in which it is known-as lived-experience; cultural, historical, and political form; object of intervention; and site of experimentation. The approaches engaged in this course draw from psychological anthropology, ethnopsychology, critical global health, history of medicine, cultural studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and critical phenomenology with an overarching dedication to de-stigmatizing "mental illness," and embracing neurodiversity in all its forms. Along the way we will cover topics including madness and reason, psychopolitics, global mental health, the governance of the self, the psychic life of racism, radical mental health collectives and the psychedelic renaissance, as well as a set of phenomena that lie at the limits of experience, such as psychosomatization, solitary confinement, oceanic feeling, and dreaming.

Imagine a world stripped of magic, where cold rationality reigns supreme and the supernatural has been banished to the realm of fiction. Now consider our own world, where Silicon Valley technocrats consult AI oracles, where political ideologies inspire quasi-religious fervor, and where the “spiritual but not religious” seek transcendence in everything from meditation apps to psychedelic retreats. Which of these worlds more accurately describes our modern condition? This course challenges the notion that modernity and secularization have disenchanted our world, proposing instead that enchantment persists and even thrives in unexpected corners of contemporary life. From Weber's Protestant ethic to UFO believers in the American Southwest, commodity fetishism in South America to Islamic modernities in Lebanon, we will ask fundamental questions: How do myths and rituals shape our understanding of the world, even in ostensibly secular societies? What role does enchantment play in science, technology, and politics? How do different cultures negotiate the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the rational and the magical? Drawing upon ethnographic studies and theoretical texts, we will explore how the categories of “religious” and “secular” are constructed, contested, and reimagined in various cultural contexts.

Illness and disease have been part of the human experience for as long as we have existed. The nature of these challenges, and how we have responded to them, has evolved over time. In this course, we will dig into evidence from the archaeological record and bioarchaeological data from skeletal remains to trace the history of human health. From prehistoric pandemics to ancient healing practices, we’ll uncover the sick and tired side of archaeology that reveals how illness and the pursuit of health have shaped—and been shaped by—human history. You’ll learn how archaeologists and bioarchaeologists reconstruct stories of past health, exploring how humans have cared for one another since our evolutionary origins and how our understanding of “health” has shifted across time.

From the late 1960s debates on environmental degradation and overpopulation to the present concerns with sociotechnical and climate change, the "commons" has returned as a key symbol for social analysis, political organizing, and collective resource management. Since then, various currents have claimed and reclaimed the concept under the guide of "communality," "conviviality," and "common-pool resources" as concrete alternatives to public and private modes of governance of tangible and intangible goods. In the past two decades, the concept has been central for the discussion of the "digital commons" with decentralized, community-based governance of information production and sharing. In this seminar, we will map out the key definitions of the "commons" with a focus on the introduction of algorithmic forms of governance. This course will be organized as a seminar for the study of concepts, case studies, and methodological approaches for the study of the digital commons. We welcome students working on Internet-based research and Free and Open Source technologies as well climate change, conservation, and sustainability to join the seminar.

This course examines the intersection of politics and economics in an increasingly global world. Economic interdependence has increased dramatically over the past fifty years. While this has raised living standards in many countries, it has also given rise to new social, economic, and political tensions. This course offers an analytical framework for evaluating the consequences of globalization and provides an overview of several theoretical approaches to and empirical issues in today's global economy. The course is divided into three main sections. The first part of the course focuses on understanding what is meant by 'globalization' as well as an introduction to several contending theories of globalization. The second part of the course will focus on managing globalization, and will evaluate different options available to states, institutions, and other actors. The final section of the class will be devoted to empirical issues associated with globalization. Topics discussed include: the environment, corruption, human rights, non-governmental organizations, democratization, and regional trading blocs.

Cross-border financial flows are one of the most important aspects of contemporary globalization. This course explores their effects on domestic and international politics. Do multinational corporations consider political factors when deciding whether or not to invest in a country? And how do their investments impact a country's development? Does the international bond market influence what policies governments can undertake? Why does the Chinese government want to control its exchange rate and how does that affect American interests? Could the 2008 financial crisis happen again? Is increased exposure to international financial flows responsible for the growth of populist movements in the United States and Europe? In addition to engaging with these questions through the readings and class discussion, students will develop their own research project based on personal interests.

The course provides students with a unique introduction to Asia in all its diversity, ranging from its languages, cultures, and histories to its political and economic systems and its relations with the United States. As the global balance of power continues to shift towards Asia, it is more important than ever for Notre Dame students to understand the continent's many complexities. This course provides just that: an opportunity to understand the multiple domestic and foreign forces that constitute the expanding global presence of these nations and regions (Burma, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam). Classroom sessions will be structured around a set of common assumptions about Asia as a whole or about specific Asian countries. Through reading, discussion, and lectures, students will be encouraged to reflect critically on those assumptions and consider a range of alternative interpretations. Assignments include primary work from visiting experts and will revolve around making comparative connections across the range of topics. Readings for the course will introduce perspectives gained from these experts' research and practice so that students will be able to formulate their own critical understanding of the region and its global environment.

Many approaches to policy, development, and governance emphasize universal goals and patterns. In practice, however, all policies and processes of social development unfold in specific places, at specific historical moments. In this course, we will explore a vibrant body of scholarship from multiple disciplines, called “critical policy studies,” that combines social and cultural analysis with policy studies. Students will learn how to analyze global policy interventions and outcomes as the products of specific communities, cultural contexts, and historical settings. We will examine the history of core categories in policy, like “poverty,” “growth,” “progress,” and even “development” itself. We will then use case studies to explore specific examples of how cultural and historical context shape policy interventions and outcomes. In so doing, students will learn the core methods of critical and interpretive policy studies, in order to develop valuable skills for analyzing how policies are shaped by, and act on, social life in unexpected ways.

In 2007, after decades of organizing on the part of indigenous activists, the United Nations issued a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The Declaration was the result of years of work by people from particular communities--each with its own history, culture, language, and home--who decided to call themselves, and work together as, Indigenous people. This creative step allowed indigenous peoples to work collectively for justice on a global scale, rather than individually and in confrontation with single states. This class explores the concept, and reality, of Indigeneity in both historical and contemporary perspective: we will consider the many shared struggles and opportunities of indigenous peoples around the globe today and the ways that similar (or distinct) histories have led to similar (or distinct) present realities.

What is ethnography, broadly defined? How is a scholar's ethnographic product shaped by their racialized experience? This course will reference texts over time and across academic disciplines to consider genre, style, audience, and purpose when engaging with this research method. We will read, listen to, and watch works to think through the various ways that Black intellectuals have used ethnography to make sense of our everyday social worlds.

Migration is a prevailing global phenomenon that affects millions of peoples around the world. According to the UNHCR report, at the end of 2019, there had been 79.5 million forcibly displaced people around the world. At the same time, refugees and migrants experience migration- and displacement-related physical and psychosocial stress and trauma, which may increase their vulnerability and affects their health and well-being. This course will explore, engage, and analyze contemporary migration flows - movements of people across national and international borders - and the ways human mobility shape refugees' and migrants' lived experiences, cultural meanings, social values, and health. How and why particular modes of mobility are permitted, encouraged, and enabled while others are conversely, banned, regulated, policed, and prevented? How do contemporary forms of displacement may challenge conventional understandings of who gets to be defined and accepted as a refugee? Why do we have so many different categories of people who simply seek refuge? Do these different categories indicate different treatments? How is migration associated with higher levels of mental health disorders among refugee/migrant populations? The course will engage with such questions by focusing on events that occurred in the second half of the twenty-first century in Europe, including both the EU and non-EU states. We will rely on the selected readings and documentaries as they reflect an integrative anthropological approach to migration, displacement, and refugeeness. Taking into account lived experiences, identity, social values, cultural meanings, health, and well-being, we will explore migration, borders, and displacement as a subjective experience and sites of ethical, socioeconomic, political, and cultural examinations and critiques. Topics will include transnational migration, terminology, citizenship, borders, asylum policy, health, and well-being. This course will also enrich your understanding of the fluidity of different categories, processes underlying refugees and migrants' cultural and social tuning, as well as their biosocial responses, resilience, and adaptability under conditions of migration and displacement. The course will be run in a seminar-style, and students will be expected to analyze and debate core readings in class.

This course examines the origins and development of contemporary opinions and policies concerning migrations and migrants. It does so by looking backward to the age when transoceanic mobility became more frequent and increasingly more accessible before moving forward to our own times. It is the central claim of this course that it is impossible to understand what drives policy today without first surveying the changing ideas of migration and the movement of people over time. It will therefore take students through the history of migration in the modern world, as well as studying the migrant journey, connections to home, the process and difficulties of assimilation and community creation, and the problems or opportunities that could arise for migrants from characteristics like race, religion, ethnicity, or language. Also considered will be the complex relationship between colonization and migration. In the process, Migrants and Mobility will also examine how different societies place value judgments upon migrants and analyze how and why migration/migrants have been categorized as “good” or “bad” over time. Students will also encounter and consider the effects of growing urbanization and industrialization, changing demography and global trade patterns, and, more recently, the impact of climate change. Migrants and Mobility will be primarily seminar based, placing a premium on participation and analytical discussion.

This course offers an in-depth analysis of the roles of structural and cultural violence in peace studies. Unit 1 (conceptual/theoretical) explores field-formative debates over the nature, basis, and viability of “structural violence” and “cultural violence” as analytical concepts, asking how they have shaped (or failed to, but perhaps ought to shape) the field of peace studies. We will examine their critical appropriations of early critical theory, and assess comparable theoretical approaches such as reflexive sociology (Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant), post-structural analysis (Michel Foucault), and later critical theory (Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth) while asking what advantages, if any, lenses of structural and cultural violence have vis-à-vis these resources for peace analysis and peacebuilding, and where they need to be supplemented. Unit 2 (cases/agents) studies cases in which some version of these analytical lenses have been deployed for purposes of peace analysis and peacebuilding. We examine recent uses of these lenses to examine poverty, global development, and global health in building peace (e.g. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Farmer, Peter Uvin), religious/cultural identity (Veena Das), and race, class, and gender (Joshua Price on incarceration and prison abolition in the U.S; Alex Mikulich and Laurie Cassidy on white complicity in hyper incarceration).

The rise of populism around the world, coupled with the emergence of “neo-Fascist” leaders in Europe and new authoritarianism in Latin America and Africa invite a lot of worried questioning over the state of world politics, and indeed of the stability of a world that seems to grow more tense, divided, and partisan by the moment. In this course we will delve into topics in democracy, charismatic and authoritarian leadership, human rights, and social movements to probe, fundamentally, what social and political participation actually means, and where that participation leads people around the world. If there is no single concrete definition of democracy, do we actually know it when we see it? What factors indicate that it is corrupted or endangered? What accounts for the rise of charismatic leaders, and when is charisma positive, versus a move towards authoritarianism? How do social movements form, what might they accomplish, and when and why do they fail? Finally, are “rights” universal, or are there fundamental issues within “rights” themselves that prevent people around the world from flourishing?

Creole is the quintessential language of migration. This elective explores the multidirectional interplay of Creole narrative expression and transnational migration. How do Creole texts imagine and influence the experiences of migration, long-distance belonging and immigrant settlement? How, in turn, does the changing experience of diaspora affect the evolution of the vernacular at home (lakay)? In what ways do Creole writers and performers express struggles with xenophobia and racism abroad and oppression and poverty in Haiti? We engage these questions through study of Creole fiction, poetry, theatre, story telling and music. Among the Creole works we explore are the novels and poetry of Maude Heurtelou, Felix Morriseau-Leroi, Baudelaire Pierre, Patrick Sylvain and Denizé Lauture, stories by Jean-Claude Martineau and Kiki Wainwright, musical lyrics of Emeline Michele, Beethova Obas, Ti Corn and Wyclef Jean and Rap Kreyòl groups like Barikad Crew. The class is intended for students who have completed Intermediate Creole II or have reached the equivalent level of competence in speaking, reading and writing the language.

The ancestors interrelated with the environments we live in today and will interact with in the future. This course explores indigenous cultures and perspectives on the importance of traditional knowledge and the environment. In this seminar-style course, we will learn about how indigenous groups in the Americas, both past and present, think about the world around us and how their cultural livelihoods are threatened by climate change and ongoing development. The goal is to provide students with a strong foundation in indigenous environmental issues. We will cover a range of topics that intersect with traditional ecological knowledge, land use and perceptions, reciprocity, sense of place, memory-making, and environmental justice.

The rate and expanse of human caused global environmental change is unmatched in our evolutionary history. It is widely argued that these actions have produced enough change that the stable conditions found in the Holocene epoch of the last 11,000 years are over and we are transitioning to a new Earth Systems trajectory and epoch dubbed the Anthropocene - the time when humans are the single largest driver of geologic change. In this course we will seek to understand what characteristics of the contemporary human niche - the myriad socio-ecological practices, policies, institutions and lifeways that comprise how humans live their everyday lives around the globe - are producing the Anthropocene and what the implications are for different groups of people. We will pay specific attention to the distribution of global environmental change and corresponding risk to human health, historical and contemporary contributions to the production of this change, and what the implications are for human health, equality, and environmental justice. The focus of this course is more towards breadth than depth - we will sample and discuss many topics but will be unable to fully dive into each in a holistic way. But, this is by design, as the point is for us to develop a mutually negotiated and understood functional language and base understanding of the topics such that after this course you are empowered to engage the topics most compelling to you and have the skills requisite to effectively dive in.

Spirit possession in Africa, Catholic piety in Mexico, and mortuary rituals in Borneo could all be described as manifestations of religion. But what do we mean by the term “religion,” and how might we compare different religions (and their corollaries, myth and magic) across the globe? By building upon these examples and many others, this course will help you think about religion from a comparative perspective, both across various cultures and between your own beliefs and those of others. Along the way, you will encounter and evaluate core concepts in the anthropology of religion such as purity and pollution, the sacred and the profane, ritual, sacrifice, and witchcraft. You will learn to articulate prominent theories of religion, and, by pairing foundational texts in anthropology with select case studies, you will grow in your ability to think and see as a budding ethnographer of religion.

What do the paintings and sculptures in museums and the manuscripts and antique books in archives tell us about our collective past? What do they tell us about how value, importance, and worth have been ascribed across time? As users of these cultural collections, how might we address inequities and silences within them? This course provides an introduction to the history of cultural heritage collecting and addresses major issues and questions in the field. Students will apply a critical gaze to the collections held in our campus repositories - the Snite Museum of Art, Rare Books and Special Collections, and University Archives - and in museums and archives beyond the Notre Dame campus. Students will reflect on what they read and discuss and collaboratively will build an online exhibition around themes of diversity in our campus collections. This exhibition will be published on the Hesburgh Library's Digital Exhibitions and Collections page and students will be given curatorial credit for their work. Note: This course will include a full day of site visits tentatively scheduled for September 30, 2022.

This course examines how gender and sexuality are understood, constructed, and implicated in relations of social power in various regions of the world. It will integrate scholarship from anthropology and women and gender studies to explore how ideas of maleness, femaleness, trans, queer, and heterosexual are reproduced, contested, and transgressed within different social contexts and the everydayness of these categories. We will learn about cultural changes in conceptions of gender and sexuality in North and South America, SWANA (South West Asia/North Africa), Southeast and East Asia, Central and Southern Africa, and Europe. In the first half of this course, we will consider traditional themes in cultural anthropology, including kinship, morality, ritual, emotion, politics, and the circulation of goods and labor, to examine how different communities produce cultural knowledge about gender and sexuality. The second half of this course will address contemporary themes such as activism, violence, and gender and sexual oppression. Using our knowledge of anthropological theories developed in the first half of the course, we will take up topics of concern such as masculinity and violence, LGBTQ rights and pinkwashing, and gender and nationalism to understand how gender and sexuality are relevant to post-colonial contexts and settler-colonial resistance movements.

This course offers an ethnographically grounded understanding of contemporary European cultures and societies. We start by presenting a brief history of the idea of Europe. Then, we define its geographical focus: where are the boundaries of Europe? Are Israel and Turkey part of Europe? Who gets to decide? Are there European Muslims? We will then read recent works focusing on selected regions and on diverse urban populations. We will explore and discuss socio-cultural facets of European everyday life; trends and challenges in technology, the environment, popular culture, demography, and politics; and the diversity of urban/rural, north/south, and more generally intra-European ways of life. The course will be of interest to students of contemporary global issues, and in particular to students who intend to spend a semester in Europe; are back from the field; or intend to write a related senior thesis.

This course follows major themes and thinkers in the development of the study of language and culture in Anthropology, Linguistics, and Philosophy. The course explores the form of language as abstract structure and as practical mechanism of human communication. The course asks how linguistic forms as signs come to be meaningful in thought and in conversation. This requires attention to the principled study of signs at large: semiotics. A running current of investigation in this course is the role of semiotic theory in posing and answering questions about the connections between grammar and cognition, language diversity and cultural difference, and the production of social meaning in interaction. We ask how the anthropological study of meaning contributes to knowledge about what sorts of things are universal and what might be variable in language(s), culture(s), and mind(s). We read and discuss anthropological analysis of empirical data showing how people in different cultures using different languages actually speak. This application yields important insights into the thought and life-worlds of others and of ourselves.

Models of human communication developed in linguistic anthropology have long relied on empirical analysis and cross-cultural comparison of how people talk to other people, and to a variety of non-human “persons” as well. This course examines how anthropologists study communication between humans and non-humans, and how communication helps make persons out of non-humans. The class concerns research on seances and related scenes of spirit possession where the dead speak, talking with animals whether pets or prey, learning spiritual lessons from teacher plants, and contemporary conversations people have with artificial intelligence language models. We compare how anthropologists have asked questions about personhood when considering speech across species boundaries or across divides such as life and death. We ask how communication constructs interlocutors and makes relationships possible, and we consider the commonality and variety among communicative approaches and tactics. We ask if communication with non-humans connects people to other worlds of experience, or if it is more instructive as a projection of our own social life onto others.

This course will foster thoughtful dialogue on the importance of cultural humility in healthcare. Students will work to grow their cultural awareness and understanding of the social determinants of health by exploring the lived-experiences of individuals. Through the utilizations of skills based in the compassion science framework, students will consider how cultural humility impacts patient outcomes. An exploration of current topics in healthcare disparities will deepen classroom discussion. This course provides an added entry point into the understanding of the important place cultural humility and understanding hold in the healthcare relationship. The course is open to CCIM minors. Permission is required for those outside of the minor who are planning to pursue the health professions as space permits.

This course offers a general introduction to the politics of contemporary China. After background on the imperial and Republican periods and the development of the Communist revolution, we will focus on major political events in the People's Republic: land reform, Hundred Flowers Campaign, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, Democracy Wall, Opening and Reform, Tiananmen Uprisings, Beijing Olympics, etc. Then we proceed to a thematic discussion of popular participation and protest, state control, the emergence of civil society groups, and major challenges facing contemporary China. The basic objectives of this course are to provide a working knowledge of Chinese politics and to encourage a critical evaluation of the positive and negative aspects of China's socialist experiment.

In this class we analyze the many modes of human interaction, from our original invention/discovery of spoken language, to the invention of writing, to telegraphy, telephony, radio, movies, television, and the Internet, smart phones, and social media. We examine the affordances of each medium and modality, and develop tools to understand the ones that aren't even here yet. We draw on linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, conversation analysis, media studies, and communications.

Do you want to learn how to solve problems that matter? Human Centered Design (HCD) is an empathetic tool that utilizes guided questioning related to product, service, or systems innovations to identify opportunities for sustainable, human-centered impact. For example, how might we design a cookstove that reduces the amount of smoke inhaled by a community member? How might we design a new service engaging low-income borrowers in rural communities? How might we design a system linking social innovators and their innovations to users across the globe in a manner that encourages collaboration and sharing of resources? Whether a social innovator is designing in the private, public or nonprofit sector, HCD provides a valuable framework, deeply rooted in empathy, and is an excellent methodology for social innovators who want to problem solve and design alongside communities. In this course students will be introduced to the HCD toolkit and will apply it in practice, either in a domestic or international context. This fast-paced course will take students through the HCD cycles of inspiration, ideation and implementation, and provide opportunities for student and community collaboration.

This course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of health issues affecting women globally, with particular emphasis on Africa, Asia, and the United States. The topics will focus on a woman's life, from infancy and childhood, through adolescence and reproductive years, to old age. We will examine the physiological, social, psychological, economic, cultural, political, behavioral, and environmental factors that influence women's health, and the role of poverty, discrimination, and unequal health access. Topics such as determinants of women's health, reproductive health, sexual health, cardiovascular health, maternal health, cancers of the reproductive tract, mental and emotional health, substance use and abuse, and various forms of violence against women will be discussed. At the end of the course, students should have a solid grasp of key issues affecting the health of women in different cultural contexts globally, and how women can be empowered to take actions that positively influence their health.

In many societies around the world, culture plays a major role in health and wellbeing. This course will provide a global overview of how society and culture influence the health and wellbeing of people, with discussions on strategies for health promotion and awareness that are sensitive to cultural settings. Focusing mostly on developing countries, we will examine the ways in which different aspects of culture, such as gender and social norms, values and belief systems, and religion influence health, with particular emphasis on physical health, mental & emotional health, and sexual & reproductive health.

This course seeks to explore connections between environment and culture change by introducing students to the diversity of cultures living in the Southwest. We begin by learning about indigenous people living in the Southwest today including the Pueblo peoples (e.g., Hopi, Zuni, Santa Clara, Cochiti, Acoma), Navajo, Ute, and Tohono O’odham using ethnography and contemporary native histories. We will then travel back in time to learn about the complex histories of these people, particularly the ancestral Pueblo, to places like Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, the Rio Grande, the Mimbres Valley, and the Phoenix Basin. Our explorations will cover from the earliest Paleoindians (11,500 years ago) to the 13th century Migrations to European contact, the establishment of Spanish Missions, and the Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692. We will then bring this discussion full circle to today. Along the way, we will explore the impact of large-scale, long-term processes such as the adoption of agriculture, village formation, religious change, migration, and warfare on the rich historical landscape of the Southwest.

This rigorous, hands-on, interdisciplinary seminar prepares students to design and execute an independent international field research project. The course enhances your ability to conduct your own research, but also teaches techniques that will be useful for the rest of your academic studies, and for understanding research results presented to you through popular press in your life after college. This class is unique because throughout, your learning and work are geared specifically to your selected research interests. The first part of the class guides students through the steps of refining a research project and preparing a research proposal. The second part of the class will help students hone their ability to conduct research through a series of research practicums: students get hands-on experience in a variety of methodological approaches through research conducted in the local area. Because of the over-arching nature of the course, we will touch on topics of research design, such as developing a research question, a theoretical framework, and hypothesis testing, as well as analysis of data and evidence. However, we encourage students to see this course as a complement, rather than a substitute, for discipline specific research methods and analysis courses.

To understand religion, we should go to Asia: Asia boasts the majority of the world's religions and religious people. In this class, we look at what Asian religious traditions are up to today, and how they inform everyday social and political life. How might religious traditions as diverse as Zen Buddhism and Zoroastrianism inform conflict, coexistence, and cooperation? What is it to be human within worldviews that seem to depart from our own with respect to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, dis/ability, and the natural world? How might society, culture, or economy develop in Sunni Muslim, humanistic Buddhist, or atheist Maoist terms? How might we learn to "scale up" spiritual practices such as shamanism, ancestor worship, radical nonviolence, and mindfulness meditation to solve global problems? We read historians, anthropologists, and other scholars of religion to explore Asian spiritual routes and roots, from Iraq to Japan and beyond.

Food access, equity and justice should be of great importance to everyone. Consistently there has been political, economic, geographic and flawed distribution supply chains within the domestic food system. This interdisciplinary course will utilize digital humanities tools and platforms for students to express their research interests. We will analyze the impact that human actions have on foodways, or the social, cultural, and economic practices of producing and consuming food in relation to race, equity and access, historically and currently. We will explore alternative courses of action toward viable, ethical, and antiracist solutions to questions about sustainable farming, global economic inequality, and hunger. Throughout the semester, participants will use the lens of race and ethnicity to study and discuss how these two concepts affect access to agricultural land, foodstuffs /foodways, environmental justice and nature.

The applied research methods course will allow students to examine research as a driver of change in poverty studies. Throughout this course students will learn a variety of research methods that will equip them with the skills to engage research that in some way seeks to disrupt, reduce, or abolish poverty. Students will learn the foundations of applied research through qualitative and quantitative methods including sampling basics, grounded ethnographic approaches, survey design and the utilization of secondary sources. Students will also engage with experiential learning that is focused on problem-based goals and relevant applications in the area of poverty. This course will create an opportunity for students to learn practical approaches to data identification, collection, analysis and dissemination. It will include a lecture and seminar-based format where students are introduced to key concepts in research methods as well as hands-on opportunities to practice what they've learned in collaboration with community partnerships. At the end of this course, students will have the strategies, tools and confidence to handle complex data, to develop practical solutions to current challenges, and develop a clearer understanding of the varying ways knowledge can be created and accessed. The course will culminate in a group research project.

Almost 40% of the world's population is overweight or has obesity. Obesity has become a central focus in biological research as well as policy. Billions of dollars have been spent on public health interventions, biological interventions, diets, and exercise regimens. However, the obesity rate among adults and children has been steadily increasing globally. Why is this happening? How do we even define obesity? Does that definition truly reflect health? Why do we even have fat to begin with...actually what even is fat?!? Why are humans prone to obesity? These are just some of the questions we will address in this class. Using non-traditional methods and assignments, we will discuss adipose tissue and digestive physiology, the role evolution has played in the human propensity to hold onto fat, diet and exercise, food insecurity, therapeutic interventions, as well as the physical and mental health consequences of having obesity. We will use this as a basis to investigate the biological and cultural factors including stigma, race, and gender that shape our perceptions of body image and health in the midst of the obesity epidemic. Finally, this course will include occasional laboratory exercises to familiarize you with the methods used to assess body mass, body composition, metabolic rate, and point of care measures of biomarkers like glucose and cholesterol.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has emerged as a crucial skill in the workforce, especially with the advent and accessibility of generative AI technologies. From intelligent chatbots and virtual assistants to automated content creation and sentiment analysis, NLP applications are transforming industries and redefining how we interact with technology. Mastery of NLP techniques and tools not only opens doors to careers in the technology sector but also equips students to contribute to innovations that shape our future. Language Processing in Practice is a hands-on course designed to introduce students to the fundamental theory and applications of NLP, with a special emphasis on working with large language models, generative AI, and the Hugging Face ecosystem. The course focuses on practical techniques for processing, analyzing, generating, and understanding human language data. Students will explore key topics such as text preprocessing, tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, parsing, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, machine translation, and text generation. The curriculum places a strong emphasis on modern NLP libraries and frameworks like NLTK, spaCy, and particularly Hugging Face Transformers. Through a series of projects and assignments, students will gain experience in building NLP applications, creating word embeddings with pre-trained large language models, and generating human-like text using generative AI models. Basic proficiency in Python programming is required.

This course examines the intersection of gender, health policy, and health care around the world, by using an integrative anthropological approach. Gender is frequently a central contributing (though sometimes ignored) factor to people’s health. People across the gender spectrum experience their biological and social lives (social, economic, political, and biological) in unique ways, and all of these can shape their health. What causes different genders to experience different illnesses? What factors place some genders at greater risk for illness than others? How do different genders across the world experience health policies? Are they affected and constrained by similar factors? How do their work lives affect their experiences with health? How has risk changed through time? How is the body medically produced? How do poverty, race, and discrimination play a role in people’s gendered well-being? Through an inquiry-based approach, and through readings from across the sub-disciplines of anthropology, these and other topics will be addressed in this class. In this writing-intensive course you will work on a research project, you will learn to write your results and analysis, and you will receive feedback on your writing in order to understand the iterative nature of good writing.

Our species is unique because it is the only species that deliberately buries its dead. Mortuary analysis (the study of burial patterns) is a powerful approach that archaeologists use for the study of prehistoric social organization and ideology. This course explores the significance of prehistoric human mortuary behavior, from the first evidence of deliberate burial by Neanderthals as an indicator of the evolution of symbolic thought, to the analysis of the sometimes spectacular burial patterns found in complex societies such as ancient Egypt and Megalithic Europe. We will also examine the theoretical and practical aspects of the archaeology of death, including the applications of various techniques ranging from statistics to ethnography, and the legal and ethical issues associated with the excavation and scientific study of human remains.

The aim of this class is to try to understand what conquest, as we have traditionally called it, meant to the people who experienced it in some parts of the Americas that joined the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth century. We'll concentrate on indigenous sources - documentary, pictorial, and material - and try to adopt the indigenous point of view, without neglecting sources mediated by Europeans. Although the class will concentrate on selected cases from Mesoamerica, the lecturer will try to set the materials in the context of other encounters, both within the Americas and further afield; and students will be free, if they wish, to explore case-studies from anywhere they choose in the Americas (in consultation with the lecturer and subject to his approval) in their individual projects.

The course adopts an entrepreneurial perspective in exploring the role of business in helping to address the poverty challenge in developing and developed economies. The multi-faceted nature of poverty and its implications when it comes to business and entrepreneurship are explored. Attention is devoted to venture creation as a pathway out of poverty, and to how the larger business community can be leveraged in poverty alleviation efforts. Students will examine case studies and meet low income entrepreneurs.

Bioarchaeology is the study of human skeletal remains for reconstructing the biology and cultures of past peoples. We will use the three large ancient Near Eastern collections housed in the Anthropology department to explore theoretical and methodological issues related to: paleopathology (violence, infection, & nutrition indicators in particular), population mobility (migration & pilgrimage), subsistence (chemical analysis of diet & weaning), paleodemography, childhood health and adaptability, mortuary analysis, daily activities (musculo-skeletal indicators), bimolecular genetics, and ethical issues faced when working with human remains. We will explore the archaeological and/or historical records associated with each collection as well, for an holistic understanding of ancient life at these sites. This will be a very hand-on class requiring active participation.

This lab-intensive course will explore the methods used in biological anthropology for studying individual human remains, as well as those employed to establish biocultural connections at the population level. The three objectives of the class are: 1) develop and expand your skills in the identification of human skeletal remains (bones, landmarks, forensic methods); 2) develop an understanding of how skeletal remains can be used to reconstruct past patterns of adaptation and biocultural evolution; 3) Produce a piece of original research related to one of the skeletal collections curated in the BioArchaeology Lab. During the course of the semester, you will learn the bones, as well as the major landmarks for each. You will be able to side bones, determine age & sex, reconstruct stature, and identify trauma & disease. You will also learn how these features are used for evolutionary, bioarchaeological, and comparative anatomical studies. And, you will be introduced to the potential of the integrative nature of osteological analyses through the ‘6Ds of bioarchaeology’ – Demography, Diet, Disease, Daily activities, Death, bioDistance. Ultimately, you will be able to identify fragmentary skeletal material typical of those found in many archaeological settings, and, using independent lines of evidence, establish a biocultural framework for ancient populations.

By helping us step back to see humans as primates, mammals, vertebrates, and beyond, evolutionary theory provides a framework for understanding many aspects of our day-to-day lives that shape the health and well-being, including weight gain-diet, psychosocial stress, immune function, sleep patterns, risky behavior, and child development. But, increasing evidence from the exciting field of "developmental origins of health and disease" suggests that our biological and behavioral patterns are far from being determined solely by our genes. Our early life contexts, from before birth, and possibly even the experiences of our parents and grandparents in prior generations influence how our brains and biological systems function, including how genes are expressed, and thus impact our health and behavior. This course will bring these dynamic perspectives together to answer questions regarding why we get sick, how our bodies flexibly respond to the world around us, and the inheritances we receive from our ancestors.

This course provides students with a unique introduction to Asia in all its diversity, ranging from its languages, cultures, and histories to its political and economic systems and its relations with the US. As the global balance of power is shifting towards Asia, it is more important than ever for Notre Dame students to have more than just basic knowledge about the continent. This course provides just that: an opportunity to take your understanding of Asia beyond the level of what you read in the newspapers, providing you with the knowledge and the tools to formulate your own critical understanding of the region and its global environment. Different types of writing about Asia – academic, journalistic, diplomatic, political, popular – will be examined alongside different ways in which Asia has been and continues to be represented in the western imagination. Asian perspectives will be accessed through English-language writings and English-language media published in Asia. Guest lecturers with specific expertise on individual Asian countries will join the class at regular intervals. Assessment methods will include both written work and classroom (group) presentations.

This course is aimed to provide a basic understanding of how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and satellite imagery can be used to visualize and analyze environmental data. Students will learn basic techniques for analyzing, manipulating and creating geospatial data in both pixel-based (satellite imagery and digital terrain models) and vector based (point, line and polygon representation of spatial data) formats. Students will also learn how acquire high resolution satellite imagery and other GIS data from online data servers.

In Apocalypse Now (1979), a single phrase marks an iconic enemy and creates a chain of associations that separate Western Selves from Eastern Others. The story behind the phrase, "Charlie don't surf," is one of many complex narratives characterizing the Southeast Asian region that call for further critical understanding. This course is an anthropological journey through Southeast Asia, a region rich in cultural diversity, linguistic complexity and archaeological significance. Including the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma), students can explore the ecological, historical, and socio-cultural patterns of this ethnographic region through analyses of its societies and institutions. With a holistic approach to the cultural influences that characterize Southeast Asia, we will chart the region's indigenous, social, political, economic, artistic and religious formations over time. The course offers a broad overview of the historical factors affecting the region, including the impact of Indian, Islamic, Chinese, and European exchange, colonization, and violence. These transregional influences provide a window from which to view contemporary issues in the cultural politics and economics of Southeast Asia. The course provides an overview of the major cultural features of the region to enable students to gain a better understanding of the current developments within the region and the lives of Southeast Asians. Overall, we will contribute to the development of anthropological ideas about Asia while also providing a means to organize and analyze Asian ethnographic perspectives.

Visual anthropology involves the cross-cultural study of images in communication and the use of images as a method for doing anthropology. This course proceeds through a non-linear integration of visual themes including water, earth, light, fire, flesh and blood with analytical themes including aesthetics, poetics, violence, history, materiality and subjectivity. We explore still photography, film, and popular media in domains from ethnography, social documentary, war photojournalism, to high art. Students watch, read and write about, and generate visual products of their own in multiple media.

Have you ever pondered how people live(d) in a world without television, YouTube, iPhones, Lady GaGa, and cellphones? Why have bellbottoms come and gone twice in the last 50 years? Will we be forced to relive the fashion mistakes of the 1980s? What new stuff will people invent and sell next? In asking and answering these questions, we must focus on one underlying query: What does our stuff really say about who we are and who we want to be? This course combines lectures, discussions, and interactive small group activities to explore the nature and breadth of peoples' relationships with their things. We will investigate why and how people make and use different types of objects, and how the use of these material goods resonates with peoples' identities in the deep past, recent history, and today. Since everyone in the class will already be an expert user and consumer of things, we will consider how people today use material objects to assert, remake, reclaim, and create identities, and compare today's practices to those of people who lived long ago. Class members will learn about how anthropologists, including ethnographers (studying people today) and archaeologists (studying past peoples) think about and approach the material nature of our social, economic, and political lives. We will discuss why styles and technologies change through time, and why, in the end, there is very little new under the sun in terms of human behaviors and the way people produce and consume goods. The topical breadth of this workshop encompasses most social science disciplines, including history, economics, psychology, and anthropology, and resonates with classics, art history, and gender studies.

This course focuses on archaeological and ethnographic ceramic collections and studies to explore how people make, use, discard, and understand ceramic objects in their lives. Ceramics offer tactile and material expressions of culture, and signify and embody complex intersectional ideas about what it means to be human. Through hands-on projects with archaeological and ethnographic ceramic collections from ND professors’ research projects, students will engage in experiential learning about gender, race, class, sexuality, political power structures, and identity. All peoples’ identities are grounded in intersectional axes of difference, and ceramics offer a tangible tool for exploring how people use material culture and technology to be themselves, interact with others, and build personhood in the past and present. Because ceramic remains are abundant in many archaeological sites, the study of pottery has a long history in archaeology. Analysis and interpretation of ceramics allows archaeologists to accomplish varied ends: to establish a time scale, to document interconnections between different areas, sites, or groups of people, and to suggest what activities were carried out at particular sites. How archaeologists study the connection between ceramics and people, today and in the past, is the focus of this course, and we will be using contemporary, prehistoric and historic archaeological collections from Jordan, Ghana, and the United States to enable students to explore the linkage between people and their ceramic material culture.

How do people in immigrant-receiving countries shape their attitudes toward immigrants? What are the differences between refugees and other migrants? How is immigration related to urban "immigrant riots?" And what can anthropological studies of borders and national policies tell us about the transnational world in which we live? We will examine these and related questions, and more generally the causes, lived experiences, and consequences of migration. We will acquire a sound understanding of migration in its social, political, legal, and cultural facets. Fieldwork accounts from countries of origin and from the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Japan will enable us to appreciate both global and U.S. distinctive trends. Rather than merely learning a collection of facts about immigrants, we will address how migration intersects with gender and class, the mass media, border enforcement, racism, the economy, territory and identity formation, and religion.

The course will adopt a broad anthropological perspective to introduce students to the cultural and utilitarian contexts of justice that speak to the everyday experience – urging students to rethink issues of education, health, wage, economy, immigration, peace, environment, and spirituality, including the issue of justice itself. We will read some classic and contemporary works on justice that may have (or have not) garnered attention in a world emerging from a pandemic. By the end of the course, students will learn how to use the framework of ‘just-ness’ in things they do on the campus, at home, offices, marketplaces, and inside other social and civil arenas – and unpack their drivers as budding scholars in the humanistic social sciences.

This course provides an introduction to the emergent field of social studies of data-intensive analytics for the examination of how "things are done with data." The goal is to cover a wide range of examples and practical applications to introduce questions of design and implementation, privacy and surveillance, as well as governance and stewardship of digital tools and infrastructures. Following the performative aspect of data, we will explore social, technical, political, and economic dynamics that involve data extraction, sharing, literacy, and analysis. From little to big data practices, we will examine at the interface level the professional and institutional applications, development histories, and current political economy of data to situate ourselves as engaged technologists and researchers, not detached critics or passive users. There are no prerequisites for this course: no previous experience in statistics or programming is needed, but independent study of the supplementary materials we provide is highly encouraged.

Vengeful spirits, foxes that turn into alluring women, green and red ogres, Godzilla, and Pokémon: these are some of the monsters that have spooked and beguiled Japanese people across time. This course explores how medieval legends and local histories of monsters and gods play an important role in identifying and resolving social anxieties throughout Japan's cultural history, from the 8th to the 21st century. The materials we will examine include literature, manga, film, and anime, in addition to scholarly essays and historical texts.

As an emergent field of ethnographic theory and methods, design anthropology involves talking to people, figuring out what they want, and creating ways to improve our shared lives. These practices are focused on developing ideas and forms based on people’s needs while anticipating conscious practice and considerate use. Design anthropologists create potentials for future selves, anticipating projected needs and transcending potential limitations. This seminar introduces the emerging phenomenon and ongoing merger of the anthropology of design. It integrates sources in design anthropology, ethnographic design, cultural marketing, and other applied methodologies. We will engage with theoretical discussions, analytical approaches, practicing exercises, and portfolio development to explore the holistic depths of this nascent field.

Site of the delayed 2020 Olympics, Tokyo has recently been under scrutiny as a problematic international space. Tokyo's role as a complicated space of both exclusion and inclusion has a deeper history, however, extending back to a relatively recent founding in the late 16th century. This course looks at how the imaginative figuration of Tokyo has been a battleground for contesting different ethnic, social, and gendered identities in historical documents, literature, and popular culture.

Archaeology is a dynamic worldwide discipline that draws on both the sciences and humanities to interpret material remains of the human past. This course introduces the basic definitions and concepts for archaeological research and includes a practical component. It provides an introduction to archaeology for those who are interested in the discipline, as well as a foundation course for those wishing to proceed to any senior course of study in Archaeology. This two-part subject provides, first, an introduction to the history and development of archaeological research from antiquarianism to the present science. It also examines at a general level relative and absolute dating methods and chronological sequences. The course also comprises an excavation component.

This interdisciplinary module offers an introduction to archaeology, providing a grounding in the main concepts, methodologies, and techniques of investigating the past through material evidence and physical environments. Topics will include the identification and ways of investigating archaeological sites and materials, as well as how archaeologists and cultural heritage practitioners disseminate, preserve, and curate the past for professional and public audiences. A key component of this module will be introducing the multi-disciplinary nature of the subject; lectures and seminars will cover topics that demonstrate the application of modern scientific and digital technologies to ancient landscapes and materials; included will be uses of Geophysical Information Systems, Environmental Analyses, Ancient DNA, and the creation and management of databases. Tutorials and workshops will focus on methods and approaches, and the presentation of data and its interpretation.

Taught as ANTH1001 - 'Being Human: Culture, Identity and Society' at a host insitution. We live in a multicultural world where there are many ways of 'being human'. At the same time, all people share some experiences in common—all learn, share and communicate beliefs, create and maintain social relationships, adapt to local environments, and make a living through particular modes of production. This unit explores the world's rich diversity of human experience and practice, looking at cross-cultural examples of it in domains such as religion, identity, subsistence, social inequality and communication. It also considers the variety of ways that anthropologists and sociologists conduct their research.

Fieldwork is a key research tool in archaeology and develops many skills that have extensive professional applications. This course provides, by use of bona-fide archaeological sites, knowledge of methods and the techniques that may be applied in archaeological contexts. The emphasis of this course is on gaining competence, or developing an existing competence, in the broad range of techniques involved in fieldwork practice. During fieldwork, students undertake surface exploration and excavation, environmental sampling techniques and recording. After fieldwork, students will be involved in post-excavation processing and archival work. The course is tailored to archaeology students.

This unit focusses on the deep human history of Australia and the Indo-Pacific. The region is playing an increasingly important role in archaeological research and for our understanding of the global story of humanity. Recent years have seen the uncovering of the oldest dated rock art in the world in Indonesia and the region was home to the earliest seafarers, who first settled Australia and New Guinea ca. 65,000 years ago.

This class focuses on Indigenous populations in Australia, their histories, and how societal disparities affect them.

Global Health is a relatively new though rapidly expanding field of enquiry in which scholars and public health practitioners seek to understand the challenge that globalization presents for human health. Globalization has led to a shift from national to global medicine in which the leading determinants of health are no longer circumscribed by the territorial boundaries of individual states, leaving nations less able to control the health outcomes of their citizens. The causes of this globalization are still not fully understood, and its effects are hotly debated, especially with respect to its potential benefits and negative consequences for human health. This course seeks to provide a conceptual framework for identifying the different types of global change that impact public health and for understanding the key drivers of this change. More particularly, the course investigates how the new stakeholders in healthcare have shaped medical services to serve their own vested interests and ideological commitments. including national governments, international agencies, advocacy groups, commercial companies, and the pharmaceutical industry. The course concludes by assessing the current state of public health in light of the globalization and 'commodification' of healthcare at the beginning of the 21st century.

The aim of this module is to investigate expressions of identity, social organisation and cultural practices among Gaelic peoples c. 1200-1600 AD, through the record of their settlements and material culture. There is particular emphasis on the centrality of ancestral attachment and pedigree of place in Gaelic society. Social organisation was defined by a deeply hierarchical kin-based structure of septs, and framed by a concept of geography as lineage. Those values influenced the ways in which people organised and settled their territories and lived their lives. The impacts and outcomes of relationships between Gaelic peoples and colonial communities on the island of Ireland in this period are integral to the module. The approach is grounded in the theory and methods of historical archaeology (Old World), in which the efficacy of all types of archaeological evidence, from artefacts to landscapes, buildings and text, is valued in the generation of interpretations of the past.

ND Keough Ctr Course: Prof. Kevin Whelan. Evolution of Irish culture from the eighteenth century to the contemporary period; It aims to give students a foundational understanding of the cultural inheritance of the island. While organized in broadly chronological terms, it will also examine crucial thematic concerns -- landscape, history, languages, economy, society, politics and government, literature, music, sport.

From the earliest written works to popular culture today, the collapse of ancient civilisations has been a concern for societies all over the globe. Cycles of growth and collapse are embedded into our understanding of the human story. These crises regularly punctuate the real and imagined past the destruction of Atlantis, the sack of Troy, the Biblical Exodus, the Fall of the Roman Empire, the Maya collapse, the demise of complexity on Easter Island (Rapa Nui), the end of Communism in Europe. While endings are emphasised in such narratives, continuity and cultural resilience are also hallmarks of these horizons of change as people negotiate and adapt to new situations. The very idea of collapse as being a catastrophic turning point may well be seen as hyperbolic, particularly when practices, ideas or networks survive and demonstrate cultural resilience. Taking a broad approach to prehistory and early history, this module explores the forms of crises that were commonly experienced by a variety of societies and how these were responded to. We will be assessing the impacts of climate change, natural disasters, sociopolitical change, migrations and wars, amongst other factors. The outcome will be for you to have a better understanding about the varied responses to crisis and change as they unfolded in past societies. Through this, we will consider how these archaeological case studies can inform us about challenges we face in the world today.

This module examines food and drink production and consumption in ancient Greece and Rome through a combination of archaeological remains, literary sources, iconography, and anthropological theory. From daily bread to pungent fish sauce, food consumption can be linked to wider social issues such as status and identity. These issues will be considered with reference to specific topics including feasting (Greek symposion and Roman convivium), sacrifice, taboos, and funerary meals, while case studies of olive oil, wine, cereals and fish will facilitate an understanding of food production in the ancient world. Tutorials include recreating Roman recipes and identifying spices. Throughout the module, students are encouraged to reflect on their own consumption habits and related contemporary issues. An optional visit to the UCD apiary is included.

The study of the material culture of past societies is one of the most direct ways to explore not only the technological advances of these peoples, but also their beliefs and aspects of everyday life. This course deals primarily with the technologies applied to transform different raw materials into finished portable products and permanent installations such as building and bridges covering a large chronological period spanning from the Neolithic up to Roman times in Greece and the Greek world in general.

This course highlights the importance of science communication and investigate its long lasting influence on a wide range of audiences. We will follow research groups at the National Research Institute and measure the impact that this research can have on society and the research center.

This course will investigate a range of processes through which raw materials such as clay, wood, and marble were shaped into objects such as Dipylon vases, Kouroi sculptures, temple friezes, and jewelry.

The course surveys the development of Byzantine art from the Late Antique Period through the Palaeologan periods. Architecture provides the framework from which the other arts, especially mosaic, fresco, panel painting, and manuscript illumination are examined. These works are looked at in terms of their formal characteristics, but the emphasis of the course is placed on exploring the meaning of this art beyond its formal aspects, and on appreciating its function in Byzantine society, particularly as a reflection of both the theological concerns and the political realities that the Byzantine Empire confronted. Readings introduce a range of approaches to this art in current scholarship, and class trips to a number of monasteries and museums, allow personal investigation of some of the most important and beautiful examples of Byzantine Art that have survived.

The aim of the course is to help students understand the urban characteristics of Athens in all its complexity.

The various forms of traditional life in the Iberian Peninsula in terms of social and economic features as well as literary, artistic, and religious aspects. Taught in Toledo, Spain

"Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are". Quite possibly the most famous words in the entire history of food-writing, that phrase, issued by 19th-century epicure, politician, layer and gastronome, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, has never been truer than it is today. Food has always been closely linked to identity, but in the past three decades, it has also become the focus of a host of issues - everything from the industrialization of farming to the integration of immigrants - that reflect cultural, social, and even political values. In this course, we will look at the nexus between what you eat and who you are by focusing on food culture across the world, but by using most case studies from North Europa, South Europe and in the United States. Europe has a deeply-rooted culinary tradition that was shaped by geography, religion, and demographics. But in recent years each has also shot to the forefront of the gastronomic world, producing a distinctive kind of cutting-edge cuisine ('molecular gastronomy'; 'new Nordic' in Denmark) that has turned its chefs into celebrities and its restaurants into the object of international pilgrimage. We'll investigate how those transformations have come about, and what they have meant - culturally, economically, and even artistically - for the societies that produced them. Throughout the course, students will read documents from leading philosophers and anthropologist include Mary Douglas, Pierre Bourdieu, Ari Ariel, and Clifford Geertz. Then, they will apply their literary knowledge by constructing a written analysis of the theory behind Bourdieu's idea of cultural and economic capital, a series of written analyses on identity, nationalism, religion, and culture, and finally an in-depth essay on identity, morality, or nationalism based on an interview they conduct and supported by literature from the course.

This course is designed to offer an historical overview of 20th Century Italian Cultural History with focus on film, design, music, and fashion. Students will be provided with chronologically ordered articles, documents, images, videos, etc. demonstrating the role that each of these arts and industries played in the formation of what we now call contemporary Italian culture. By the end of the course students will have acquired the ability to recognize, analyze and fully understand the influence that contemporary Italian culture, its brand names and manufacturers, have had on the rest of the world.

At the end of the course unit students will tools for an integrated approach to the study of the archaeological sites around Vesuvius, attentive to their specific nature of historic sites, which have their status as the best sample of classical archeology, not because of their real excellence in the ancient world, but because of the fate and their exceptional material preservation.

Students will learn about the Chilean political process since the 1930s, with a special emphasis on the period from 1964 to 2002. Students will analyze and discuss institutional, economic, social and cultural changes that occurred during that period. Chilean politics, economics and sociology will be addressed from a historical perspective.

The Camino de Santiago constitutes a cultural milestone that incorporates the medieval past of Spain with the relevant recovery of its use in the present. This course offers the possibility for us to enter the medieval society of Spain and Europe, to know the exceptional route of St. James, and examine the new forms of its use including its representations as a cultural milestone, an interior journey, or an entrance into the northwest of Spain.

A lecture and discussion course which examines theories and dynamics of socio-cultural continuity and change. Beginning with case studies of commitment to continuity, we then will focus on situations of change related to a range of factors, various degrees, types, and rates of change, and consideration of outcomes. In conclusion we will consider human costs and benefits while analyzing key issues in our contemporary world and in the discipline of anthropology.

This unit aims to provide U.S. Study Abroad students with a substantial overview of Australian history and an analysis of the evolution of contemporary Australian society. It covers major themes in Australian history and offers a context for comparison with aspects of American history and society. A principal theme of the unit is of the small and isolated early Australian settler population coming to terms with an unfamiliar and often hostile environment in one of the most remote parts of the British Empire. The unit emphasises the changing pattern of Aboriginal/white relations: from armed friction on the frontier during colonial times, to the beginnings of a search for reconciliation. The brutal nature of the convict system, the desperate expansion of the gold period, and the sacrifices of Australians in far off fields during the 'Great War' are all examined in some detail. Australia's changing relationships with its powerful allies - Britain and the United States - are also examined. Through it all, Australia has had a bloody, determined and vibrant history as the 'Great Southern Land' and has, through the struggles of its migrants and indigenous people, been transformed into a modern society.

What does globalisation mean at local levels? In the face of so much 'progress', why are many people still so poor and others so rich? This unit explores how people's lives have been transformed by colonialism, economic development and globalisation. Focusing particularly on Australia and our region, it examines various social science perspectives on inequality, migration, urbanisation, work, modernisation, globalisation, culture, communication and the environment.

This class will introduce you to Danish language as well as Danish culture. You will never be able to immerse yourself in a culture unless you know just a little bit of the local language. The course will explore how language serves as an opener to culture. The language itself and the interactional conventions and etiquette reveal something of the values and worldviews that form everyday life in a community and how we perceive others and ourselves. By analyzing keywords and concepts and applying appropriate etiquette while speaking the language, you learn how to navigate in a foreign culture. When studying the Danish language, we will focus on spoken everyday Danish. The course will enable you to have short basic conversations with Danes from the very beginning of the semester. The course will provide an insight into Danish culture through a study of collective Danish identity and self- perception. We will focus on dominant national narratives and symbolism, and approach some of the Danish key values from both a historical and modern perspective. The course will zoom in on key historical events, national memories, symbols, and works of art as well as literature that have contributed to shaping modern Danish identity. An important component of the course will be your own observations and critical analysis of what you are experiencing. There will be a strong focus on intercultural awareness and reflection through a comparative approach. We will use Copenhagen and Denmark as an extended classroom and discuss current key issues and events in Denmark. This class will enable you to become a qualified discussion partner to your Danish family, friends or roommates and if you are willing to take the step out of your comfort zone, interesting and thought provoking discussions are almost sure to happen. Moreover, you will acquire a new and more nuanced perspective on your own cultural background.

In Europe, the colonial past has often been marginalized in the collective memory, as practices of imperialism and colonialism seldom fit into contemporary national narratives. Using the former Danish West Indies and Greenland as case studies, this course deconstructs colonial narratives in the literature, film, art, advertisements, and historical works. Keeping a comparative perspective, we situate our discussions in current European debates about 'the other.'

Global Health is an interdisciplinary field that requires the integration of lived experiences and narratives into health discourses. The premise of SHAER is to establish a theoretical platform for the development of story-telling interventions in Global Health. SHAER is embedded into the meanings of health and suffering related to distress and disease from various contexts that are the landscape of global health research and practice such as health system development, humanitarian health efforts, conflict and disaster settings, and the universal human right to health and justice. The concept of SHAER has been developed as part of a research collaboration with an international network to develop a traditional story-telling trauma therapeutic intervention for gender-based violence and conflict-related trauma. Collective collaborations from trauma studies, psychiatry, literature, political and social science, philosophy and ethics produced a manual for a storytelling intervention in Afghanistan, Kashmir Valley, and Turkey, which embodied storytelling traditions and cultural histories of what a story means and who are the storytellers. This course will foster the principles and premises through which SHAER are founded on, namely the need to create spaces for marginalised narratives through humanities-based methodologies to improve global health practice and research, including other relevant health fields such as medicine. The course offers the pedagogical aspect of the theoretical frameworks of storytelling and narratives from literary perspectives. Another important aspect of the course is the learning of skills related to health interventions. Through a collaboration with an arts foundation, the students will learn how to propose and form a storytelling intervention. Students shall have the opportunity to choose a particular cultural context of their interest and form a student engagement activity through the facilitation of the arts foundation, Invisible Flock, and to apply the theoretical knowledge to an applied aspect of global health.

The course introduces students to the full range of the material and visual culture of the ancient Greek world from the Neolithic to the Imperial Roman period. Each class will be focused on selected key developments and issues in the study of Greek art and archaeology. Each theme will be discussed within its own historical and chronological context. Discussions will range from the study of the Minoan Civilization, the discovery of the writing and the epigraphic evidence, Panhellenic sanctuaries, the diversity of public buildings, the monumental sculpture, the sculpture of death and the portable objects of daily life.

This course explores how food relates to culture and identity, with a focus on ideas of authenticity. We look at food practices and culture in Greece and other societies to understand how history, tradition, and globalization shape what people eat.

A survey of the art and archaeology of Greece from prehistoric times to the end of the Classical period: its purpose is to introduce the student, using whenever possible the primary sources (monuments and artifacts), to the ancient civilizations of the Aegean and Greece: Minoan, Mycenaean, and Classical Greek. The schedule of class visits to sites, monuments and museums is coordinated as much as possible with school and class trips. Classroom lectures and the readings provide the historical context into which to set the monuments and artifacts. Not intended for students who take A361, or for East Mediterranean Area Studies Track students.

This course explores the dynamics of mobility, trade and exchange networks in the Mediterranean from prehistory to Late Antiquity. These dynamics have shaped economic and military superpowers, all thriving and eventually collapsing, sometimes overlapping in this quite unique region.

This course offers a comprehensive overview of the topography, archaeology and history of Athens from the earliest prehistoric settlement through to the demise of the city in Late Antiquity, but focuses particularly on the monuments and culture of the Arch aic to Roman periods. Classes are taught on - site and cover all the major (and many minor) sites around Athens, giving a complete picture of the ancient city in its urban, social, religious, and historical contexts. One of the main aims of the course is to investigate how an understanding of the physical fabric of Athens can inform important historical questions about Athenian Democracy, Empire, religion, and political and social life. The course will also place Athenian sites and monuments into their modern setting, exploring the discovery of ancient Athens from the earliest modern travelers in the 15th century AD, to the origins of scientific excavations in the 19th century, and will look at how ancient Athens is being excavated and preserved today.

Archaeological methodology has undergone a revolutionary transformation over the past decade. Traditional techniques for recording and interpreting archaeological data are increasingly supplanted by digital and computational methods, which have become integral to both archaeological projects and cultural heritage management (CHM). This course explores the latest state-of-the-art advancements in 3D modeling and photogrammetry, GIS-based spatial archaeological analysis, database management, digital archaeological illustration, remote sensing, and more. Through a blend of lectures, hands-on projects, and student presentations, students will engage with cutting-edge technologies and methodologies, developing both theoretical knowledge and practical skills. The curriculum culminates with an examination of the ethics surrounding digital archaeology and a discussion of contemporary critical approaches to its practice. This ensures that students not only master technological tools but also critically assess the broader implications and responsibilities inherent in the digital transformation of archaeological work.

This course explores the history of how gender and sexuality have been practiced and portrayed in Greece. We analyze changes in gender norms over time, and this impacts the overall culture of Greece. Assignments include readings, class trips to relevant sites, and ethnography experiences.

In the world of global economy, the sense of place has changed dramatically over the past decades affecting mostly the physiognomy of metropolitan areas. Socio-spatial inequalities are evident in different urban contexts and social exclusion refers to a wide range of population groups. From this point of view, radical geography and feminist urbanism offers a different perspective on socio-spatial interpretation and analysis, providing different alternatives for ur-ban development, beyond the traditional patriarchic patterns. Combined with environmental concerns, eco-feminist approaches dare to differ from the norm, introducing a relatively new scientific field that attracts scholars from different disciplines. In light of all these, this course focuses on radical theories expressing the feminist view on the development of urban surround-ings, analyzing socio-spatial inequalities. Exploring experimental examples as well as applied policies, students will familiarize with the basic theories on the field, elaborating critical thinking on the existing patterns of urban planning. They will comprehend the international experience on the field as well as the case of Greece. The course is suitable for students from different scientific fields as anthropologists, urban and regional planners, sociologists, ethnographers and architects. It includes in classroom lessons and extended field work so as to study in depth the Greek case study. Field work involves onsite lessons in selected neighborhoods and also partic-ipant observation in open public spaces. Class visits are divided into two parts; the first part focuses on urban socio-spatial inequalities as analyzed by radical geography and the second emphasizes on gender representation in public urban spaces. Class visits help students com-prehend theoretical approaches discussed during the in-classroom lessons.

This course presents the landscape approach through intersisiplinary research and field work. The course provides an introduction to landscape-based study and its applications; a main goal is building an appreciation for landscape literacy.

This course focuses on radical theories expressing the feminist view on the development of urban surroundings, analyzing socio-spatial inequalities.

The course is designed to introduce students to the history of museums and to curating practices. Classes will discuss the cultural position of the museum, the evolution of its function, the different forms of display, the historical developments of the act of collecting, the position of the visitor and the role of the curator. The primary purpose of the course is to provide students with a critical vocabulary for understanding how museums produce knowledge and structure the ways in which history, geography, cultural difference, and social hierarchies are mapped. Through a series of richly detailed case studies related to ancient and contemporary Rome museums, collections and institutions, classes will investigate the differences between the roles, the missions, the objectives, and the policies of conservation and exhibition-making in spaces, relating to modalities of thought. The course also intends to introduce the figure of the curator and its development from conservator and classifier to creative, critical protagonist of contemporary art culture. The course concludes with an overview of current debates around the contemporary need for museums, and large scale exhibition (such as Biennials and Triennials) and their perceived social functions.

Introduction to the most significant artistic monuments and trends of European art and architecture. They are designed both for the student with no previous art history background, and for the student with some experience seeking a general historical overview.

Students will be introduced to archaeological research, focusing on Classical Antiquity. The recovering of ancient monuments and artifacts by excavation is only one archaeological method to get information on the past. We will learn about radar surveys, aerial reconnaissance and underwater archaeology. The interpretation of stratigraphy and dating methods based on natural sciences (as C14, endrochronology, thermoluminescence), on historical data or on stylistic evidence jointly contribute to establish a chronology. Apart from fieldwork, the question remains what to do with the regained facts: We will see the changing interests of the discipline by an overview of the history of archaeology, from the first scientific excavations in the 18th century to new approaches in the last years. Finally, the presentation to the public (restoration, museums) and problems as illegal digging and trading will be discussed.

This course examines Roman visual culture in Italy from c. 800 B.C. to c. 400 AD by focusing on the most important surviving sites in Rome and its environs and in the areas hit by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. A focus throughout the course is development of Roman cities and towns, their plans and topography, their public monuments and their political, economic, social, and religious institutions. We will also study private architecture: from the aristocratic city-house to the country villa to middle class homes. In addition to formal descriptions of the structures, there is a strong emphasis on the role of the monument in ancient society. The course will be conducted entirely on site. There is a mandatory week-end field trip to Pompeii and Herculaneum (equivalent to 3 class meetings).

This course focuses on the history of the (bourgeois) nuclear family, looking at what social conditions led to its creation as conceived of in modern day. We then look at its current state and how politics of the family affect the structure.

This course offers a critical examination of the social conditions of Black Italians today, at the intersection of gender, race and class inequalities with a focus on their lived experience and calls for structural change. Within the frame of decolonial and critical race theory, the course explores the theoretical and cultural production of the descendants of the Black diaspora in Italy.

This course looks at the history of the environment combined with human history. Using paleoclimatology and geology techniques, this course uses primary data sources such as climatological datasets and site visits. This course focuses specifically on the climatic history of Italy and the Mediterranean in historical periods.

This course focuses on investigating the types of societies that occupied Europe in the Bronze Age. A range of themes will be addressed including patterns of production, exchange and interaction, the exceptional social and economic developments in Iberia and in the Aegean region, the role of warriors, and patterns of metalwork deposition and hoarding. Following these thematic treatments, we will investigate the nature of Bronze Age societies by focusing on how the concept of 'chiefdoms' has been developed and used by anthropologists and archaeologists. This will involve a close look at some Polynesian chiefdoms that have been used as interpretive models to help understand Bronze Age European societies and specific European case studies focusing on Wessex in England, and Denmark.

This course introduces evidence from the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods of Western Asia and Europe, to create a context for the understanding of the early prehistory of Ireland. We will look particularly at the possible reasons why communities who lived by foraging and hunting adopted agriculture and what implications those changes had. The 14 course begins with an overview, followed by an examination of various aspects of Mesolithic society. The origin of farming in Western Asia is next, followed by the Neolithic of the central and north European plain and the introduction of agriculture to Western Europe, particularly to Britain and Ireland. The development of ritual and burial monuments will be explored towards the end of the course.

As early as the 4th millennium BC people in some parts of the world began living in a new form of society characterised by social and economic inequalities. Archaeologists refer to these complex, state-level societies as civilizations. How and why did these ancient civilizations first emerge and can we detect common processes involved in the emergence and development of different early civilizations? This course begins with a review of various theories of state formation with different emphases ranging from economic and environmental factors to social factors. The course then moves on to a more detailed consideration of four areas where some of the earliest states developed: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Mesoamerica.

Rural areas are revered for their beauty and their contribution to the sustainability of mankind. Nevertheless, the rural can often be depicted as remote, excluded and in need of modernisation. One of the central themes to emerge from this course will be the multifaceted and challenging nature of the rural, which has attributed to the richness and breath of contemporary research in modern rural change.

Games are distinctive cultural forms, with histories, aesthetics, design cultures, player communities and academic theory. This unit explores how games work, how they are situated in culture, and some of the practices behind designing and critically assessing games as media items. Drawing on game studies, game design, and media studies, students analyse games and develop a game concept from scratch.

This course is designed to provide firsthand and experiential knowledge about the richness and challenges of conducting field study in Morocco. It provides the necessary conceptual and methodological thread that enables the student to learn from experience, to apply the knowledge and skills gained in language study and the thematic course, and to prepare to undertake field study in Morocco in strict observance of research procedure involving human subjects and the regulatory ethical norms defined by the Institutional Review Board.

A Celtic identity, however that might be defined, is a complex and fascinating paradigm that has its origins in deep prehistory. Indeed, the concept of a single Celtic people, language or nation is problematic and often incorrectly lumped together as Celt, Celtic and/or fringe nations. The story of Celtic identities is far more nuanced than that and subject to local variations, differing chronologies and ideas around the construction of cultural lifeways. In this course, we focus on an extraordinary body of work known as ‘Celtic art'. Our coverage includes ancient artefacts (such as The Gundestrup Cauldron, Denmark and The Basse Yutz Flagons, France), illuminated manuscripts (including The Books of Kells and The Lindisfarne Gospels), paintings (such as the work of the Pre-Raphaelite movement), material culture (e.g. ancient body ornamentation cf. Stevens 2007) and historic perceptions and depictions of Celtic peoples through manuscripts and texts. This will lead us to explore how a Celtic identity is also a modern construct and at the heart of our enquiry in what it means to be human, both now and in the past . Our coverage will draw upon a range of sources including the collection and archive at The Royal Society of Antiquaries London, Tate Britain and The British Museum. The course brings together a range of sources and techniques that will shed light on the origins, materiality, past iterations and present uptakes of this fascinating subject. These are transferable skills that will inspire and equip you to develop your studies on art and its interplay with the materiality of identities.

Taught at a host institution. Over the course of 3,00 years Jerusalem has developed from a regional center to a national capital to the spiritual center for the world's three great monotheistic religions. This course will attempt to understand the development of the city through its architecture. With a critical eye towards how architecture affects society, the course will question how the built environment has affected the spirituality of the city and how that spirituality is reflected in and affected by the built environment.

The course acquaints students with central facets of Greek society and culture as depicted by ethnographers and other social scientists since the mid-sixties. The emphasis is on institutions, modes of living, options, contests and negotiations of everyday existence in the Greek society of today - the society which the students actually come into contact with during their stay in the country. The "traditional" will come into the picture as one among other cultural frames of reference in terms of which people in Greece behave and "cope" in different circumstances and situations. A central aim of the course is to cultivate in the student an ethnographic sensibility which involves among other things the ability and willingness to put oneself in the place of the people one has come to study and become aware of one's own cultural conditioning.

Seminar format: Study of meaning and significance of poverty in Latin America, from theological and social science perspective. Mandatory 2 credit field work component.

Taught as ANTH 3500 "Field Study Seminar' at host institution. This course prepares students to learn effectively in a field-based, cross-cultural environment and offers specific techniques that students will need to complete their Independent Study Projects. Field study in the host country is placed in its appropriate cultural context, with emphasis placed on methods of research that are appropriate for local realities and dynamics. Varied techniques for gathering, recording, interpreting, and analyzing information from primary sources are studied through class-based and field exercises, work journal assignments, observations, and interviews. Ethics in the context of fieldwork with human subjects is also discussed. MAJOR COURSE OBJECTIVES: 1) To provide students with the necessary skills for adapting to, learning from, and understanding another culture; 2) To become familiar with the standard methodologies used in the social sciences, including in-depth interviewing, participant and nonparticipant observation, questionnaire development, and basic surveys required for successful field study; 3) To develop an understanding of appropriate methodologies used to increase learning and complete a successful practicum utilizing the unique human and physical resources available in Uganda.

This course examines a history of and issues in popular music cultures of contemporary Korean society. For this examination, the course surveys the development of various genres of Korean popular music, from sinminyo (new folksong) in the early twentieth century to the recent K-pop. Also, this course aims to situate these musical genres in a variety of the Korean contexts, including modernization, Westernization, industrialization, urbanization, democratization, globalization, the Korean currency crisis, the Korean Wave, fandom, and gender and sexuality. Drawing upon abundant music and video clips, the course will incorporate lectures and in-class discussions on weekly topics. Through this course, students will learn: 1. How to approach contemporary Korean society and its history especially in relation to popular music cultures. 2. How to study a history of Korean popular music. 3. How to analyze K-pop socio-culturally, socio-historically, socio-politically, and socio-economically. 4. How to listen to K-pop more critically and analytically. 5. How to discuss K-pop-related social issues by means of music, music videos, and musical performance. This learning will then enable students to better understand K-pop as a culturally, socially, and politically inclusive phenomenon, as well as to explore contemporary South Korea from diversified perspectives.

Archaeology and heritage are fascinating disciplines that allow us to time travel into the past, and to look forward to the future while offering us an insight into our attitudes toward culture and heritage in the present. In this course, we address key ethical questions currently being asked of the past as we navigate our way through the present. These include: Who owns the past? Why is archaeology and heritage a primary target and focus in contemporary conflict? Do ancient human remains have human rights? What is ‘dark tourism’? What is the role of replicas in the construction and reconstruction of histories? Is there an authentic experience of an archaeological site? Should museums own their collections? Our coverage will be through the practical dimensions of modern archaeology and heritage studies, drawing upon a range of international case studies and problems. We will consider the relationship between archaeology and the public, archaeology and the media, international and national approaches to archaeological heritage management, local and global perspectives, contested sites and artifacts, the antiquities market, archaeology and the museum, archaeology as a profession and archaeological education. This includes the current call for the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria, the removal of statues in public spaces, the display and repatriation of human remains and the relationships between heritage, archaeology and contemporary art in the construction of identities (past and present). You have the opportunity to work on your own research project for your final paper (guidance on research topics, research methods and academic literacies will be given throughout the course), as well as writing critical real world analyses of big issues based upon your field visits which focus on the management of UNESCO World Heritage Sites and the ethics of modern museum practice.

In recent years, Greece has seen the development of a number of social movements and solidarity efforts, in the face of the difficult social conditions that have arisen with the "financial crisis" that occurred in 2009 and the austerity measures which followed. Some of these efforts are new and creative responses, while others have long histories in Greek society and politics. Preceding the crisis, we also see the emergence of what has been called "civil society": voluntary and social organizations that are an integral part of political life, but are not commercial in nature or part of the state. This course examines the roles that solidarity and social movements, social justice goals, and civil society development play in contemporary Greek society. What are the social problems currently identified by these concerns? In what ways have people responded? How has the relationship between citizen and state, individual and society, been changing through these efforts? Students join such organizations as volunteers, devoting a minimum of 45 hours to their volunteer work over the course of the semester. These volunteer experiences are integrated into the course, providing an experiential dimension to the questions we will be exploring together.

This course explores the anthropological understanding of water challenges across the globe, on the continent, and particularly in South Africa. It engages with concepts linked to scarcity, sociality, marginality, citizenship, inequality, resilience, embodiment, and culture. Through anthropological lenses, the course seeks to understand the many relationships and complexities of water and how humans think about, relate, and respond to water, particularly the lack thereof. Through people's experiences, this course will deliberate how integral and fundamental water is to life in all its manifestations: medical, physical, ecological, spiritual, anthropological, social, philosophical and political.

In this course, there is a focus on Bronze Age cultures that flourished during the Neolithic to the Early Iron Age in the Aegean world. This is a more hands-on/involved class, in which there are museum visits and opportunities to use the CYA workshop to successfully learn more about different methods and issues in the archaeological realm.

We will explore the meaning of collective transgressive acts, from abiding to local codes of honor which prevail over the formal law, to strategies of survival, to resistance to marginalization, to performances of masculinity and femininity, and to the counter-narratives invented by those who deviate, transgression constitutes a field which cannot simply be addressed by the idea of crime and associated discussions about prevention. Adopting a sociological perspective which gives emphasis on the social construction of meanings, this course proposes to comprehend transgressive acts by taking into account both the dominant moral narratives about transgression, as well as the ways these are resisted, appropriated or reinterpreted by the deviant subjects.

This course is about how we study ancient societies and their ways of living. It looks at gender norms, living styles in the home, and the impact of climate change on food.

Beyond Greece and Rome. From the emergence of the first agricultural societies to the complex tapestry of the Iron Age, students will embark on an academic journey across time and geography, uncovering the rich heritage of the ancient Mediterranean, Near East, Anatolia, North Africa, and neighboring regions. The course will primarily focus on the Eastern Mediterranean basin, examining the rise of early state-level societies in Mesopotamia, the interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age, and the transformative period of the Iron Age, including the civilizations of the 1st millennium BC. However, to provide a broader context, the course will also explore the cultural dynamics of the Central Mediterranean, Iranian Plateau, and the Balkans, offering students a comprehensive understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world. In the final weeks of the course, students will engage in thematic discussions covering literature, state formation processes, funerary practices, and the modern reception of ancient cultures. These discussions will allow students to delve deeper into specific aspects of the ancient world and share their insights through presentations.

In this course, different aspects of Greece will be covered, including politics, religion, migration, etc. There will be a focus on ethnography and genuinely coming to understand how the study of anthropology has changed over time.

Three weeks of practical instruction in the methods and theory of archaeological field work including excavation and laboratory analysis of artifacts. The course covers topics in prehistoric and historic archaeology. You will learn about field techniques and work with artifacts collected during the field work. In addition to the basic archaeological techniques, you will also learn about geophysical survey methods, including lessons on how to use a total station (laser transit) and equipment for magnetic, soil resistivity, and ground penetrating radar surveys. There are no prerequisites for this course, but prior exposure to an introductory course in anthropology or archaeology is helpful.

In this course, we will examine how policy frameworks around the world address patterns of gender difference and gender inequality. While policy experts often assume that gender and sexuality are stable, coherent categories of identity, scholars have long shown that both take socially and historically specific forms. In this course we will read a range of critical case studies that demonstrate the complicated ways that local and global beliefs about gender, sexuality, and development intersect in everyday life around the world. This course will help you approach "gender" and "sexuality"—two key terms in development discourse and global affairs—with an understanding of how these categories shape not just individuals but institutions, processes, and practices.

This five-week course will examine forced migration from the perspective of the beliefs, teachings, and programmatic commitments of faith communities. The first week will be devoted to identifying the causes of and global trends in forced migration, as well as the categories of forced migrants. It will also explore the “law of migration”; that is, the diverse legal systems that migrants must negotiate on their journeys and that religious actors use to assess migration policies. The second week will explore the teachings of diverse faith communities on forced migration, their understanding of this immense and growing phenomenon, and their programmatic and policy responses. The third week will segue to state-centered approaches to the governance and management of migration, with a focus on the concepts of sovereignty and the rule of law. It will also consider ideologies such as nativism and exclusionary nationalism that are in tension with the beliefs, policy positions, and programs of religious actors. The fourth week will be devoted to guest speakers and student presentations on situations of protracted displacement throughout the world. Persons in protracted displacement have lived in exile for at least five years and have no viable course out of their “long lasting and intractable status of limbo.” The fifth week will be devoted to US refugee protection trends and policies.

This research lab will employ an interdisciplinary approach to research on a range of issues related to mass incarceration. Collaborating with faculty, scholars, activists, practitioners, those impacted by systems of incarceration, and other classmates, students will develop, refine and implement a research project which contributes to the overall body of scholarship on incarceration. Students will be able to design projects (exploring moral, normative, and/or empirical etc. dimensions of incarceration) which connect their own academic and intellectual interests to emerging research questions at the Institute for Social Concerns. This research lab is open to students in all disciplines.

What is structural violence, and what role does it play in shaping human lives and human interactions? In this course, we investigate the often subtle, systematic sources of harm that damage health and hinder individual and community potential, while often remaining rationalized, invisible, or simply taken for granted as the world “as it is”. Structural violence is distinguishable from “hot” forms of violence in its diffuse and seemingly agentless source, where no one person is to blame. We will target these diffuse sources—from bureaucracy to urban planning to corporations to policies meant to help the poor—in order to identify the hidden abode of violence and the consequences these hold for ordinary life. Structural violence is influenced by, and in turn influences, cultural violence, which we will also investigate as a source of persistent harm. Structural violence will emerge in this course through a diverse set of studies; from American housing policy, to medical discrimination, to toxic “sacrifice zones”; and racism in disease epidemics. Our inability to interrogate these structures hinders our ability to create a just and sustainable world, and recognizing and redressing the existence of structures can be a productive path towards healing the wounds—and ending the violence—caused by the invisible trappings of power. This form of inquiry is also productive in understanding why decades-long stand-offs—whether or not an official state of violence exists—are never resolved simply through the absence of active fighting. We will finish the course with case studies of people who actively resist or attempt to escape structures, with varying levels of success.

In this course, we will examine the particular social, cultural, and political positions occupied by children and youth in contexts of violence, and the practices in which they engage to survive. Children have inhabited a position in popular imagination as unmitigated victims of violence—as the refugees, the slaves, the kidnapped child soldiers—while youth have contrarily been portrayed as the willing perpetrators of violence: its rebels, gang members, and rioters. In this course we will investigate notions of child and youth autonomy, gendering, socialization, liminality and resistance through case studies ranging from the streets of Pakistan to the juvenile prisons of the US and the rebel camps of Sierra Leone.

Images of Hispañiola conjure up extreme contrasts. Romantic, sun-drenched beaches, heroic exploration and discovery, quaint relics, tourists, and happy-go-lucky natives merge in pleasing portraits of one side of the island. Rebellion and revolution, chaos and neglect coalesce menacingly at the other end. This course interrogates the taken-for-granted narrative of the antimony between the Dominican Republic versus Haiti and opens possibilities of recognizing the shared histories, politics, economies, and traditions of the two societies. In the first part of the semester, we examine how Spain’s neglected, undeveloped colony became a rising economic power, while the wealthiest “Pearl of the Antilles,” once freed of slavery and French colonial rule, confronted relentless depletion of its human and material resources. In the second part of the semester, we study the causes of the massive exodus from both countries over the past century. We focus on unanticipated consequences of diaspora, including the inspiration for those “outside” to transcend the borders dividing the “inside” of the island. We learn about innovative formations of transnational communities that span multiple sites linked by constant circulation of digital messages, videos and money, and the comings and goings of people, politicians, and spirits. We appreciate examples of the dynamic, expressive cultures of diasporan Haitians and Dominicans in prose, poetry, film, music, visual arts, and, last but never least, cuisine.

Why do weight lifters wear lifting belts? How does athletic training and diet differ between endurance athletes and strength athletes? What are the sex-based differences in athletic performance? What impact do supplements and performance enhancing drugs have on athletic performance? Through the use of peer reviewed research, popular media articles, podcasts, and film we will answer these and many other questions within the field of exercise physiology. The course will be split into two broad units: 1) Powerlifters and 2) Marathoners. Topics covered will include cellular metabolism, muscle physiology, training programs, response to training, basic nutrition, body composition, some methodological exercise testing, supplements and performance enhancing drugs, recovery, fatigue, and activity in extreme environments. Through this use of mixed media, we will also discuss how the media misrepresents and misreports exercise physiology studies, making us all more discerning consumers of information.

If you were to perform a Google image search of “human evolution,” you would see endless pictures of men linearly evolving from apes to modern humans. These overwhelmingly one-sided depictions are because much of our human evolutionary story has been written by and about men to the exclusion of women. Consequently, many of the key theories explaining the unique suite of human features seem to assume that evolutionary forces act only upon men, and women are merely passive beneficiaries. Not only is this exclusion of roughly half the population sexist, it is also bad science – bad science that to this day has been repeated and perpetuated to justify the status quo. In this class, we will explore human evolution from a feminist perspective intellectually drawing upon human biology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, primatology, exercise physiology, and reproductive health to demonstrate that women were and still are a driving force in human evolution. Using non-traditional learning methods and assignments, we will cover: 1) foundational feminist human evolutionary theory, 2) the pervasiveness of estrogen, 3) physical/athletic performance and sexual division of labor; 4) the significance and frequency of alloparenting; 5) multiple orgasms and the control of women’s sexuality; 6) cooperation and competition among women; 7) concealment (or not) of human ovulation; 8) evolutionary reasons for the difficulty of human birth; 9) the physical and mental resilience of women; and 10) the crucial role grandmothers and menopause. It is my hope that this class not only provides an alternative perspective to current thinking in human evolution, but also encourages students to bring their experiences and perspectives to bear. Because who asks the questions matters, and a greater diversity of views can only improve and enrich our holistic understanding of human evolution.

It has been 20+ years since the first draft sequence of the entire human genome was published, spurring development of genetic technologies that were previously impossible, such as CRISPR genome editing. These technologies carry potential to identify, treat, or even prevent genetic conditions; at the same time, they often rely on assumptions that genes determine one’s fate and are shaping contemporary ideals of health, wellness, and disability. This course will examine how genetics and genetic technologies raise a host of complicated ethical questions, such as concerns about “new” forms of eugenics and genetic determinism, the ownership and commodification of genetic material, the ethics of genetics research in marginalized communities, legislative efforts to prevent genetic discrimination, and more. We will use a case study approach, pairing examinations of the biological and technical bases of specific genetic technologies with bioethical analysis to consider costs and benefits from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. This will entail engagement with perspectives from the history of science, genetics, bioethics, genetic counseling, etc. to explore complicated questions about the relationships between genetics, research, medicine, and society.

The goal of the course is to compare the processes by which social scientists and filmmakers/photographers engage in social documentation. Students explore how global social problems such as rural and urban poverty, race and gender inequalities, immigration, and violence are analyzed across the social sciences, and depicted in a variety of documentary film and photography genres. The course also explores the role that documentary photography and film play in promoting rights and advocating for social change, particularly in the realm of human rights and global inequality. It examines the history of documentary film and photography in relationship to politics, and to the development of concerns across the social sciences with inequality and social justice. It also looks at how individual documentarians, non-profit organizations and social movements use film and photography to further their goals and causes, and issues of representation their choices raise. The course is also unique because it requires students to engage in the process of visual documentation themselves by incorporating an activity-based learning component. For their final project, students choose a human rights or social problem that concerns or interests them (and which they can document locally - no travel is required), prepare a documentary -exhibit- on the chosen topic (10-12 photographs), and write a 12-15 page paper analyzing how 2-3 social scientists construct and frame the given problem. Students also have the option to produce a short documentary film.

Service Design is an interdisciplinary course that explores the theories, methods, and practices involved in designing effective and human centered services. Students will be introduced to key concepts and frameworks used in service design, with a focus on creating seamless and customer-centric experiences at critical touch points. As a capstone course, it combines elements from design thinking, design research, visual communication, and industrial design to develop solutions that meet customer needs and create value for organizations.

What is psychic life? The word psyche has encompassed a range of definitions as it has travelled through time, from notions of mind, soul, spirit, and the conscious and unconscious mind, to a mirror, an asteroid discovered in 1852, a moth or butterfly, and anima mundi, "the animating principle of the universe" itself. Today an additional constellation of concepts may also be drawn into psyche's orbit, including brain, emotion, feeling, affect, self, subjectivity, person, ego, and experience. As opposed to terms like "mental health," the concept of psychic life provides a language with which to speak about a range of phenomena across multiple traditions, epistemologies, and histories, without prioritizing any one conceptualization over another or locating the psyche within the boundaries of an individual mind, as distinct from the body and the world. Instead, in this course we will explore psychic life through the various ways in which it is known-as lived-experience; cultural, historical, and political form; object of intervention; and site of experimentation. The approaches engaged in this course draw from psychological anthropology, ethnopsychology, critical global health, history of medicine, cultural studies, affect theory, psychoanalysis, and critical phenomenology with an overarching dedication to de-stigmatizing "mental illness," and embracing neurodiversity in all its forms. Along the way we will cover topics including madness and reason, psychopolitics, global mental health, the governance of the self, the psychic life of racism, radical mental health collectives and the psychedelic renaissance, as well as a set of phenomena that lie at the limits of experience, such as psychosomatization, solitary confinement, oceanic feeling, and dreaming.

Imagine a world stripped of magic, where cold rationality reigns supreme and the supernatural has been banished to the realm of fiction. Now consider our own world, where Silicon Valley technocrats consult AI oracles, where political ideologies inspire quasi-religious fervor, and where the “spiritual but not religious” seek transcendence in everything from meditation apps to psychedelic retreats. Which of these worlds more accurately describes our modern condition? This course challenges the notion that modernity and secularization have disenchanted our world, proposing instead that enchantment persists and even thrives in unexpected corners of contemporary life. From Weber's Protestant ethic to UFO believers in the American Southwest, commodity fetishism in South America to Islamic modernities in Lebanon, we will ask fundamental questions: How do myths and rituals shape our understanding of the world, even in ostensibly secular societies? What role does enchantment play in science, technology, and politics? How do different cultures negotiate the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the rational and the magical? Drawing upon ethnographic studies and theoretical texts, we will explore how the categories of “religious” and “secular” are constructed, contested, and reimagined in various cultural contexts.

From the late 1960s debates on environmental degradation and overpopulation to the present concerns with sociotechnical and climate change, the "commons" has returned as a key symbol for social analysis, political organizing, and collective resource management. Since then, various currents have claimed and reclaimed the concept under the guide of "communality," "conviviality," and "common-pool resources" as concrete alternatives to public and private modes of governance of tangible and intangible goods. In the past two decades, the concept has been central for the discussion of the "digital commons" with decentralized, community-based governance of information production and sharing. In this seminar, we will map out the key definitions of the "commons" with a focus on the introduction of algorithmic forms of governance. This course will be organized as a seminar for the study of concepts, case studies, and methodological approaches for the study of the digital commons. We welcome students working on Internet-based research and Free and Open Source technologies as well as climate change, conservation, and sustainability to join the seminar.

This course is meant to provide a relatively comprehensive introduction to Marxist theory in relation to expressive culture, or the aesthetic in social life. We begin with the writings of Marx and then move historically through various major re-readings of Marxist thought in relation to aesthetic theory.

What is ethnography, broadly defined? How is a scholar's ethnographic product shaped by their racialized experience? This course will reference texts over time and across academic disciplines to consider genre, style, audience, and purpose when engaging with this research method. We will read, listen to, and watch works to think through the various ways that Black intellectuals have used ethnography to make sense of our everyday social worlds.

Migration is a prevailing global phenomenon that affects millions of peoples around the world. According to the UNHCR report, at the end of 2019, there had been 79.5 million forcibly displaced people around the world. At the same time, refugees and migrants experience migration- and displacement-related physical and psychosocial stress and trauma, which may increase their vulnerability and affects their health and well-being. This course will explore, engage, and analyze contemporary migration flows - movements of people across national and international borders - and the ways human mobility shape refugees' and migrants' lived experiences, cultural meanings, social values, and health. How and why particular modes of mobility are permitted, encouraged, and enabled while others are conversely, banned, regulated, policed, and prevented? How do contemporary forms of displacement may challenge conventional understandings of who gets to be defined and accepted as a refugee? Why do we have so many different categories of people who simply seek refuge? Do these different categories indicate different treatments? How is migration associated with higher levels of mental health disorders among refugee/migrant populations? The course will engage with such questions by focusing on events that occurred in the second half of the twenty-first century in Europe, including both the EU and non-EU states. We will rely on the selected readings and documentaries as they reflect an integrative anthropological approach to migration, displacement, and refugeeness. Taking into account lived experiences, identity, social values, cultural meanings, health, and well-being, we will explore migration, borders, and displacement as a subjective experience and sites of ethical, socioeconomic, political, and cultural examinations and critiques. Topics will include transnational migration, terminology, citizenship, borders, asylum policy, health, and well-being. This course will also enrich your understanding of the fluidity of different categories, processes underlying refugees and migrants' cultural and social tuning, as well as their biosocial responses, resilience, and adaptability under conditions of migration and displacement. The course will be run in a seminar-style, and students will be expected to analyze and debate core readings in class.

This course provides grounding in some of the methods of qualitative analysis present in the field of anthropology. The focus of the course is on developing skills that students can use to do systematic analysis of anthropological data. The perspective guiding the course is that anthropology is an empirical, scientific approach for describing social and cultural aspects of human life, and that qualitative data can be analyzed in systematic and rigorous ways. The course will explore a range of approaches and will cover analytic skills that cut across traditions, including theme identification, code definition, and pattern recognition. Advanced topics covered will include content analysis, text analysis, and schema analysis. Students will learn techniques and protocols in data arrangement and visualization that are appropriate for different analytical methods. It is a hands-on class where students will be able to work on data provided to them as well as on their own. Collaboration will be integral to the course success.

What are the contributions of anthropology to the study of contemporary science and technology? In this course, we will respond to this question by examining the history of anthropological studies of the technosciences from the post-war period to the present. We will cover the history of ethnographic engagements with the biological and natural sciences, the debates about the nature of knowledge production, and the contemporary studies of computing and engineering with a focus on Artificial Intelligence. We will organize the class as a seminar, so be prepared to engage in close readings of the material and workshopping a research project of your own.

The ancestors interrelated with the environments we live in today and will interact with in the future. This course explores indigenous cultures and perspectives on the importance of traditional knowledge and the environment. In this seminar-style course, we will learn about how indigenous groups in the Americas, both past and present, think about the world around us and how their cultural livelihoods are threatened by climate change and ongoing development. The goal is to provide students with a strong foundation in indigenous environmental issues. We will cover a range of topics that intersect with traditional ecological knowledge, land use and perceptions, reciprocity, sense of place, memory-making, and environmental justice.

This course examines how gender and sexuality are understood, constructed, and implicated in relations of social power in various regions of the world. It will integrate scholarship from anthropology and women and gender studies to explore how ideas of maleness, femaleness, trans, queer, and heterosexual are reproduced, contested, and transgressed within different social contexts and the everydayness of these categories. We will learn about cultural changes in conceptions of gender and sexuality in North and South America, SWANA (South West Asia/North Africa), Southeast and East Asia, Central and Southern Africa, and Europe. In the first half of this course, we will consider traditional themes in cultural anthropology, including kinship, morality, ritual, emotion, politics, and the circulation of goods and labor, to examine how different communities produce cultural knowledge about gender and sexuality. The second half of this course will address contemporary themes such as activism, violence, and gender and sexual oppression. Using our knowledge of anthropological theories developed in the first half of the course, we will take up topics of concern such as masculinity and violence, LGBTQ rights and pinkwashing, and gender and nationalism to understand how gender and sexuality are relevant to post-colonial contexts and settler-colonial resistance movements.

Anthropology attempts to make sense of an infinitely complicated world by organizing its observations, inquiries, and explanations. Some of these are grand, while others are modest. Still, all anthropological work involves some kind of analysis. All analysis stems from a view of what is basic and of what is related most centrally. This course introduces the most powerful analytic perspectives in the four subdisciplines of anthropology, preparing students to encounter and situate anthropological works of all sorts. The seminar format encourages student involvement not only in reading and writing but also in discussion and analysis of the works under consideration. Written and spoken assignments will permit students to try their hand at a wide range of anthropological practice. Required of all Anthropology majors. To provide a theoretical background for later courses, anthropology students and faculty highly recommend taking this course in Junior year.

Models of human communication developed in linguistic anthropology have long relied on empirical analysis and cross-cultural comparison of how people talk to other people, and to a variety of non-human “persons” as well. This course examines how anthropologists study communication between humans and non-humans, and how communication helps make persons out of non-humans. The class concerns research on seances and related scenes of spirit possession where the dead speak, talking with animals whether pets or prey, learning spiritual lessons from teacher plants, and contemporary conversations people have with artificial intelligence language models. We compare how anthropologists have asked questions about personhood when considering speech across species boundaries or across divides such as life and death. We ask how communication constructs interlocutors and makes relationships possible, and we consider the commonality and variety among communicative approaches and tactics. We ask if communication with non-humans connects people to other worlds of experience, or if it is more instructive as a projection of our own social life onto others.

In this class we analyze the many modes of human interaction, from our original invention/discovery of spoken language, to the invention of writing, to telegraphy, telephony, radio, movies, television, and the Internet, smart phones, and social media. We examine the affordances of each medium and modality, and develop tools to understand the ones that aren't even here yet. We draw on linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, sociology, conversation analysis, media studies, and communications.

This course will give students the opportunity to develop a research proposal and prepare for anthropological fieldwork, regardless of subfield. The class will meet for three weeks at the beginning of the semester and two weeks following Spring Break. The first section will focus on developing a research proposal, seeking approval from the Institutional Review Board, and submitting the proposal for funding. The second part will concentrate on logistical preparation for the field and examining fieldwork ethics and expectations. Students should begin the course with a concrete idea for a research project that they develop in consultation with their advisor.

This course provides an intensive introduction to statistical methods of use for anthropological research. It will examine why and when to use quantitative methods, and how such methods can be incorporated into a holistic anthropological research design. Topics covered include probability theory, and parametric, non-parametric, and Bayesian principles of hypothesis testing, data ordination, and methods of analyzing non-independent data including network analysis. All course work will be undertaken using free statistical packages available through the R programing language. No prior mathematical or programming experience is needed.

What is race? How do concepts of race change according to social, political, and historical context? Do Asian understandings of race differ from those in the West? How are concepts like "blackness" and "white privilege" interpreted in Asia? In this class, we will grapple with this set of questions by looking at how competing definitions of race and nationhood emerged in conjunction with the rise of the Japanese empire (1910-1945), and American military occupation in Asia during the Cold War. Students will investigate how this historical context has continued to affect the ways more contemporary flows of migrants from Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa are racialized in Asia, by analyzing sociological, anthropological, and historical texts of everyday life. No prior knowledge about Asian languages or topics is required.

Almost 40% of the world's population is overweight or has obesity. Obesity has become a central focus in biological research as well as policy. Billions of dollars have been spent on public health interventions, biological interventions, diets, and exercise regimens. However, the obesity rate among adults and children has been steadily increasing globally. Why is this happening? How do we even define obesity? Does that definition truly reflect health? Why do we even have fat to begin with...actually what even is fat?!? Why are humans prone to obesity? These are just some of the questions we will address in this class. Using non-traditional methods and assignments, we will discuss adipose tissue and digestive physiology, the role evolution has played in the human propensity to hold onto fat, diet and exercise, food insecurity, therapeutic interventions, as well as the physical and mental health consequences of having obesity. We will use this as a basis to investigate the biological and cultural factors including stigma, race, and gender that shape our perceptions of body image and health in the midst of the obesity epidemic. Finally, this course will include occasional laboratory exercises to familiarize you with the methods used to assess body mass, body composition, metabolic rate, and point of care measures of biomarkers like glucose and cholesterol.

All human populations, from the simplest to the most complex, interact with their natural environment. Humans alter the environment, and are in turn altered by it through biological or cultural adaptations. Global environmental changes helped to create and shape our species and modern industrial societies are capable of altering the environment on scales that have never been seen before, creating many questions about the future of human-environmental coexistence. This course explores the ways that humans are altering the global environment and the ways that global environmental changes alter humans in return. Four major topics are examined: global climate change, alterations of global nutrient cycles, biodiversity and habitat loss, and ecosystem reconstruction. Students will complete the course with an understanding of the metrics and physical science associated with each type of change, their ecological implications, and the ways in which environmental changes continually reshape human biology and culture. This course is for graduate students and upper-division undergraduates. This course meets a core requirement for GLOBES students.

The GLOBES (Global Linkages of Biology, the Environment, and Society) series of courses offered each semester reflect various areas of life science relevant to multiple disciplines. Students should expect to have a different topic offered every semester under the GLOBES heading.

This course examines the intersection of gender, health policy, and health care organization around the world. Gender is frequently a central contributing (though sometimes ignored) factor to people's health. Men and women have different biologies, and it thus stands to reason that their lives—social, economic, political, and biological—would have an effect on their health. What causes men to have different illnesses than women? What places one gender at greater risk for illness than the other? How do men and women across the world experience health policies? Are they affected and constrained by similar factors? How do their work lives affect their experiences with health? How is the body medically produced? How do poverty and development play a role in people's well-being? Through an inquiry-based approach, these and other topics will be addressed in this class.

This graduate level seminar will explore the philosophical, theoretical, and ethical underpinnings for inclusive and collaborative practices in anthropology, particularly research that combines approaches from more than one anthropological subfield. Taking a global approach, students will examine a wide range of case studies in community-based and collaborative anthropology, aiming to identify best practices and develop skills which students can then apply to their own projects. Attention will be paid to the importance of context, including geography, colonial histories and decolonization, war and conflict, economy, and environment, that shape engaged approaches to working for and serving communities instead of working on or studying communities with an extractive approach.

Our species is unique because it is the only species that deliberately buries its dead. Mortuary analysis (the study of burial patterns) is a powerful approach that archaeologists use for the study of prehistoric social organization and ideology. This course explores the significance of prehistoric human mortuary behavior, from the first evidence of deliberate burial by Neanderthals as an indicator of the evolution of symbolic thought, to the analysis of the sometimes spectacular burial patterns found in complex societies such as ancient Egypt and Megalithic Europe. We will also examine the theoretical and practical aspects of the archaeology of death, including the applications of various techniques ranging from statistics to ethnography, and the legal and ethical issues associated with the excavation and scientific study of human remains.

The 12th and 13th centuries were a dynamic period in world history as civilizations across the globe experienced significant growth, reorganization, and even collapse. Trade, wars, missionary work, and exploration fostered extensive and far-reaching interactions among neighboring and more distant cultures. Genghis Khan, the Crusades, the Khmer Empire, the end of the Toltec Empire, and the peak of the ancestral Pueblo occupation of the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings are but a few of the forces and civilizations shaping the world at A.D. 1200. Traditionally, these civilizations and events are studied diachronically and in relative isolation from contemporaneous global developments. This course departs from tradition and adopts a synchronic analysis of the dramatic changes experienced across the globe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By examining these cultural shifts in light of simultaneous transitions in other areas of the world, new questions and answers can be generated concerning the activities and processes that shape people's lives in past and present civilizations.

Students, in a structured format, are involved in assessing, prioritizing and creatively solving problems encountered by low-income and other disadvantaged South Bend entrepreneurs. A process consulting approach is employed and a number of useful tools and frameworks are introduced. Students work with both for-profit and non-profit enterprises, producing tangible deliverables that help clients launch, grow and sustain their ventures. In addition to class time, students will meet with clients on a weekly basis at a Notre Dame facility located downtown. Assistance with transportation will be available for students needing it. Class will meet on Tuesdays. On Thursdays, students will consult with local entrepreneurs in one hour blocks during the hours of 5p to 9p at the Center for Civic Innovation. This consulting time is flexible with students' schedules and based on appointments made by local entrepreneurs.

The Culture of Medicine Lab is open to students with a committed interest in anthropological methods applied to questions of health. In this Lab, students work on the arc of research (project design, data organization, data analysis, and presentation) in projects such as medical decision-making around cesareans, the role of art-based methods in understanding motherhood, or the effect of crises on medical practice. This Lab is by instructor permission only.

This course will begin with reading David Lancy’s work, The Anthropology of Childhood, in order to form a good intellectual background in this sub-discipline of anthropology. Then, at Notre Dame’s Shaw Center for Children and Families, students will participate in practicum through one hour of childcare a week of the children of single mothers in addiction recovery while the mothers are in addiction recovery group. The class will then arrange times to discuss the childcare in light of the anthropology of childhood.

This course is a hands-on opportunity to work with a team on an ongoing project—School Story Lab—about people's experiences of being in school, and to amplify the work via social media. School Story Lab builds on both interviews and crowdsourced stories. The goal of the project is to collect and disseminate personal experiences of people (especially students and teachers) involved in schools at all levels, and internationally. Experience-near accounts of school should always be considered by policy makers and those charged with designing schools, but they are often overlooked in favor of simpler standardized measures. These experiences are affective, bodily, social, economic, medical, and more, not just cognitive. Stories provide it all. The course meets weekly for an hour, and students spend another 1-2 hours weekly working on the project: conducting and analyzing interviews, contributing to the website, and bringing their own experiences.

This is a lab-intensive course that explores the methods used in physical anthropology for studying individual human skeletal remains, as well as those employed to establish biocultural connections at the population level. Forensic techniques utilized in individual identification will be developed in the first third of the course.

Bioarchaeology is the study of human skeletal remains for reconstructing the biology and cultures of past peoples. We will use the three large ancient Near Eastern collections housed in the Anthropology department to explore theoretical and methodological issues related to: paleopathology (violence, infection, & nutrition indicators in particular), population mobility (migration & pilgrimage), subsistence (chemical analysis of diet & weaning), paleodemography, childhood health and adaptability, mortuary analysis, daily activities (musculo-skeletal indicators), bimolecular genetics, and ethical issues faced when working with human remains. We will explore the archaeological and/or historical records associated with each collection as well, for an holistic understanding of ancient life at these sites. This will be a very hand-on class requiring active participation.

By helping us step back to see humans as primates, mammals, vertebrates, and beyond, evolutionary theory provides a framework for understanding many aspects of our day-to-day lives that shape the health and well-being, including weight gain-diet, psychosocial stress, immune function, sleep patterns, risky behavior, and child development. But, increasing evidence from the exciting field of "developmental origins of health and disease" suggests that our biological and behavioral patterns are far from being determined solely by our genes. Our early life contexts, from before birth, and possibly even the experiences of our parents and grandparents in prior generations influence how our brains and biological systems function, including how genes are expressed, and thus impact our health and behavior. This course will bring these dynamic perspectives together to answer questions regarding why we get sick, how our bodies flexibly respond to the world around us, and the inheritances we receive from our ancestors.

In this course, students will explore the potential for studying and reconstructing a prehistory of people through archaeology. We will consider the historical and theoretical foundations of creating an engendered past, the methodological and practical aspects of "doing" engendered archaeology, and the intersection between political feminism, archaeological knowledge production, and the politics of an engendered archaeology. Topics for consideration include feminist perspectives on science, anthropology, and archaeology; concepts of gender in prehistory and the present; women's and men's relations to craft production, state formation, and space; and the complex relationship between feminism, archaeology, and the politics of women and men in archaeology and the archaeological past. Under the broad theoretical, political and historical umbrella of feminism, archaeologists today are negotiating their own paths toward an engendered past from multiple directions, and this course will explore the diversity of these approaches toward creating a prehistory of people.

Visual Anthropology provides a powerful and engaging means of sharing historical and anthropological stories. This new course is based on the assumption that people think in terms of images, movement and sound and that film can be used to create powerful and important human narratives. This class is designed to train students in how to research, design, manage and produce short documentary film projects using both state of the art production equipment and accessible forms of media capture such as iPhones and GoPros. As a graduate/undergraduate elective, this course thematically focuses on understanding and documenting the historical, social, economic and personal stories centered on 19th through 20th century Indiana local barns, and placing these in a meaningful cultural and historical context. Students will work in teams of two to research an assigned farmstead, focusing on the barn as a material setting and documenting the past through the integration of historical research, oral history and digital video.Students will develop 2 minute videos for inclusion in a video book (as seen here https://islandplacesislandlives.com/) that touches on local history as well as a longer 8 minute video that explores the life, history and social context of the barn. The result will be a collaborative effort that creates a body of work by the class exploring local history and linking Anthropology with filmmaking to tell stories.

The human experience is a social and spatialized one. Ever since we appeared on the planet, humans have intentionally and unintentionally shaped the land and spaces around them for a variety of reasons including subsistence, economic, social, political, and spiritual activities. Thus, landscapes and spaces not only reflect, order, and create our cultural identities and worldview, but also they enable and constrain us. In this seminar-style course, we will explore how the way people live and their culture shapes our relationships the natural and constructed environment and each other. The goal is to provide students with a strong foundation in current landscape theory, analysis, and interpretation. We will cover a range of topics that intersect with landscape, including social order, settlement, cosmography and ideology, political landscapes, boundaries, natural places and resources, sense of place, and memory-making. Course organization draws heavily on the instructor's expertise, but emphasizes a broad and integrative engagement with the anthropological literature.

Visual anthropology involves the cross-cultural study of images in communication and the use of images as a method for doing anthropology. This course proceeds through a non-linear integration of visual themes including water, earth, light, fire, flesh and blood with analytical themes including aesthetics, poetics, violence, history, materiality and subjectivity. We explore still photography, film, and popular media in domains from ethnography, social documentary, war photojournalism, to high art. Students watch, read and write about, and generate visual products of their own in multiple media.

What is the relation between life and politics? In the late 18th century, a new technology of governance emerged. This technology, armed with a new science of statistics, focused on the management of life and death within the population-its rates of fertility, mortality, and illness. How could life expectancy be increased? How could rates of mortality be lowered? How could biological threats be eliminated? These questions of life and death were not only biological; life itself had emerged as a political problem. Michel Foucault called this new technology of power biopolitics. Since Foucault's formulation, the concept of biopolitics has demarcated an object of inquiry that has been taken up by scholars in a wide range of academic fields, including anthropology, sociology, literature, philosophy, and history. Through the lens of biopolitics, we will study a number of contemporary issues in which the politics of life and death are at stake, including humanitarianism, new medical technologies, public health interventions, disaster, incarceration, and global pandemics. In class, we will think through these topics together using examples drawn from visual and print media including film, journalism, literature, and photography.

In Apocalypse Now (1979), a single phrase marks an iconic enemy and creates a chain of associations that separate Western Selves from Eastern Others. The story behind the phrase, "Charlie don't surf," is one of many complex narratives characterizing the Southeast Asian region that call for further critical understanding. This course is an anthropological journey through Southeast Asia, a region rich in cultural diversity, linguistic complexity and archaeological significance. Including the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Myanmar (Burma), students can explore the ecological, historical, and socio-cultural patterns of this ethnographic region through analyses of its societies and institutions. With a holistic approach to the cultural influences that characterize Southeast Asia, we will chart the region's indigenous, social, political, economic, artistic and religious formations over time. The course offers a broad overview of the historical factors affecting the region, including the impact of Indian, Islamic, Chinese, and European exchange, colonization, and violence. These transregional influences provide a window from which to view contemporary issues in the cultural politics and economics of Southeast Asia. The course provides an overview of the major cultural features of the region to enable students to gain a better understanding of the current developments within the region and the lives of Southeast Asians. Overall, we will contribute to the development of anthropological ideas about Asia while also providing a means to organize and analyze Asian ethnographic perspectives.

We usually think of field work and excavation as being the essence of archaeology, but much of what we know about the past is learned in the laboratory, where we study the artifacts brought in from the field. A rough rule of thumb states that two hours of lab time are needed for every hour spent in the field, so in reality, lab work may be even more important than field work in archaeology. This course is a laboratory class that will use many different activities to teach you about how archaeologists organize, preserve, and study archaeological artifacts to learn about the past. This class provides an in-depth introduction to basic laboratory methods for the organization, curation, and analysis of pottery, stone tools, metals, soil samples, and floral and faunal remains. By the end of the semester, you will engage in a hands-on application of course principles by conducting a research project on materials from Notre Dame's archaeological collections.

Prehistoric stone tools represent the oldest form of human technology. Much of human prehistory worldwide and throughout ancient times is decipherable primarily through stone tools. Experimental replication of stone technologies is viewed as an essential method to understanding past technologies. Organized as a series of practical laboratory exercises, in this class we deal with a broad survey of the fundamental concepts of stone tool technology, including mechanical properties of tool stone, stone heat treatment, prehistoric quarrying and mining strategies and elementary concepts of flaking stone. Students gain familiarity with these topics in a laboratory context by participating in flint knapping practice and working intensively with several archaeological collections. In addition to the laboratory exercises, students will present the results of a team project based on hands-on manufacture of tools, or analysis of materials from archaeological collections.

How are identities important in a world of frictions and connections? How do different societies deal with cultural, linguistic, religious, gendered, embodied, intergenerational, and racialized diversities (and related injustice or inequality)? How are these accommodated within (more or less) democratic regimes? How do democracies change as a result? What are the differences between multiculturalism, relativism, and pluralism? The course addresses such questions by focusing on issues including but not limited to police violence and urban riots; Arab Uprisings; Muslim-Christian-Jewish relationships (conflict and coexistence) in Egypt and Iran; gendered practices and embodied aesthetics; the experience of refugees, and the crafting of identities, in the journey between Somalia and the US. We will also use news/magazine articles, as sources of information and as artifacts to be analyzed.

Concepts of human growth vary extraordinarily across time and space. When children become full-fledged persons, when they can reason, when or whether they should be independent from their parents, and how all this happens are variable and illuminating. Education - either formal or informal - reflects and also constitutes a society's view of childhood. This course provides a selective cross-cultural survey of childhood and education, looking at stages from pregnancy and infancy to late adolescence. Students will devise and conduct projects of their own.

How do people in immigrant-receiving countries shape their attitudes toward immigrants? What are the differences between refugees and other migrants? How is immigration related to urban "immigrant riots?" And what can anthropological studies of borders and national policies tell us about the transnational world in which we live? We will examine these and related questions, and more generally the causes, lived experiences, and consequences of migration. We will acquire a sound understanding of migration in its social, political, legal, and cultural facets. Fieldwork accounts from countries of origin and from the U.S., Europe, Australia, and Japan will enable us to appreciate both global and U.S. distinctive trends. Rather than merely learning a collection of facts about immigrants, we will address how migration intersects with gender and class, the mass media, border enforcement, racism, the economy, territory and identity formation, and religion.

This course provides an introduction to the emergent field of social studies of data-intensive analytics for the examination of how "things are done with data." The goal is to cover a wide range of examples and practical applications to introduce questions of design and implementation, privacy and surveillance, as well as governance and stewardship of digital tools and infrastructures. Following the performative aspect of data, we will explore social, technical, political, and economic dynamics that involve data extraction, sharing, literacy, and analysis. From little to big data practices, we will examine at the interface level the professional and institutional applications, development histories, and current political economy of data to situate ourselves as engaged technologists and researchers, not detached critics or passive users. There are no prerequisites for this course: no previous experience in statistics or programming is needed, but independent study of the supplementary materials we provide is highly encouraged.

Indigenous people often appear to be people without property. Whether it is outside observers who presume that they never had a "proper" economy of individual possessions, or whether it is indigenous representatives who define themselves as having lost their property—their land, their traditions, their languages—what and who is indigenous is defined by an absence. In contemporary contexts of globalization, however, indigenous traditional knowledge as intellectual property has become a lightning rod of political action. There has been a corresponding redefinition of the indigenous from the criterion of autochthony or priority to relations of dispossession or appropriation. Anthropology has continued comparative study of the variety of theories of, or knowledge about, property and its place in the construction of individuals and collectivities in indigenous societies. This course connects cultural categories of property with ethnographic scenes of its alienation to explore the emerging role of culture as emblem, itself a kind of property. We ask how indigenous appropriation of the culture concept and colonial appropriation of the environmental knowledge, art, language, and land of indigenous cultures furthers the cycle of symbolic and material exchange that defines indigeneity.

What makes human beings the way we are? How do our very beings-subjective, social, biological, or biopsychosocial-get created? What's universal and what varies around the world? We shake up commonsense understandings of these four primary building blocks of experience, ultimately coming up with our own theories and applying them to real-world topics of students' choice. Topics include Spirit Possession | Morality | Rights and Responsibilities | Emotion | Authenticity, Masks, Performance | Embodiment | Theory of Mind | Disabilities | Learning and Socialization | Humans-and-Others | Body Image and Beauty

All humans eat, but the variations in what, how, and why we eat are dazzling. This course examines the many roles that food plays in a variety of cultures. We consider food choices and taboos, religious and symbolic meanings of food, dining and social interactions, obesity and thinness, and the political and industrial issues of fast food and the slow food movement. We address ethical issues and the relationship between food and sustainability. There will be practical and field studies associated with the course.

This course provides a broad approach to technical skills and strategic information for developing a career with anthropology. It focuses on honing tools for careers that are informed by anthropological and ethnographic issues in a variety of institutions and settings. The course is a vehicle from which students can explore professional techniques that augment their career goals and academic interests.

This course looks at the history of the environment combined with human history. Using paleoclimatology and geology techniques, this course uses primary data sources such as climatological datasets and site visits. This course focuses specifically on the climatic history of Italy and the Mediterranean in historical periods.

This module examines key forms of contemporary international movement, migrations, mobilities and transnationalism. We begin with an overview of the main migration phases globally before moving on to explore particular aspects of contemporary migration such as intra-European mobility, high skilled migration, irregular migration and lifestyle migration. Conceptual and empirical discussions will be linked to wider social transformations including the economic downturn, globalisation, securitization after 9/11 and skills mobility.

The class looks at the history and development of Jewish and Israeli art, architecture, and material culture, and the intersection of material culture with cultural identity. The focus of the course is the development of Jewish and Israeli material culture as window into the past and an initiator of the culture and how it exists today.

Introduction to Human Geography gives an introduction to core geographical themes, perspectives and concepts in relation to processes that shape human societies and the world around them.

Students will be able to: Analyze the complex social reality experienced by specific vulnerable populations, through the study of their context, in order to identify problems and opportunities for intervention. Propose collaborative intervention alternatives that respond to a specific need, through the application of community intervention methodologies, to promote the improvement of the living conditions of a community or group and promote the construction of a more just, free and supportive society. Systematize the social and formative impact of the social service experience according to the objectives of the receiving organization, as well as the generic and specific competencies developed during the experience.

Conducted in an approved off-campus location appropriate to the project. Students work with their academic advisor to design and build their Independent Study Project (ISP).

This module focuses on the social and cultural relations produced by resource extraction and explores the global and local frames through a series of worldwide case-studies. Resource exploration and extraction has historically played an important part in the interface with non- western and indigenous peoples and the forces of colonialism and globalisation. The module examines a series of diverse historical and geographical case-studies from different world regions and resources, including mining, oil, gas and logging - and uses these to illustrate and discuss debates in anthropology. The module takes an exploratory ethnographic approach to resource extraction sites and encounters as significant venues and vantage points for analysing knowledges and cosmologies - indigenous and anthropological - to understand the positions and consequences afforded by different ontological perspectives.

The Parknabinnia Neolithic court tomb (CL 153) was excavated by Dr. Carleton Jones between 1998 and 2001. Since that time various publications have dealt with different aspects of the site and analyses of the finds but a full analysis and publication of the complex stratigraphy of the site is still forthcoming. Sophie will help progress the analysis of the stratigraphy by first re-drawing the stratigraphic matrix using an appropriate software package and then inserting into the matrix the results of various analyses that have been carried out post-excavation. These new pieces of data consist of radiocarbon dates (on human, hare and dog bones), stable isotope analyses on human bone, and aDNA analyses on human bone. This updated and annotated stratigraphic matrix will then be used to explore the possibility that there may be stratigraphic and chronological patterns in the trophic level (as revealed in 15N stable isotope analyses) and the kinship relationships (as revealed by aDNA) that have been detected so far in the Parknabinnia people. From those findings, we will then also look at which stratigraphic contexts may be suitable for further sampling.

Burial mounds, megalithic tombs, enigmatic earthworks, ring forts, ancient churches, medieval castles, and shipwrecks - these are just some of the vast array of archaeological monuments in the Irish landscape. This course teaches you how to recognize and date these various sites and monuments, how to access and use various online resources that contain detailed map-based information about all known Irish archaeological sites, and finally, how archaeologists progress from this abundance of 'raw' data to interpreting and presenting archaeological monuments and landscapes to the public.

For independent undergraduate research the semester abroad.

The course offers the opportunity to know, understand and experience the mysterious treasures of an ancient country, unique in the world. The course begins by briefly exploring the history of prehispanic Mexico and the process of being invaded by the Europeans. From here students are able to begin to understand how Mexico came to where it is today. Then, the course uses the exploration of different celebrations throughout Mexico's diverse towns and cities to uncover history behind different parts of Mexico that make it "magical."

Qualitative methodologies are basic tools for Political scientists and professionals in the areas of government and public administration, in their training and subsequent professional performance as analysts and consultants in the generation of diagnostic, evaluative, prospective and proposal for decision-makers in the area of government, civil society, private sector and others involved in decisions valued in the construction of the common good.

Introduction to archaeology is the study of archaeological practices, and this course examines real dig sites, how to look for historically significant artifacts, and how to analyze them to fit into a comprehensive image of a past culture. This course will also examine the origins, significance, and drawbacks of the study of archaeology.

This course offers a tutorial on the technical analysis of portraits through time. Portraits are incredibly telling images of the time from which they came, and throughout the course, students will learn how to contextualize and glean information from ancient and modern portraits. Everything from medium to presentation to intended audience reveals the cultural significance of the portrait, and the anthropological significance of portraits through time is unveiled.

This course covers the historical phenomenon of witchcraft throughout Europe from an anthropological perspective. Examination of economic trends, human behaviors, predicted behaviors, and cultural pressures allow for a deep dive into how certain events of mass casualty and suspicion like witchcraft can occur.

This course has at is main objective to discuss ideas about law through art. The art forms include literature, cinema, painting, architecture, monuments, and music. Among the legal concepts to be discussed will be: the definition of law, justice; equality and the role of the state; transitional justice; reparations; women's struggle for resources and power; race, class and gender discrimination; national borders and the place of law in the family.

We are entering a digital world where synthetic technologies are designed by technologists to triumph. After the early iterations of the prehistoric web, techno-entrepreneurs are inviting us to walk toward a new technological horizon. A "synthetic horizon" where the Metaverse, crypto-assets, and AIs will coexist to help humanity meet the challenges ahead. But will they really help? This course will examine the ambivalent role of digital technologies in our societies and interrogate our future by questioning their relevance.

Dissent occupies a particular place in contemporary societies. On the one hand, state mechanisms adopt pre-emptive policies and strategies in an attempt to prevent dissent from evolving into civil unrest and disorder, whilst on the other hand, dissent remains the most powerful tool in the hands of those social groups who feel and/or are marginalized, excluded or silenced. Arising in a number of contexts - the political domain, everyday life, popular culture, sports, institutions - dissent has been routinely associated with progressive causes and positive social transformation. However, similarly to the germane concept of resistance, dissent can also take regressive forms. In recent years, the multiple manifestations of crisis in the West have given rise to ideologies and practices with a strong anti-establishment profile coupled with an agenda of social exclusion, calling, thus, for a revision of our sociological horizon and analytical tools with regards to dissent. Using contemporary Greece as an entry point to these debates and combining key readings with interactive learning methods, this course presents a sociological perspective on dissent that calls into attention the meanings and conceptual histories of dissent.

The course focuses on the experiences of Jews living in Greece during the 19th and 20th centuries. It is structured around a core issue, namely the encounter between two forms of belonging: on the one hand, a pre-national, imperial one where religious and ethnic diversity was the norm; and on the other, a 'modern' at the time, national one where sameness became a prerequisite. The course will examine these issues focusing primarily on two aspects: (a) on the policies that the Greek state adopted in order to 'manage' the Jewish populations that were gradually added in its territory; and (b) on the reactions of the Jews living in the Greek territory vis-a-vis the new exigencies of the new nation-state; reactions that covered the whole spectrum from assimilation to migration. Understanding how Jews and more broadly people of different creed and origin invented alternative versions of "Greekness," which undermined the intimate connection between religious and national identity, is more than relevant today that the asserted homogeneity of nation-states is seriously challenged by the waves of global migration. Studying the history of Greek Jews thus invites us to reflect more broadly on forms and definitions of belonging.

In this course, different perspectives on health and medicine are examined through an anthropological perspective. We especially focus on biomedicine (modern medicine and technology) in comparison to alternative medicine such as traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, reading medical articles and critically thinking about how health systems influence the modern world.

This course focuses on anthropological inquiry in the form of filmmaking, exploring the impacts of displaying cultural studies in a visual format. In class, we watch many example films and learn about the process of making an anthropological film, which we then use to make our own film for the final project, based on anthropological study.

Sport and Learning in Australian Culture provides students with a socially critical perspective on the place, meaning and practice of sport in contemporary Australian society and culture. Focused on the range of learning that takes place through youth's engagement in sport, it examines the practice of sport at levels ranging from elite international sport to grassroots sport. In striving to provide a meaningful educational experience this unit places students' first hand experiences of Australian sporting culture at the centre of the unit of study through the provision of field trips to relevant sporting events in Sydney. These involve attending sporting events ranging from Super Rugby Union to Australian Rules football matches. These experiences of Australian sporting culture are informed by a socially critical examination of sport in Australia through lectures, field trips, assessments and readings.

Sport and Learning in Australian Culture provides students with a socially critical perspective on the place, meaning and practice of sport in contemporary Australian society and culture. Focused on the range of learning that takes place through youth's engagement in sport, it examines the practice of sport at levels ranging from elite international sport to grassroots sport. In striving to provide a meaningful educational experience this unit places students' first hand experiences of Australian sporting culture at the centre of the unit of study through the provision of field trips to relevant sporting events in Sydney. These involve attending sporting events ranging from Super Rugby Union to Australian Rules football matches. These experiences of Australian sporting culture are informed by a socially critical examination of sport in Australia through lectures, field trips, assessments and readings.

Inequality is an increasingly central feature of our economic systems. Economic changes seem so vast that as individuals we may feel powerless to influence their direction. However, the economy is made up of various tools and social practices, incorporating money, market, work, and home, produced and enacted by differently positioned humans and more-than-human agents. By examining these relations and practices closely, we can identify and challenge the cultural assumptions that underpin our economic institutions. This examination will enable us to imagine and work towards a more equitable and caring economic future.

Globalization contributes to major shifts in global health patterns and how they are perceived and addressed. Global health has become a discipline in itself. It emphasizes not only public health, but also the broader connections to economic and political factors, and the connections between national and international aspects. This course maps and analyzes progress and challenges in meeting global health goals.

How can literature help us understand illnesses? Combining close readings of fiction and hands-on meetings with doctors, therapists, authors, artists, and members of the ethical council and patient associations, this course explores narrative medicine as part of the new interdisciplinary field Medical Humanities. Gain insight into how literature can help us comprehend experiences of suffering and illness, approach the bioethical implications of treatment, and understand the complex relationship between patient and practitioner.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in biological anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in medical anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in sociocultural anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in linguistic anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in archaeology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent readings on a special problem area in anthropology about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography, write a scholarly paper, or research report.

This course provides undergraduate students in the Department of Anthropology with advanced teaching roles beyond traditional laboratory positions. It will also provide undergraduate students with a mentored teaching experiences that mimic teaching done by a professor.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in biological anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in medical anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in socio-cultural anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in linguistic anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in archaeology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography and write a scholarly paper.

Intensive independent research on a special problem area in anthropology, about which the student will be expected to produce a detailed annotated bibliography, write a scholarly paper, or research report.

This course is for undergraduate students conducting zero-credit independent summer research.

This course provides the student with the opportunity for independent study and the development of skills in research and writing. The effort is the student's own, from the choosing of a topic to the conclusion presented in the final paper. A thesis director is chosen to guide the student and provide assistance.