Global Arc

War is ubiquitous. This course seeks to critically understand a fundamental aspect of our increasingly interconnected global present through examining the question war. We will draw on works from different disciplines (anthropology, history, critical theory, fiction, political science, American Studies), and we will constantly move across them, as we seek to understand how war is conceptualized by different intellectual traditions and experienced by multiple actors. In doing so, we will focus primarily, but not exclusively on the US and the Middle East.

This seminar explores racial capitalism and the right to the city from the perspective of the housing crisis in the US. We will engage historical studies, social theory, and urban ethnography in order to understand how redlining and real estate speculation produce landscapes of housing injustice. We will also consider the ways marginalized communities mobilize to fight insecurity and to guarantee their right to housing. In collaboration with the social impact research and design studio, The Practice of Democracy, we will organize urban walking tours and interviews in Trenton, and students will produce collaborative multimedia projects.

In this entrée to anthropology's visual modes, we explore documentary film as a way to represent experience, identity, and conflict through the senses, and we study data and visualizations to reveal the imperceptible, unexpected, and abstract structures of social life. We assess their realist truth claims and learn to see the world from indigenous media makers whose projects point beyond decolonization and toward knowing visible and invisible ties among people and with more than human species and natural forces. Our aim is to enlarge the material and cultural possibilities for making legible the complexities of critical social issues.

Disabled people are the largest minority in the world. Attention to the lived experiences and discourses of disability is crucial to our understanding of what it means to be human in an ever-changing world. This course moves beyond a medicalized view of disability and develops an historical and ethnographic critique of ableism with a focus upon the diverse forms of impairment and their social, economic, and technological contexts. What are the moral and political stakes of an anthropology of disability today?

Anthropology is unique in its people-centered, ethnographic approach to understanding social life and worlds. We begin with a critical eye on colonial era articulations of the method of participant observation, then explore alternative ways of knowing. Throughout, we explore the tensions, contradictions, and creative potentials of producing critical knowledge with people. Students cultivate skills for field and archival work, with forays into digital spaces. Fieldwork exercises allow students to practice ethnographic approaches and challenge more experience-distant, quantitative methodologies.

This course uses historical and anthropological methods to examine the health of Native communities. By investigating the history, social structures, and colonial forces that have shaped and continue to shape contemporary Indigenous nations, we investigate both the causes of contemporary challenges and the ways that Native peoples have ensured the vibrancy, wellness, and survival of their peoples. We will treat health as a holistic category and critically examine the myriad factors that can hinder or enable the wellbeing of Native nations.

What does it mean to be free? From slavery to cyborgian imaginations, from anarchy to abolition, from exploration to decolonization, what would make us free? Can we be free under capitalism? Can we be free amidst persistent violence? Can we be free if our bodies are subject to stat-mandated regulation? Can we be free if we cannot move across borders? What might it mean to articulate the answers to these questions via film? Will new people gain access to new conceptualizations of freedom? Can film liberate? Can the process of making these films make us free?

This course will study borders, literal and imagined, and those who contest and enforce them. We will review anthropological approaches to bordering logics, focusing on how bordering and its violences creeps into everyday life far from nation-state boundaries and exploring insurgent mobilities. Drawing heavily from bordering processes in the Americas while also exploring parallels around the globe, this course asks: who do borders serve? How are they maintained? What does transgressing borders mean for those in power and for those who do the crossing?

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year.

The senior thesis (498-499) is a year-long project in which students complete a substantial piece of research and scholarship under the supervision and advisement of a Princeton faculty member. While a year-long thesis is due in the student's final semester of study, the work requires sustained investment and attention throughout the academic year.