Global Arc

From Curious George to the chimps Jane Goodall studies, nonhuman primates occupy unique and interesting roles in our existence. They are our closest evolutionary relatives and they can be taught to communicate with humans, but are also imperiled by human expansion, tourism, and the pet-trade. Non-human primates are often studied in social sciences like Anthropology, Psychology, and Sociology as a means to understand human evolution and behavior. This course will employ quantitative and qualitative methods from Anthropology and other social and physical sciences to explore the human relationship with nonhuman primates.

As environmental unpredictability strikes the world in the form of erratic monsoons, rising temperatures, floods and droughts, how do people grapple with uncertain futures? Ethnographically exploring human and environment relationships across the world leads us to see how people often understand climate change as connected to longer histories of colonialism, unequal developmental trajectories and capitalist systems of production. As we move across diverse geographies, we will explore how people's cultural values, moral standpoints and ethics shape their everyday experiences of climate change and their cultivation of alternate futures.

The energy transition (or perhaps transitions) have begun. Where are they going? And what does anthropology have to do with energy anyway? In this class we will take these questions as central, looking at how energy systems shape culture, and how culture shapes the energy systems that shape it. We will deal with topics like solarization, microgrids, NIMBY-ism, green grabbing, and electric vehicles from the ground up. We will also take up a historical perspective that will help us to understand how earlier coal and oil-powered energy transitions shape our everyday lifeworlds.

Authoritarianisms is a course that challenges binary views by exploring the multiple and evolving forms of authoritarian rule - from totalitarian states to hybrid regimes, from technocracy to digital populism, from religious imaginaries to surveillance. Drawing on anthropology, political theory, and public policy analysis, it shows how authoritarian practices embed within democracy, shaping Human Rights and Public Policies. Through theory, case studies from Latin America, debates, and creative exercises, students develop tools to imagine dissent in the 21st century.

Water is emerging as both a site of contemporary crisis and hope for the future of life on earth. This course will focus on key theoretical and methodological approaches to the social scientific study of water from the ocean to the tap, from the atmosphere to the ice caps. We will build upon a range of humanities and social sciences literature on the theme of water and think archipelagically about water futures.

Home to more than 1.4 billion people, China has undergone seismic changes in government, economy, and demography over the past century. Today, China continues to transform as emerging systems of technology are reshaping everyday life, family and work, media, business, and cultural and political identities. This course draws on anthropology and qualitative social sciences more broadly to equip students with analytical perspective and conceptual tools to understand the lived realities of contemporary mainland China while situating them within the broader dynamics of China's rise as a global power.

This seminar examines anthropological approaches to the study of the Middle East (or Southwest Asia) and North Africa, with a primary focus on what is called "the Arab world." Situated in the longue durée of the region, we examine how anthropologists have engaged in ethnographic studies of gender, religion, politics, health, labor, infrastructure, and more. Ultimately, this course aims to help us think about what the human can teach us about the MENA region and, conversely, what the region can teach us about being human. This course is a Humanities Council Magic Project that includes mandatory pedagogical travel to Jordan during the break.

This course invites students to engage critically with community-engaged learning and research, focusing on case studies within anthropology and beyond. This course will center around conversations with practitioners who will reflect on community-engaged and activist projects. What does it mean to enter communities that aren't our own? How might academics do research with rather than on communities? How might we disrupt hierarchies of knowledge production? Students will learn about the fraught history of academic research on human subjects, and explore decolonizing, indigenous and community-based methodologies of knowledge production.

This course relies on ethnographic, historical, and creative accounts of love, hospitality, and belonging to inquire into the boundaries of bonding for people (and peoples) across the world. Paying close attention to the practices, worldviews, and disappointments associated with these domains, we will ask: How do historical narratives intersect with cultural repertoires in ordinary people's attempts to connect (or disconnect)? How do they experience the cultural and political boundaries that define their place in the world? How do they improvise when their cultural scripts (or legal options) prove insufficient for their needs?

In this seminar, we begin to address this question with contemporary analyses of the "guilty pleasures phenomenon" and continue with a selection of philosophical and social theory texts on guilt, taste, and consumption. From there, we proceed with texts on a range of guilty pleasures in both US and international contexts. In our discussions, field trips, and assignments, we also turn our analytical gazes inwards, asking what role guilty pleasures play in our own lives and how that has come to be.