Global Arc

According to the UN, by 2050, two-thirds of the world's population will live in cities. Urban life -- whether or not that means living in close proximity to each other, interacting with infrastructure, or new experimentations with the built environment -- has an impact upon how we experience the world and our sense of place. In this class, we will discuss theory on urbanism, infrastructure, and urban anthropology, and we will conduct observations about the built environment in and around campus. This class should be of interest to those interested in urban theory, anthropology, or architecture.

We're surrounded by narratives that AI (artificial intelligence) is rapidly learning, listening, coding, calculating, and altogether acting more like (or better than) humans. But what does it mean to be human? Which "actual" humans do "artificially" intelligent agents mimic or resemble? We will consider such questions through the lens of anthropology, a discipline dedicated to tracking the ever-changing definitions of being human. By reading and creating alternative stories about AI, we explore how race, citizenship, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, class, labor, environment and empire fundamentally shape human-machine borders.

Exploration of cross-cultural constructions of sickness, disease, health, and healing interrogates our basic ethical, moral, and political positions. Our healing and disease models derive from specific cultural assumptions about society, gender, class, age, ethnicity, and race. Categories of disease from one culture can compromise ethical positions held by another. We pursue the moral implications of a critique of medical development and the political and ethical implications of treating Western medicine as ethnoscience as well as universal truth. One 90-minute lecture, one 90-minute class.

This seminar traces the historical roots and growth of the Black Lives Matter social movement in the United States and comparative global contexts. The movement and course are committed to resisting, unveiling, and undoing histories of state sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies. The course seeks to document the forms of dispossession that Black Americans face, and offers a critical examination of the prison industrial complex, police brutality, urban poverty, and white supremacy in the US.

How do we grapple with the lasting, unintended impacts of science, engineering and medicine in "the nation's service and the service of humanity"? What lessons can we learn from the past to conduct morally sound research and generate culturally inclusive knowledge? We explore perspectives from indigenous studies to approach the intersection of Princeton's history, nuclear science, settler colonialism and environmental racism to collectively imagine a more holistic and inclusive approach to studying science, technology and the environment. Students will conduct original research that draws from and contributes to the Nuclear Princeton project.

This course will introduce students to the comparative study of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. We will take a broad hemispheric approach instead of focusing solely on the experiences of any particular native community, allowing students to both acquaint themselves with the diversity of indigenous communities and better understand the multitude of indigenous experiences--or, what it means to be indigenous--across regional contexts. How do processes of imperial expansionism and settler colonialisms shape the conditions within which indigenous Americans now live? How do native peoples relate to settler colonial governing bodies today?

This course draws on anthropology, history, critical theory, films and documentaries, fictive and journalistic writing to explore violence, its power and meaning. We will explore conquest and colonialism, genocidal violence, state violence and political resistance, everyday violence, gendered violence, racialization, torture, as well as witnessing and repair. Building across disciplines and working with heterodox theoretical frameworks (post-colonial/decolonial, non-Western, feminist, and indigenous approaches), this course invites us to understand violence in its multifaceted physical, symbolic, social, political and cultural manifestations.

This course tackles anthropological ways of knowing and explores the evidentiary power of ethnography to advance our understanding of diverse lifeworlds. As students engage classic theoretical texts and contemporary ethnographies, they are introduced to the analytical and writing skills necessary to pursue their own independent anthropological studies: how to develop a research question, locate and analyze relevant sources, situate their interests and concerns in relation to key anthropological debates and concepts, and consider the potential of ethnographic storytelling to expand ethical and political imagination.

This course is an introduction to doing ethnographic fieldwork. Class sessions alternate between discussions of key issues and questions in the theory and practice of ethnography and workshops devoted to fieldwork exercises: participant observation, interviewing, fieldnotes, oral history, multi-modal and virtual ethnographic methods; as well as debates over research ethics and regulatory ethics. Students will build skills to design and conduct ethnographic research, while developing a critical appreciation of the possibilities and limits of ethnographic research to help them understand and engage with the world.

Ethnography is a qualitative method for finding patterns in complicated field data. This course teaches students how to perform rigorous and ethical ethnographic methods for research and application. Students first learn the history and tools of anthropological methods. They are then introduced to case studies where ethnographic methods were used for business, policy development, leadership, and product design. Finally, students develop their own ethnographic research projects. This course is designed for non-anthropology majors or anthropology majors who are unable to take ANT 300 in their junior year.