Anthropology

The course provides a comparative understanding of mobility and migration patterns in prehistory. It examines theoretical approaches that explore human adaptation towards changes in society related to migration or increased/decreased mobility. The course is transdisciplinarily linked to subjects like anthropology, linguistics, genetics, and geochemistry. From anthropological models, it engages the societal causes and causations of mobility and migration. Linguistics is implemented as a tool to understand connections between languages and different forms of cultural movement, and novel approaches from the natural sciences like ancient DNA and isotope analysis are explored to further contextualize physical mobility. The course also implements a practical component where the theory from the lectures is put into practice in laboratory work (in a broad sense). Scientific approaches are explored to get a source-critical perspective on how to frame and understand contact between and within cultural groups.

This course examines issues of power and how it relates to language use in various institutions such as law, medicine, and business among others. It covers how people in power can influence the ways in which language is used, and exercise control over access to language by others; and similarities and differences in institutional language practices across different sociocultural contexts, including Hong Kong and other countries. 

This course offers a critical overview of anthropological approaches to the environment. It introduces a set of contemporary and now classic literature on nature produced by anthropologists and social scientists more broadly, while critically engaging with contemporary environmental issues. This course examines key anthropological approaches organized into three key themes of community, capitalism, and multispecies entanglements. 

This interdisciplinary course examines the socioeconomic and political disenfranchisement experienced by residents of the "other France"—a France comprised of working-class citizens often of immigrant origin and from France’s former colonies. It introduces students to urban sociology by requiring that they focus on the particular problems experienced by social actors who live in economically and socially disfavored parts of Paris. Topics covered include urban sociological theories, de-facto segregation, poverty, crime, schooling, public policy, national identity, the negotiation of bi-culturality, and the French secularizing mission. Students investigate these topics from a variety of sources, ranging from documentary film and photojournalism to literary and cinematic expressions. Via these sources, students become familiar with a vibrant urban "vernacular" culture that contests issues pertaining to citizenship, racialization, and representation.

This course focuses on 'mobility' in the global era, reviews the various landscapes of migration, and explores ways to improve multicultural sensitivity. It examines theories related to globalization and migration and provides a study of capital, migrants, citizenship, and multiculturalism through specific examples. In the first half of the class, the theoretical concepts and aspects related to migration are identified, and the experiences of migrants are listened to. The second half analyzes what drives the migration of young people and how the desire and identity of mobile/imobile youth are structured through migration. 

This course offers a study of the body and emotions from the interactions between biological, social, and cultural dimensions taking into account the contributions from different branches of anthropology such as symbolism, rituals, religion, politics, and health and disease.

This course is an introduction to some of the central themes in environmental anthropology as well as an exploration of some recent anthropological analyses of environmental change. Drawing on a range of ethnographic studies, the course provides perspectives on topics such as: how peoples’ understanding of the environment can be related to their sense of self, identity, and moral obligation; how nature—animals, plants and landscapes—can become sites of contestation and conflict; how environments can elicit different forms of knowledge; how global inequality and colonial dispossession are connected to climate change and biodiversity loss; and how both slow and sudden environmental crises affect how we think about the future and what it means to be human.

This course examines the different ways in which people experience and explain supernatural phenomena across the globe. It will look at these varied understandings and people’s experiences of witches, witchcraft, vampires, zombies, and other supernatural phenomena across time and space. This course will address various questions, including how “the supernatural” is a category of beliefs, phenomena and experiences that did not fit within the narrative of a dualistic, scientific paradigm developed in the West as a result of the so-called “Enlightenment” era. It will also look at how this itself was “a myth of modernity” which ignored the fact that not infrequently magic and science coexist. As part of a process of decolonizing knowledge, we will also examine supernatural and occult traditions as they appear in the context of religion, narrative, healing, ritual and media accounts and representations in Western cultures. The primary focus in this course is not belief, but practice, and not what people say they do, but what they do and why they do it. This course seeks neither to prove or disprove the existence of supernatural phenomena, nor to make value judgments about people’s praxes. Rather, it takes an ethnographic, phenomenological approach, recognizing people’s lived supernatural experiences and the many different ways in which people inhabit and perceive this world. 

This course examines the cultural dimensions of emotion in everyday life. It will focus on how emotions are experienced, represented and understood in individual and social contexts. Drawing on different media and cultural sites, this course will examine a range of emotional states such as (but not limited to) love, happiness, fear, hate, terror and ideas of hope, trust, belief and faith in the (re)making of individual and social life. It will also consider how emotions are deployed in current social and political debates.