Anthropology

This course uses ethnographic case studies to examine how interactions between people, societies, and systems generate health or illness and wellbeing or illbeing in a range of contexts. The course explores the ways in which health and wellbeing articulate with politics and inequality. 

This course provides an advanced introduction to the anthropology of health, illness, and healing. Students are introduced to key theories and current debates at the interface of anthropology and medicine through a focus on cross-cultural approaches to illness, pain, healing, the body, and care. This course explores biomedicine as one among many ways of thinking through and constituting personhood, illness, and the body. It deals with the challenges that arise when biomedical expertise meets other understandings of illness and suffering; the multiple kinds of care provided in institutional, public, religious and domestic settings; the relationship between curing and healing; and the ways in which people grapple with affliction and uncertainty through narrative, through relationships, and through action. 

This course explores urban anthropology, tracing its classical schools and the evolution of the subdiscipline to the present, and delving into the analysis of housing in urban environments. Topics include: anthropology of the city; the Chicago School; the Manchester School and the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute; urban planning and capital; space financialization; public space; gentrification; socio-spatial segregation; housing and social theory; housing systems; debt, credit, and home financing.

This course enables students from any subject major to explore gender and sexuality from a critical angle. By looking at the most popular debates from across the world, students examine how cultural makings of body, gender, femininity, masculinity, and sexuality have historically shaped and been shaped by wider social forces. The course visits foundational concepts and theories (feminist and queer theory) in gender studies which draw for example on philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and history. The lectures provide examples from across the globe, to enable students to question their very own norms, in the way people often fail to notice they exist. In seminars, students discuss their chosen examples from popular culture and facilitate discussion of current controversies around gender vis-à-vis the themes and theories covered in the lectures.

The course introduces key concepts of culture anthropology, and diversity and provides tools to analyze different approaches to the study cultural differences. Particular attention is devoted to current issues, positionality (race, class, gender, sexual orientation) and the processes of globalization, migration, and intercultural relations. The course discusses topics including, an introduction to cultural anthropology (theoretical approaches); cultures, cultural differences, and diversity; local and global dimensions, borders, and contact areas; migration processes and intercultural relations; language and communication, arts, media, and sports; and concepts of identity and issues of positionality. The course explores these topics in relation to psychology.