Anthropology

This course provides students with a theoretical and historical overview of the field of contemporary digital interactive factual (non-fiction) narratives. It is a course for storytellers from all backgrounds that want to use digital platforms (web, mobile, tablet, apps, VR, AR, MR, AI, immersive theatre…) to speak about our “shared world” by innovating and involving the user/inter-actor within their story world. Whether you come from journalism, documentary, film, ethnography, social communication or any other field, the challenge of creating for digital platforms is to move from a story-telling to a story-experiencing approach. This is the creative journey that the course proposes: to delve into the history of interactive narratives since the invention of the World Wide Web, learn about its current genres and platforms and be ready to navigate future trends in immersive media. 

Employing recent theories from gender and postcolonial studies, as well as media studies, this course analyses a wide range of case studies from contemporary visual culture, across a broad scope of genres and technologies. The course requires participants to critically think about concepts such as visuality, visual culture, representation, and technology. A novel approach to art, culture, and technology by challenging the primacy of vision and by mobilizing an intersectional perspective is provided. Visual methodologies and analytic tools from the fields of semiotics and psychoanalysis to be able to critically assess how social and cultural norms are disseminated in visual ways are learned. The course provides a toolkit for thinking through the growing and often overwhelming array of images we are confronted with daily in our media-saturated culture.

This introductory course covers some of the most familiar and important themes in medical anthropology. The literature focuses on classic texts dealing with issues such as classification of illness, uncertainties, bodies, subjectivities, identities, narratives, medicines, symbolic healing, patients and therapeutic journeys, lay and expert knowledge, medical practices, technologies and infrastructures. The course introduces the field of medical anthropology as part of the overall study of culture and society.

This course analyzes classic and contemporary theoretical debates in tourism studies from an anthropological perspective. These debates are critically examined using ethnographic case studies from European, specifically Spanish, settings. Asian, African, and Latin American cases are used for comparison.