Teaching

Anthropology is the discipline that studies the diversity of the human experience—from the biocultural evolution of Homo sapiens and the ways of life of past societies to contemporary human cultures and global challenges. In this course, you will be introduced to the four fields that make up the holistic discipline of Anthropology: Cultural Anthropology, Biological Anthropology, Archaeology, and Linguistic Anthropology. The intercultural anthropological perspective learned in this course will prepare students to become critical and empathetic observers of the human condition, ready to engage the world as active global citizens.  

Cultural Anthropology is the subdiscipline of Anthropology that studies people’s communities, behaviors, beliefs, and institutions to interpret how people make lives of meaning and significance. In this course, we will explore how cultural anthropologists come to understand and represent the diverse cultural lives of different communities using a unique set of methods, theoretical approaches, and modes of representation that enable us to “walk in other people’s shoes” and see the world through different eyes. Practical assignments will help you build skills in inter-cultural communication, critical thinking, social analysis, and ethnographic research methods that will prepare you to confidently navigate a world of cultural connection, creativity, and difference. 

This course explores the social relations and politics generated through disasters to understand how disaster—as an experienced catastrophe and a subject of study and intervention—is culturally encountered. Our class will examine the perceptions, practices, reflections, and knowledges of scientists, humanitarians, and communities from different regions of the world. A central goal of the course will be to come to an understanding of how disasters create social relations across space, time, and social groups even as they disrupt them. In this way, the class will engage disaster not as a single, destructive, episode but as part of longer patterns of socio-environmental and political change, vulnerability, and exclusion that raise fundamental questions about socio-environmental justice and responsibility for living on a shared, and imminently unpredictable, planet.