Fall 2019
ANTH 89: Transforming Our Food System
Dr. Don Nonini
This course focuses on an analytical and ethnographic critique of the transnational corporate food economy, and on its classed, raced and gendered exclusions and oppression of workers and people of color, and explores alternative food practices that embody challenges to its domination.
LTAM 101: Intro to Latin American Studies
Dr. Florence Babb
This course introduces the interdisciplinary field of Latin American Studies. Readings encompass discussion of Mexico and Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, with significant attention to Latin America in the global context. We highlight recent developments in the region and the broader context of the Americas, which include the United States and Canada in North America, and the complex history of relationships throughout the hemisphere. There is an emphasis on histories of difference and inequality that are evident on a notably uneven playing field. We focus on race, class, gender, and sexuality and ask whether legacies of colonialism and inequality are being overcome or persist in the contemporary period of neoliberal development and globalization.
ANTH 503: Gender, Culture, and Development
Dr. Florence Babb
This course is intended for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students interested in critical and feminist approaches to development studies. We will consider classic writings and debates since the 1970s relating to gender and development, and then turn to recent writings that assess and critique conventional economic development models. The primary emphasis will be on countries of the Global South and on such questions as how alternative approaches to gender, culture, and development may be more inclusive of diverse peoples and grassroots movements for change. Themes will include feminism and critical development studies and the cultural turn in gender and development studies. Case studies and videos on gender, culture, and development will serve to illuminate questions of rural and urban political economy, health and wellbeing, sexual rights, and social policy, as well as gender, race, and cultural identity. Students will be active participants in the seminar and will take turns helping to facilitate discussion. Research projects will be developed in consultation with the instructor. Occasionally, outside lectures and other events will be recommended.
ANTH 897: Ethnography and Black Communities
Dr. Karla Slocum
This graduate seminar looks at twentieth and twenty-first century ethnographic studies of African American communities as conducted by anthropologists and other humanistic social scientists (especially sociology and geography). This includes studies of urban neighborhoods, rural and suburban locales, and other sites or collectives where groups or places that are black-identified in some way reside in high concentration or have had significant influence. In exploring these places and groupings, the primary focus is as much on what we can understand about various social processes associated with them as it is on ethnographic approaches to studying black community. With readings from W.E.B DuBois to Bianca Williams, we explore texts that focus on such topics as: social organization and everyday life in particular black communities; race, class, gender and generational relations, intersections and positions in black communities; heritage projects and the role of history and memory in community identities; different forms of community and community organizing especially in the context of black and black diasporic sensibilities as well as in the face of anti-black racism, and social and economic injustice.
ANTH 898: State, Politics, Power
Dr. Townsend Middleton
A graduate seminar examining key theories of the state and power, with an abiding interest in how difference figures in various forms of rule and governance.