Courses

ANTH 34901 Geostories: Assembling the Planetary                  
Instru: Joseph Masco
TH    3:30 pm – 6:20 pm

This seminar explores recent work in science studies focused on the role of geology in our understanding not only of the deep time of the planet but its climactic futures.  A focus on the emerging concept of the “planetary” is a central theme. We will read texts across anthropology, history, geology, and technoscience exploring how the intersections of big data, computation, systems of visualization, and social theory combine to establish the idea of planetary form, politics, and futurity.

ANTH  34970  Radical Ecologies and Futures                                Instru: Michael Fisch
T/TH 11:00 am – 12:20 pm

This seminar explores issues in environmental anthropology through the conceptual, methodological, and ethical challenges posed by speculative philosophies at the edge of reason and the intersection of nature, technology, and science. In so doing, it seeks to develop a mode of anthropological engagement with ecology that complicates recent material, ontological, and multi-species responses to the crisis of the Anthropocene. Its aim, as such, is also to elaborate the implicit possibilities born of thinking not only in terms of relation but also in relation to a politics and ethics of process. Of particular concern will be a number of questions, such as: how to (re)imagine the conceptual currency of nature as an analytic category or even object of inquiry; how ethnography might reshape nature; and what sort of social transformations might this reshaping render imaginable.  

ANTH 35021  “Strange Times”: Provocations of an Anthropology of Governance”                          
Instru: Hussein Ali Agrama
TH  2:00 pm – 4:50 pm

Contemporary public life is marked by strangeness. Official accounts of consequential events fail to cohere, not through concealment, but openly. Mutually exclusive statements stand together on the public record without reconciliation. Disclosure produces deeper opacity. Denials answer accusations no authority has made. Evidence arrives narrativized, as if staged for comprehension. Even noticing this can carry penalties out of proportion to the act. Such strangeness is not captured by vocabularies of corruption, propaganda, conspiracy, or failure. It appears to constitute something else, for which we lack good concepts.

This seminar refuses premature explanation. Rather than resolve strangeness into a theory of how power now works, we treat it as a provocation: a signal that inherited frameworks for analyzing governance across state and non-state, national and global domains have encountered their limits. We proceed through historical and contemporary cases, with readings in political anthropology, history of science, political economy, and deep politics. We cultivate the discipline the material demands: establishing what can be established, mapping what cannot, distinguishing hidden, unknowable, and manufactured, and resisting twin collapses into certainty and normalcy.The premise is that learning to think within strangeness, without dissolving it, has become a condition of serious socio-political analysis.

ANTH  36509  Bakhtin, Life and Meaning                                      
Instru: John Kelly
T/TH  9:30 am – 10:50 am

Mikhail Bakhtin is unique among social theorists. He provokes fury from some partisans of redemption by struggle, and for others enables life-changing political consciousness. This course explores his linguistics, political theory, theology, ethics, and philosophy of the human condition. His dialogics are vital to study of decolonization, and much else. He negates Saussure’s semiotics more fundamentally than Derrida, and builds history and politics into Sapir, Whorf culture theory. Bakhtin challenges theories of order, progress, and knowledge, and theories of power, struggle and revolution. He opens a third possibility, a social theory of life, death, and renewal. Making death comedy not tragedy Bakhtin revalorizes life and real meaning. With Gandhi he is one of the last social theorists to reject modernism and embrace faith in God – with a vastly different view of truth and consciousness. Bakhtin was dramatically discovered in the West in late twentieth century, a half-century after the Stalinists decimated his school. He offers a surprising new road out of Kant, dialogical not dialectical (Hegel, Marx) not historical realist (Weber) not centered by culture, libido or will to power. We will read key texts by Bakhtin and school in contrast with others. We consider dialogues with antagonists and intimates, with God, with other species, and smart machines, dialogics of feminism in the Global South, and of migration, global warming, war, peace and democracy.

ANTH 37201  Language in Culture I                                            
Instru: Constantine Nakassis
T/TH 11:00 am – 12:20 pm

The first quarter of the two-quarter Language in Culture sequence introduces a number of analytic concepts developed out of the study of “language” and its limits. We begin with the study of “interaction order” in its multifunctional complexity, teasing out its constitution through the real-time unfolding of indexical (pragmatic) and reflexive (metapragmatic) signs/functions as coherent “text.” We use this attention to the dialectics of indexicality and its various implications to investigate various problematics in the philosophy of language (reference, performativity), linguistics (poetics, grammatical sense, variation, register), and sociocultural anthropology (racialization, relativity, subjectivity/identity, temporality, institutionality).

ANTH 54101 Professionalization Seminar: From PhD to Job            
Instru: D. Li /K. Takabvirwa
W 12:30 pm to 3:20 pm

This course helps PhD students prepare for and navigate the job market. It focuses primarily on academic jobs, though it also devotes some time to non-academic jobs. Doctoral training equips students for a variety of careers. The class will help students identify those careers, and communicate the skills and expertise they have and can offer to potential employers. It also offers students a better understanding of what different kinds of positions entail, how to identify career opportunities that are a good fit, how to represent themselves on paper through their written materials, and prepare for interviews, campus visits, job talks, etc. Students will write and revise application materials like cover letters, CVs, writing samples, teaching statements, research statements, etc. We will discuss how to negotiate a job offer, and how to navigate the transition from graduate student to gainfully employed professional. Space is limited. Students who enroll must attend all nine sessions. Enrollment priority will be given to Anthropology PhD students, though PhD students in other departments are welcome, space permitting.

ANTH 54201 Visual Trust across Science, Religion and Society. An Experimental and multi-modal Approach           
Various Dates (see below)            
Instru: Roger Canals
M/W  9:30 am – 12:20 pm

This course focuses on the concept of 'visual trust'. Drawing on disciplines such as anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), ethics, and visual and media studies, it critically analyses how regimes of authenticity, veracity, and deception in images are crafted, intensified, and assessed in contemporary science, religion, and society. Key notions such as 'visual fakes' and 'anticipatory images' are also discussed. The course takes a relational, contextual, and performative approach to the study of images. To this end, it brings together examples from fact-checking agencies, Caribbean religious movements, photojournalism, AI, astronomy and medical imaging, to name a few. Methodologically, the course follows to the principle of 'studying images through images'. Consequently, it encourages students to experiment with visual research methods and visual modes of writing that complement the textual form, in line with contemporary multimodal, visual and public anthropology. The course takes the form of a seminar, complemented by video screenings and individual or group student presentations. No prior experience of visual methods, photography, or cinema language and technique is required.

(M: Oct. 12th, 19th, 26th, Nov. 16th, Nov. 30th); (W: Oct. 14th, Oct. 21st, Oct. 28th, Nov. 11th, Nov. 18th)