Coming soon (Spring 2025), courses “Listening to African Cityscapes” and “Sound and the Environment Lab”
Anthropological Perspectives on Society and Culture
(Spring 2023)
Senior Distinctions Seminar
(Fall & Spring 2023)
This course explores the theoretical debates that have structured anthropological thought over the past century, paying attention to what gets taken up as theory and why. Course materials offer a critical approach to the study of anthropology theory, dialoging between “canonical” and contemporary texts to consider anthropology’s colonial histories and decolonial openings. We use Anthropological Theory for the Twenty-First Century (2021) by A. Lynn Bolles, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, Bernard C. Perley, and Keri Vacanti Brondo as our guide—honoring “the diversity of scholars who have long contributed to the development of anthropological theory…[and] whose contributions have historically been under-acknowledged.” In class, we experiment with multimodal theoretical engagements, including film, comics, memes, podcasts, music, and game shows. Students conclude the semester by collectively creating Final Podcast projects engaging a theoretical topic or scholar of their choice.
Image Credit: Simian, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), Donna Haraway
This course is a two-semester seminar sequence aimed at supporting majors through the thesis writing process. While writing a thesis is largely an independent process, this course fosters a collaborative environment to provide each other with regular, critical, generous, and useful feedback; to keep each other on schedule; and to provide the support and encouragement that co-working can make possible. We think-together about form, style, and rhetoric, and well as data collection, management, and analysis.
Anthropology of the Body & the Subject
Image Credit: Martina Bacigalupo, Gulu Real Art Studio, 2011–12
(Fall 2022)
This course takes up “the body” as its locus of inquiry into everyday lived worlds. While bodies are often taken as natural and given, opposed both to “the mind” and “the environment,” anthropological, philosophical, and historical studies of the body advise otherwise. Bodies sit (stand, lay, move…) at the interface of knowing and being in the world. Their complexities have generated an extensive history of inquiry in the social science and humanities, and lived experience gives witness to their contested power. We will attend to the ways subjectivity and materiality play out in the body in a selection of current and classic theoretical and ethnographic materials. To do so, this course foregrounds feminist theoretical approaches to the body alongside works in anthropology, ethnomusicology, science and technology studies, and design. In studying the body, we will think aesthetics and performance alongside science and medicine, thinking with and against any boundaries between them.
Culture and the Environment
(Spring 2021)
The course examines pressing questions in the anthropological study of the environment. These include: what is the relationship between culture and environment? How do we know the boundary between human and nonhuman? How is “nature” understood in different societies? When does “environment” become political? How do people live with environmental degradation? What are the linkages between environmental thinking and the forces of racial capitalism? We explore these questions thematically, considering the cultural, economic, social, and political factors that shape people’s understanding and experience of each. We think across ‘natural’ and ‘built’ environments in order to trouble the boundary between them. We engage feminist, decolonial, political ecological, and science studies contributions to these topics. Course materials include films, audio productions, and ethnographic accounts.
Engaging with these questions, students produced “natural histories” of home for their final projects - you can explore their creative projects here.
Sound and the City
(Spring 2016, Fall 2023, 2024)
This course examines the relationship between the sounds we hear and the cities we live in. How does listening complement or complicate what we think we know about a place? This course encourages writing and listening as complementary modes of engaging with the city ethnographically, descriptively, sensorially, and analytically. We will attune to the city by spending time out and about in the community and recording what we hear. To bridge writing and listening practices, we: (1) keep listening journals, revising selected entries to develop into polished pieces of writing; (2) engage others’ writing about sound; (3) develop skills in telling stories with sound; (4) explore diverse ways of writing the city through listening. This is a writing intensive course which emphasizes writing as a social process. I’ve taught this course in Durham, NC (see photos) and Rochester, NY.
Fieldwork Methods
(Spring 2020)
How do we know what we know? How do anthropologists transform field notes, and all they entail, into ethnography? By exploring “the field” as the site where anthropologists work, this course explores the ethics and implications of writing about others and ourselves. This course challenges students to engage and question anthropological ways of knowing. How do we constitute an “ethnographic subject”? How do we see, relate to, and identify (or not) with those whom we study? How do we account for various forms of power? Combining theories of anthropological fieldwork methods with practice, including participation, observation, interviews, and creative multimedia methods, this course explores fieldwork as a method for understanding social life. Students undertake original research in a local fieldsite of their choice and produce their own mini-ethnography.