Current courses: Spring 2024
A&S 201: Culture and the Environment
How can we understand the various ways in which people shape their environments and are, in turn, shaped by them? This course explores this question by delving into the social and political dimensions of human-nature interactions. It focuses on exemplary studies of water and its infrastructures, as well as theoretical concepts that inform these studies, such as “ecological violence,” “residual governance,” “slow violence,” “racial capitalism,” and “infrastructural violence.” Through engagement with these and other concepts, we will examine the fragile and constructed boundaries between “nature” and “culture,” as well as the complexities involved in the political control of the natural world.
The course material is diverse, drawing from anthropology, history, geography, and the humanities to address the disproportionate effects of floods, sea level rise, infrastructure breakdown, and water contamination. It also includes films, library workshops, and writing exercises, emphasizing the course’s focus on writing. Throughout the semester, you’ll develop a research paper on a specific water-related controversy and environmental justice. Additionally, you’ll create a “interpretative path” based on your research to be featured on our Scalar website site.
Other courses:
A&S 102: Cultural Anthropology
A&S 230: Social Memory
A&S 258: The Anthropology of Violence
A&S 374: Museum Studies: History, Theory, and Debates
This course offers an introduction to the social and cultural history and theory of museums. Thinking about the idea of the “modern” museum as an instrument and technology of power, we will first consider how the practices and ideologies of colonialism, looting, and exploitation have shaped the construction of museums and their collections since the cabinets of curiosities of the Enlightenment. Second, we will explore specific collections and exhibits of natural history, anthropology, and art, to question whether museums can be transformed into spaces for restitution, repatriation, community building, and the unlearning of the imperial foundations of the knowledge. This course will also offer students the opportunity to develop an exhibit on campus, focusing on objectives such as: crafting a narrative around physical objects, writing exhibit text, developing virtual components, and installing and de-installing the exhibit.
In fall 2023, our class exhibit “Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism” drew inspiration from Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s book of the same title and aims to confront the profound legacy of violence deeply ingrained within museum collections. Building on her ideas, our physical exhibit features eight textual interventions (see samples below) designed to address the neutral language commonly found in museum labels. This language often overlooks the violent history of museum collections, particularly their imperial and colonial origins. Through our website, we aim to further emphasize this context and its lasting impact. We believe that for museums today, the most critical issue is understanding what was taken, from whom, under which conditions, and facilitating the return of objects when requested.
A&S 263: Latin American Ethnography
A&S 390-391: Independent Reading and Research (Ethnographic Methods)
A&S: 495-496: Thesis
Image Credit: Detail, Totonac Women in Papantla Plaza, Photo Lot 80-32. Isabel Kelly Photographs, 1948, National Anthropological archives, Smithsonian Institution