Download Anthropology Graduate Courses ~ Fall 2016

Anthropology Graduate Courses ~ Fall 2016
CULTURAL & LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY
16:070:515 Theories of Agency
Wednesday 2:15 - 5:15pm RAB 302
Ahearn
This seminar will explore the various meanings surrounding scholars’ uses of the term
“agency.” We will debate the utility of the concept and attempt to trace its intellectual history
through various theoretical movements, especially practice theory. In the process, we will
address related issues such as resistance, attributions of responsibility, and causality.
16:070:537 Anthropology of Human Rights
Goldstein
Monday 3:55-6:55 RAB 302
Human rights is a global conception that has produced many and varied impacts, has been
adapted and reworked in local contexts worldwide, and has become the object of as well as a
resource for popular struggle, state policymaking, and transnational movements – all of which
makes it a perfect subject for anthropological analysis. But anthropology has a long and
complicated relationship with human rights, as this course explores. We will examine the
origins and expansion of human rights thinking, and the impacts this has had on national
formations and local contexts. We will go on to consider the conflicts between culture and
rights that have emerged in this process, and the question of universality in the application of
human rights around the world. The course will also consider the ways in which rights
conceptions have been mobilized in local struggles, with a particular geographical focus on
Latin America. We will look at specific manifestations of rights as captured in ethnographic
writing, including issues of indigenous rights, women’s rights, the relationship between security
and rights, and the rights of transnational migrants. Students will develop one particular theme
from among those studied in their final research paper for the course.
16:070:541 Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Crosslisted as 16:195:519, Comparative Literature and Other Fields
Tuesday 3:55 - 6:55PM RAB 305
Professor Louisa Schein
This interdisciplinary course introduces theories that have been developed to engage cultural
politics, including discourse, ideology and subjectification; materialist cultural analysis;
capitalism and the culture industry; affect, performativity and embodiment; critical race and
ethnic studies; queer theory and queer of color critique, cultural production, circulation and
reception. Readings cover British and Frankfurt school geneaologies of the Cultural Studies
field, and subsequent trajectories, juxtaposing Euro-American, transnational, and non-Western
(particularly Asian) sites and flows. We explore methodologies for researching and interpreting
media, popular culture and consumption; neoliberalism and markets; race, racism and bodies;
gender/sexuality and eroticism; normativity, policing and resistance; nationalism,
transnationalism and diaspora; new, digital and social media.
Through close readings of theoretical, empirical, creative and film texts, we ask questions such
as: What meanings and practices constitute subjectivity and/or identity? How do symbolic,
epistemic and physical violence interact? How to think decolonization? How is mass culture
imbricated with class, race, privilege and other inequalities? What is meant by precarity and
social death? How and when does sexuality become racialized?
Always with an attention to modes of writing, we will actively discuss alternative and
transdisciplinary intellectual strategies. The course is also designed to hone interpretive skills as
an enhancement to students’ specific research projects.
EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY
16:070:502 Proseminar in Evolutionary Anthropology
Schrire
Tuesday 2:15-5:15pm
This course is an introduction both to human evolutionary science as a discipline and to the
particular research interests of Rutgers’ faculty, most of whom belong to the section of
Evolutionary Anthropology (EA).
During the first class we will discuss the organisation and administration of the course and the
backgrounds of the faculty and students that are involved here. In the last class we will discuss
what has been learned and how that might affect our future research. The rest of the semester
will feature a series of faculty presentations, where they will discuss their broad research fields
and focus on their particular interests. The visiting faculty member will assign readings, give a
presentation, and lead a discussion. After the class, the students will be required to summarise
the main findings and present this to the Instructor.
16:070:561 Human Behavioral Ecology
Cronk
Monday 2:15pm-5:15pm RAB 305
Review of major issues and recent research in behavioral ecology and related approaches to
human behavior.