The history of African diasporic people is about more than slavery. This course is an overview of the archaeology of African Diaspora sites occupied between the 13th and 20thcenturies. The goal is to increase your understanding of the ways economics, environments, networks, governments, religions and culture all coalesced to create vibrant black communities around the world. Students...
This course explores disability worlds in the Bay Area through the ethnographic field methods, visual anthropology, and design anthropology. What does it mean to be disabled? How are disability organizations in the Bay Area trying to accomplish social and political change? What is the disability world? Through close participant observation and iterative design, students will work closely with...
What does work look and feel like today, in the Bay Area, and far beyond? How do we think about the rise of the gig economy (Uber, Caviar, Task Rabbit), along with the re-entrenchment of nationalist, anti-immigration politics in the U.S. and elsewhere? Where is the line between work and leisure in a digital economy? Are scrolling and clicking forms of labor? Is there room today to imagine work as a source of...
Various topics covering current research theory, method; issues of social and cultural concern; culture change, conflict, and adaptation. May combine more than one subdiscipline of Anthropology.
How did we get from the "warrior woman" and "model minority" to "Southeast Asian refugees" and "crazy rich Asians"? How do the imagination, understanding and politics of Asia American and Asian-American shift over time and space? What are the political, economic, and cultural stakes in re-imaginations of what is "Asian" in contemporary times?
Selected ethnographies, novels, and films will be read as dynamic...
The structure and dynamics of human cultures and social institutions from a comparative perspective with special attention to American cultures and their roots. Case studies will illustrate the principles presented in the course. It fulfills the requirements for 3.
This freshman-sophomore seminar will be a ‘thinkery’ for freshman and sophomores. We will gather together at the end of the week to discuss current events bearing on the current ‘crisis’ of global immigration and its relationship to many factors from climate change, political chaos, drug cartels, poverty and violence. Although this is a global phenomenon, we will focus on the US borderlands. We...
