On the contribution of anthropology to the study of major challenges to everyday life in human history and the production of responses to these challenges. The ongoing challenges of the past few years will be used as a starting point to think through similar and perennial challenges in education, health, technology, etc.
The class is a general introduction to anthropological approaches to the study of the political and professional concerns that are always challenging human life. The class focuses on various theoretical approaches to the identification of constraints (social structure, systems) and opportunities (culture, agency, play, imagination) in the ongoing production of human responses across all distinctions of identity and contexts.
This course is the first of the "colloquium" sequence which we conceive as a form of apprenticeship during which doctoral students are taken through all the steps that characterize professional work in anthropology: grounding themselves in a theoretical framework, elaborating a research proposal asking a concrete question that theoretical considerations suggest might be answered by anthropological techniques, conducting a eight to ten weeks pilot ethnographic investigation over the summer months, analyzing their data, and writing a research report to be defended in public.
Requirements for these students are similar but separate from those of the doctoral students in anthropology.