How can we read, write, and critically think (imagine) about African politics and society? The course presents contemporary ethnography on African politics and society during the postcolonial era, emphasizing the multiplicity, complexities, and diversity of African ideas, imaginations, practices, and experiences, in along with the variety of national and international factors that either influence or are impacted by them. Upon completing the course, students will have the essential critical thinking abilities and analytical tools required to recognize and challenge reductionist and biased narratives concerning Africa.

Humans have a deep history, one that informs our contemporary reality. Understanding our evolutionary history is understanding both what we have in common with other primates and other hominins, and what happened over the last 7 to 10 million years since our divergence from the other African ape lineages. More specifically, the story of the human is centered in what happened in the ~2.5 million year history of our own genus (Homo). This class outlines the history of our lineage and offers an anthropological and evolutionary explanation for what this all means for humans today, and why we should care.

Love is a deeply personal experience. Yet, powerful social, political, and economic forces determine who we love, when we love, and how we love. Looking at practices of romantic love, dating, sex, marriage, queer love, friendship, and familial love across different social and global contexts, this course explores how social and cultural factors shape our most intimate relationships. Drawing on ethnography, history, and journalism, we examine the intersections between love and technology, gender, race, the law, capitalism, colonialism, and religion. For the final project, students will use creative writing or multi-media to tell a love story.

This class introduces students to anthropological approaches for understanding science and related forms of knowledge production as forms of cultural practice. Does scientific knowledge production transcend social and cultural contexts, or is it always situated in a milieu? To what extent is science shaped by its broader social contexts and how should this lead us to understand the nature of objectivity? In answering these questions, the class will equip students to produce sensitive analyses of diverse forms of knowledge production and reflect on anthropological ways of knowing.

Medical Anthropology explores how structural violence and the social markers of difference impact life chances in our worlds on edge. While addressing biosocial and therapeutic realities and probing the tenets of medical capitalism, the course articulates theoretical and practical contributions to apprehending health as both a struggle against death and a human right. We will learn ethnographic methods, engage in critical ethical debates, and experiment with modes of expression. Students will develop community-engaged and artistic projects and consider alternative forms of solidarity and care emerging alongside newfangled scales of harm.

What roles do feelings and emotions play in our evaluations of the world? Are our emotions reliable sources of moral intuition? Can we take our feelings to be our own? This course focuses on how humans engage with issues of morality, faith, justice, collective wellbeing, and political critique, and how our feelings, emotions, and sensations mediate such engagements. Through ethnographic and theoretical readings, we will learn how anthropologists discern the affective textures of our moral and political lives.

This course is an introduction to doing ethnographic fieldwork. Class sessions alternate between (1) discussions of key issues and questions in the theory and practice of ethnographic fieldwork, as well as research ethics and regulatory ethics; and (2) workshops devoted to fieldwork exercises: participant observation, interviewing, fieldnotes, archival research, oral history, multi-modal and virtual methods. Students build skills to design and conduct ethnographic research projects, while developing a critical appreciation of the possibilities and limits of ethnographic research methods to help them understand and engage with the world.

This course will examine how legal systems and human rights practices are shaped by history, state policies, culture and international influence. We will address colonial influence, the impact of conflict, gender and human rights, the role of religion, human rights advocacy and the international community's role. How has the region's history and political context impacted its legal systems, why have we come full circle after the Arab Spring, and how can an anthropological approach help us better understand solutions to this ongoing crisis? This course will adopt a comparative approach, and will draw lessons from other parts of the world.

This upper-level seminar examines how ideas about language, disability, and science shape each other in contexts ranging from everyday life to expert medical practice. We look at how anthropologists and historians of science and technology have (or have not) considered disability and language in their research and, conversely, how scientific and technological innovations, like new media technologies, can change practices of communication and conceptions of disability.

This class offers an overview of the history, pharmacology, cultural uses and changing attitudes about psychedelic and other psychoactive substances around the world. After introducing the field of ethnobotany and its role in drug 'discovery' the course surveys shamanism from various perspectives: transcultural psychiatry, altered states of consciousness, New Age spirituality and the science of 'plant intelligence.' Readings investigate the legal and scientific repercussions of the 'psychedelic revolution,' while providing a critical assessment of questions around criminalization, commodification and appropriations of Indigenous knowledge.

In combining historical and anthropological perspectives with legal studies, the course explores how law is created and enforced in diverse societies and multiple spheres, inside and outside formal juridical institutions. We will address foundational legal questions related to themes such as sovereignty, citizenship, indigeneity, property, crime, carcerality and human rights--always in comparative perspective, and probing law's controlling and transformational potentials. How can the anthropology of law help us to better understand past and present ideas of justice and be a mobilizing force in the quest for social and environmental justice?

What does it mean to be a man? Or to act like a man? By calling attention to the gendered identities/practices of men-as-men, scholars of masculinities have given diverse responses to these questions across time and space. We draw on anthropology, history, critical theory, gender studies, and media to explore the processes and relationships by which men craft gendered lives. Rather than defining masculinity as biological trait or fixed object, we examine how men's life stories and prospects are shaped by social scripts, political-economic forces, labor regimes, and ethical norms.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, human experience has become heavily defined by our digital/virtual interactions. From Zoom calls and classes online to meeting up with friends in magical lands in video games, we have come to rely on digital technologies in ways rarely seen in the past. But how does one go about understanding our new digital condition? And how might one develop research around the many virtual worlds that have come to exist? This course is an anthropological exploration of the history of human interaction with the internet, social media, virtual worlds, and other forms of digital existence.

This course explores what we do with language and other modes of expression and how these modes shape our communicative capacities. How do we decide what communication is appropriate face-to-face or via text or email? Why do we gossip? What informs our beliefs about civility and obscenity? How do we decide what credible speech is? What happens when a culturally rooted expressive form is taken up for other aesthetic and political ends? We will explore such questions by studying theories and ethnographies of a range of phenomena: dance, gossip, poetry, asylum appeals, advertisements, protest speech, and more.

How can ethnographers use documentary film to convey lived experience from a person-centered perspective? How can data visualization reveal invisible concepts and structures that are imperceptible or beyond horizon of a field site? To understand what is knowable in these modes, students learn fundamental techniques of shooting, editing, and storytelling, and then data-making, structuring, and visualization. Classes entail screenings, hands-on workshops, and critical readings. Students are prepared to use film and data in their independent work and a wide range of future projects.

This seminar introduces foundational works in media theory and practice. It discusses representational strategies, technologies, ideology, and the political faculties of film, television, online, and print media. Through the ethnography of analog and digital media production and circulation, the seminar also examines various techniques that shape political contestation and social reproduction of subordinated groups.

Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Studies showed how critiques of capitalism were based on a provincial account of western history. Postcolonial studies was based on analysis of places that were directly colonized, usually India. What are the essential elements of postcolonial theory? What are the grounds of its many critiques and what are implications for our own research problems? Readings will draw on social theory, political economy, postcolonial studies, novels, history of the Middle East, and ethnography and are appropriate for students of any region or discipline.

The seminar examines a variety of settler colonial contexts in North America and Oceania. After exploring a range of theoretical approaches to the study of colonialism, gender, and sexuality, the course will feature three main case studies: Maori, Oneida, Cherokee, Diné, and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). We will then assess how nationalist self-determination struggles negotiate gender and sexual decolonization, focusing on the growing body of work on gender liminality, contested masculinities, Native and Indigenous feminisms, debates regarding same-sex sexuality and marriage, as well as Two-Spirit, Mahu, LGBT, and `Indigiqueer' identities.

This is the second half of a yearlong seminar required for first-year graduate students in sociocultural anthropology. The course focuses on anthropology's engagement with critical theory, ethnography, and writing. While reading key texts in the discipline, we reflect on how scholars transition from fieldwork to theorizing, and from the ethnographic open to text and public engagement. Throughout, we attend to intellectual cross-pollinations and the ways ethnographic subjects become alternative figures of thought, redirecting modes of expression and restoring movement to ethical and political debates then and now.

The notion of urbicide, the intended destruction of a city, its cultural heritage, and its built space, became increasingly prevalent after the Yugoslav wars of succession. In this course, we draw on the concepts of urbicide and what Hammami (2016) terms hyperprecarity to consider the case of Jerusalem, where settler colonial processes of 'sacralized and securitized preservation' entail remaking and rebuilding built space to rewrite past and future and destroying to replace.

A practice-based introduction to ethnographic fieldwork. Students experiment with participant-observation, interviewing and conversation, taking and interpreting fieldnotes, oral and life histories, multi-modal and virtual ethnography, archival research. These methods are explored in light of ethical, political, and epistemological stakes of ethnographic research: the space of "the field," identity and identification, privacy and anonymity, regulatory ethics, collaboration, advocacy. Students design and conduct a research project while developing a critical appreciation of the possibilities and limits of ethnographic research.

This course traces the social and literary history of maritime rebellion. From Pirates of the Caribbean to the specter of "Somali hijacking", Wikileaks, and the Orca uprising, seafaring (or web-surfing) agitators are back. Tracking the figure of the pirate in novels, ethnographies, films, comics, and counter-histories from the 16th century to the present, this course will approach piracy from three angles: "enemies of all mankind" and the making of international political orders; pirate predation and rebellion in the circuits of capital and Empire; mutiny, slave revolt and the new social orders that emerge out of pirate utopias.

How do technologies, infrastructures, and large-scale environmental interventions tangle with social, political, and ethical concerns? This course considers infrastructures like dams, canals, pipelines, power facilities, and others, in the process of creating new environments, also create new ideas of power, governance, and political economy. We think globally with the history of large-scale environmental infrastructures, from colonial landscape interventions to actual and proposed plants for generating green power, to explore how environmental technologies interact with societies across time and space.

This interdisciplinary seminar examines death as a social process and a historical event. The first part focuses on death rituals in a variety of contexts: preparing and disposing of dead bodies, and mourning and commemorating the dead. Key texts address religion, rites of passage, symbolic efficacy, ontologies of personhood, and theologies of the soul. The second part explores the intersections of death with law, the state, and museums: forensic investigations, public commemorations, and curations of funerary objects and human remains, considered as means of public reckoning with death, especially in contexts of war and political violence.

As authoritarianism spreads across America, this course offers a feminist reading of authoritarian politics in Central America--centered on its everyday forms of racism, sexism, and classism intensified under neoliberal politics. From an ethnographic perspective, this course excavates the intersectional memories of authoritarianism, democratic disenchantments, and radical pessimism. Then, it discusses the fascist cooptation of family, bodies, and labor, the political ecologies of authoritarianism, and the feminist forms of activism under authoritarianism.

This course will study the system of international protection, who is understood to qualify and why, how the system has changed over time, and what these developments mean for a broader understanding of human rights across borders. We will also take a critical look at asylum, examine ideas of deservingness and innocence and their intersection with categories of race, class, and gender, and question what it means for certain people to be constructed as victims and others to be seen as not eligible for protection. This class will also collaborate with a New York organization to work directly on ongoing asylum claims.

Since the 1920s, the term "gang" has been used to describe all kinds of collectives, from groups of well-dressed mobsters to petty criminals and juvenile delinquents. In nearly a century of research the only consistency in their characterization is as internal Other from the vantage of the law. This class will investigate how the category of "the gang" serves to provoke imaginaries of racial unrest and discourses of "dangerous," threatening subjects in urban enclaves. More broadly we will examine the methods and means by which liberal democratic governments maintain their sovereign integrity through the containment of threatening populations