This course will provide a graduate level introduction to the anthropology of mind, body, and health, addressing broadly the question of how people use cultural resources to cope with pain, illness, suffering and healing in specific social, cultural and political contexts. In addition, we will analyze how body and mind, health and illness, are socially influenced and socially constructed, how these constructions articulate with the material body, and how they are influenced by and implicated in power. We will give special attention to trauma, as a diagnostic category, biopolitical construct, and an experiential domain. We will also explore in depth the concept of embodiment, its various uses and meanings, especially in the context of the social determinants of illness and healing. The course will combine an examination of current theoretical paradigms with ethnographic case material from around the world, including Brazil, Japan, Mexico, the US, and Canada. The goal of this comparative endeavor will be to analyze similarities and differences across understandings of mind and body and systems of healing, and to examine medical systems, behaviors, practices and institutions critically in order to understand the implications of the ways in which they are socially and politically embedded and culturally specific.
This course will engage scholarship that traverses studies of race and difference, technology and science, and a variety of information systems and platforms. The objective is to develop a scholarly foundation of the literatures relevant to the ways racially marginalized communities experience, navigate, and inhabit information infrastructures. A special emphasis will be placed on understanding how the concepts of trust, justice, and equity function within these relationships, both historically and at the contemporary moment.
English 461-0-21 Contemporary Experiments in Racial Form
This seminar surveys literary experiments in contemporary Ethnic American poetry and narrative that expand notions of what constitutes "ethnic literature," a category historically denigrated as insufficiently imaginative or aesthetically minded. In addition to highlighting the richness and complexity of these literary traditions, our goal in this course is to track evolving referents for racial formation in a "postracial" era defined by the gap between ostensible cultural tolerance and the persistence of structural inequality. Responding to the contradictions of racial representation, scholars of African American, Latinx, Asian American, and Native American literatures have redoubled critical engagement with form, genre, and aesthetics to expand our understanding of race's imbrications with embodiment, aesthetic judgment, cultural belonging, and the constitution of histories and futures. With particular emphasis on familiarizing students with foundational texts of Ethnic American Literature, the class will pressure critical terms and paradigms such as representation, racial formation, genre & form, voice & lyric, and history. Participants will develop skills of close reading for racial formation as a formal feature of textual composition as well as gain proficiency with central and emergent debates within Ethnic American literary studies regarding the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Some conceptual questions for consideration include the following: how do experimental texts by writers of color destabilize conventional modes of understanding ethnic and racial representation? What tensions and resonances arise when critical race and ethnic studies meet theories of the avant-garde? And to what extent do these literary experiments suggest that race itself can be understood as a cultural form or generic object?
Soc 406-3-20 Contemporary Theory in Sociological Analysis
This course offers an introduction to classical sociological theory. A “classical” work is thought to be a must-read, a foundational text that influenced the older (as opposed to contemporary or modern) ideas that undergird discipline of sociology, both the way we think about it and perform it. We will focus mainly on Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Du Bois, exploring what they have to teach us about the sociological enterprise. Readings and graded assignments focus on determining these foundational disciplinary authors’ (1) methods for viewing and understanding the socioeconomic world, (2) ideas about the proper objects and subjects of study and how sociology should be properly conducted, and (3) key contributions to early sociological thought. Ten weeks is a very short time to acquire and engage with this knowledge, so expect this course to be very reading and writing intensive.
This seminar is designed to expose students to the realm of sociological research (and research in other disciplines, notably history) that addresses how we think about and memorialize the past. How is history constructed? How are historical events shaped and made socially meaningful? Who are the shapers and who are the shaped?
