Courses Currently Teaching (click on the course titles for syllabi)
Anthropology 191HB - Honors Seminar in Research Design and Research Methods
The goal of this class to help Anthropology Department Honors students prepare for the data collection phase of their Honors research.
Anthropology M234T/Psychiatry M282 - The Anthropology of the Human Body
This seminar will explore how sociocultural and political dynamics shape perceptions of and understandings about the human body and how, reciprocally, those perceptions and understandings influence social processes. Materials are drawn from both non-Western and Western societies. Among the topics considered are: how society influences the ways we perceive our own bodies and those of others; cross-cultural variation in body metaphors, narratives, and discourses; the role culture plays in shaping the bodily experience of illness and disability; how sickness and disability challenge and alter perceptions of the body among those affected, those around them and the society at large.
Anthropology M263Q/Psychiatry M273 - Advanced Seminar in Medical Anthropology
Medical anthropologists are concerned with issues surrounding the cultural construction of health and illness, the nature of therapeutic processes, and the ways that inequality and diverse forms of social stratification shape sickness, suffering and recovery. They employ a wide range of theoretical and conceptual approaches to examine these issues. In this course, we examine some of the approaches having the most impact on the development of the field today.
This class will offer a broad overview of concepts that are orienting research, clinical practice and public health programs and debates in the fields of genetics and genetic testing. Most of the work we will discuss concerns the U. S. experience.
Each day much is made in the press and other mainstream media about the “cutting edge” nature of this field. The focus is typically on the vast possibilities that genetic research holds for transforming our most basic understandings as to what it is to be human, the nature of disease and disability, the practice of medicine and law, the field of education – in essence society at its very core – and the complicated bioethical issues that accompany these developments.
This seminar will explore how sociocultural and political dynamics shape our understandings of genetic discoveries, and reciprocally, how genetic information is used to create conceptions of the self and society.
Anthropology M269P/Psychiatry M280 - The Politics of Reproduction
This seminar will examine the various ways that power, as it is structured and enacted in everyday activities, shapes human reproductive behavior. Drawing on case materials from a variety of cultures, we will study how competing interests within households, communities, states and institutions influence reproductive arrangements in society.
Past Courses (archived course webpages with links to syllabi)
