Anthropology and Global Societies

New for 2024!

This course will ensure that students will benefit from a wide-ranging but comprehensive introduction to key anthropological theories and concepts. They will also be encouraged to explore questions central to understanding diverse aspects of human cultural and social experiences such as politics, economics, gender, ethnicity, migration, conflict, AI, and media. The course will rely on a cross-disciplinary dialogue between several subfields of anthropology and will make extensive use of examples of ethnographic research and methodology. Designed specifically for undergraduate students, the course will also benefit those with an advanced knowledge of the anthropological curriculum.

Intended audience

Undergraduate students (all years) and first-year graduate students.

Previous knowledge

There are no formal pre-requisites for this course.

Assessment

Dissertation (no more than 6,000 words): 100% of the total.

Research Topics

The potential research proposals you could pursue on the programme are listed below. The specific research focus of your project will be determined and confirmed with guidance from your supervisor. The exciting research topics in this research area are:

1. Anthropology: Ethics and ‘global’ cultures

   Drawing on several ethnographic case studies, this research project will allow the students to survey new theoretical frameworks such as the anthropology of emotion, anthropology of perception, cognitive anthropology and psychological anthropology – all interdisciplinary fields that help explore issues of ethics in the production of (local and global) cultures and meaning.

2. Anthropology: Social Media

   This research project will include an in-depth discussion of several examples of vlogs, YouTube films and social media. The case studies selected will be in close dialogue with the topics and themes explored throughout the project. It will address questions of re-representation of cultures, social orders and identities across various modes of media production, as well as issues of technological merit or limitations imposed on specific visual literacies.

3. Anthropology and AI

   Aiming to address some of the most urgent questions in digital anthropology and, in particular, those relevant to the rapid development of AI culture and practice, the students signing up for this project will have the opportunity to discuss issues and opportunities prompted by AI-assisted ethnography, multimodal AI models (see MUM), and emerging anthropology-specific AI tools. Ultimately, the students will consider a comparative framework in which human-anthropologist and AI-anthropologist might well define the near future of anthropological and sociological studies.

4. Anthropology: Empires and post-colonial worlds

   In this research project students will learn about key contributions made by anthropological scholarship and ethnographic research to understanding imperial and post-colonial hierarchies of power, domination, national agency and racial identity. They will also study in a comparative framework issues of colonial diaspora, imperial legacies, post-colonial thought and neo-colonial histories.

5. Anthropology: Migration and Diaspora

   By pursuing this research project, students will learn about some of the key anthropological and ethnographic works on migration, immigration and diaspora across several cultural contexts and historical periods. Students will be invited to explore a set of case studies relating to rural-to-urban, cross-continental or/and migration within the same geopolitical area, as well as conflict- and climate change-related types of migration.

Prefer to follow a research idea of your own?

Take a look at the Open Stream.