Course Offerings

Approved Graduate Courses in the Anthropology Department

The following Anthropology graduate courses are examples of those that may be counted as electives toward the M.A. in MSTS. Specific course offereings vary from year to year.

*Indicates courses planned to be offered in the 2019-20 academic year. Please consult the schedule of classes for final listing.

* 215A: Ethnographic Methods - offered Fall 2019 (Fortun, K)
(Exposes students to diverse methods, both traditional and experimental, used in anthropological ethnographic research. Students gain experience practicing diverse methods, and learn to select methods appropriate to particular study designs and contexts.)
229A: Anthropology of Knowledge
232B: Medical Anthropology
* 240A: Economic Anthropology - offered Winter 2020 (Maurer, B)
(Classic and contemporary theory in economic anthropology. Case studies: Latin America (primarily Mexico and the Andes), Africa, and the Pacific. Substantive topics: non-market exchange, markets and marketplaces, households, gender, management of common property (fisheries, pastoral lands, forests), labor, and development.)
249A: Humanisim and Posthumanism
249B: Multispecies Anthropology
250A: The Cultural Politics of Visual Representation
250B: Digitial Tech, Culture, and Media
* 252A: Queer Anthropology - offered Winter 2020 (Boellstorff, T)
(Explores historical and contemporary scholarship that employs ethnographic approaches to address the discursive construction of sexuality. Also examines how the discipline of anthropology has been shaped by the study of sexuality.)
* 253A: Design, Aesthetics, and Social Life - offered Winter 2020 (Murphy, K)
(Anthropology has only recently recognized that design demands consideration as a cultural form linked to, yet nonetheless distinct from, other aesthetic endeavors. Course is largely oriented toward collaboratively working out a conceptual basis for a distinctly anthropological approach to design.)
* 257A: Natures and Environments - offered Winter 2020 (Olson, V)
(Examines social scientific understandings of natural contexts and human milieus via a survey of key analytic categories. Begins by examining historical and ongoing definitions and problems organized around "nature" and "environment" as separate but imbricated concepts.)
* 289: You may choose from the following variable topics courses:
Cities - offered Spring 2020 (Nam, S)
Multimodal - offered Fall 2019 (Varzi, R)
Global History of Science? - offered Fall 2019 (Raphael, R)
The history of science engages with a knowledge tradition that claims to be universal and international. Since the 1980s, scholarship on the history of science has moved in two directions that often sit together uncomfortably. On the one hand, scholars have shifted their gaze to the local, meticulously detailed the historically specific and localized nature of many of the attributes (objectivity, quantification, experimentation) through which science purports to be universal. At the same time, historians of science have sought to make their discipline more global, challenging the discipline's traditional focus on western science. This class explores the various approaches through which historians of science have attempted to globalize their studies of science in premodern, modern, and contemporary periods. No previous familiarity with the history of science will be assumed. Readings will cover both theoretical discussions of methodology (as an introduction to the history of science and to approaches to global intellectual history) and recent scholarship in the history of science (on topics including colonialism, translation, the environment, computing, and military technology).

 

Approved Upper-Division Undergraduate Courses in the Anthropology Department

Up to two approved Anthropology undergraduate courses may be counted as electives toward the M.A. in MSTS. Specific course offerings vary from year to year, but sample courses include the following:

125B: Ecological Anthropology
125F: Humans and Other Animals
* 128B: Race, Gender, and Science - offered Winter and Spring 2020 (Fletcher, E)
(Perfect for pre-health, science and social science majors wanting to appreciate how science and society interact. Race and gender as biological and socio-cultural constructs are examined. Questions explored: What is disease? What is science? What are social and biological differences.)
* 128C: Digital Cultures - offered Spring 2020 (Boellstorff, T)
(Explores cultural and political implications of the infotech revolution and the ways new media are used around the world, new cultural practices and spaces (e.g., cybercafes), debates surrounding the meanings of these new technologies, and their implications for transforming society.)
* 132A: Psychological Anthropology - offered Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 (O'Rourke, S)
(Cultural differences and similarities in personality and behavior. Child-rearing practices and consequent adult personality characteristics, biocultural aspects of child development and attachment, culture and behavior evolutionary models, politically linked personality, cognitive anthropology, psychology of narrative forms, comparative national character studies)
* 134A: Medical Anthropology - offered Fall 2019 and Winter 2020 (Fletcher, E) (Jenks, A)
(Introduces students to cross-cultural perspectives and critical theories in anthropological studies of medicine. Special attention is given to diverse ways of understanding bodies, illnesses, and therapeutic practices in our changing world.)
* 134F: Anthropology of the Body - offered Fall 2019 (O'Rourke, S)
(Examines human bodies as both biological and sociocultural entities and explores the relationship among mind, body, and society cross-culturally. Topics include embodiment; race, sex, gender, and the body; somatization; control of the body; commodified bodies; and hybrid/cyborg bodies.)
134G: HIV/AIDS in Global Context
139: Anthropology of Biomedicine and Biotechnology

Students may petition for additional courses to be counted as electives.