Dr  Ellen Badone  Tuesday 3:30-5:30pm in CNH-607.

        Term 1 start date:    Tuesday, September 11, 2012

        Term 2 start date:    Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The graduate workshop is a student-focused bi-weekly workshop that is defined for and by graduate students.  We began this workshop because many graduate students felt it was important to have a forum for intellectual and practical discussion for incoming students. It focuses on 1) Professional training such as proposal-writing and preparing for conference presentations, 2) Discussions of intellectual debates on topics defined by the attending students, and, 3) Student research presentations.  Students enrolled each year jointly define the content of the workshop in consultation with the faculty facilitator.  It is twinned with the departmental visiting speakers’ series so that each week (Tuesdays at 3:30) we have a collective forum for discussion outside of specific course-work.  The graduate workshop is mandatory in year one and until December of year two for all graduate students.

Can be taken in Terms 1, 2 and 3

Term 1 Courses

 711:    ADVANCED TOPICS IN PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY - ANCIENT BIOMOLECULES AND BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY II
Dr.Hendrik Poinar. Start Date: Tuesday, September 11, at 9:30-12:30 in CNH-307.

Chemical analysis of archaeological material and human skeletal remains is now a standard component of bioarchaeological research. This course will introduce graduate students to the use of biochemical methods in archaeological research and provide them with intensive lab-based training in various methods. The course is designed primarily for biological anthropologists, but is also broadly applicable to archaeologists who are interested in the application of biochemical techniques to archaeological questions.

The second part of this course (Anth 711) will focus on the completion of lab-based research projects and the preparation of a final research paper of sufficient quality for publication. Students will be required to maintain a laboratory notebook that will form part of their evaluation. Students will also present the results of their research at the end of term in the format of a conference presentation.

782:    DIASPORAS, TRANSNATIONALISM AND RELIGIOUS IDENTITIES

This course focuses on religion among immigrant and diaspora communities in the contemporary globalized world.  Topics to be covered include the connections between religion and ethnic identity among transnationals, the relationships between religious and political commitments, gender and religion in diaspora communities, the role of the media and the internet in promoting community, and the symbolic significance of “home.”  The course will be conducted as a seminar.  Every student will be responsible for reading all the assigned weekly readings and for preparing a 5 page (typed double-spaced) discussion paper on the readings listed in the syllabus every week.  For each article or book chapter, the discussion paper should summarize and critically evaluate the author's argument and formulate questions to be raised during seminar discussion.  Secondary sources may be used, but the assigned course readings for the week should be the primary focus of the discussion paper.  These papers are due in class each week and will be evaluated together with seminar participation as the basis for the course grade.  25% of the grade will be based on seminar participation and 75% on the weekly discussion papers.  Course readings are available on reserve (R), online, or in the text ordered for the course from Titles: Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization.  Thomas J. Csordas, ed.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

This course seeks to address and open up the question of "the future" through a series of political, theoretical, and anthropological excursions.  Starting from the hypothesis that many of us today experience the present as extremely cynical and politically unpromising and closed, we will examine practical, theoretical, and affective openings to the problem of futurity and political possibility - openings that might help us to understand this present in different ways.  To this effect, the materials assigned for this course address the question of "possibility", "the future", and "horizons" by way of thinking through a set of inter-related terms:  "liberalism", "neoliberalism", "democracy", "identity", "the left", "collectivity", and "sovereignty".  The goal of this course is not to arrive at a determined idea of what a socially and politically just future might look like, but rather to ask about alternative cultural and political formations.

Term 2 Courses

702:    CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS IN ANTHROPOLOGY:  Democracy Uprising and the Ravages of Economic Rationality. 
Dr Kee Yong. Start Date: Tuesday, January 8, 2012 at 11:30-2:30 in CNH-307.

This course provides a review of some contemporary issues since the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism and the democracy uprising in parts of the Middle East and Africa (and the majority of Latin America).  We will address the question of "democracy".  Is democracy an ideology, even propaganda when in reality elite dislike of democracy is the norm and supported democracy only when it contributes to their economic self-interest?  If so, will the so-called Western powers support an authentic democracy in the Arab world?  This leads us to the question of the "market".  Are markets rational or motivated by self interest?  How do the privatization of national and international economies affect local producers and consumers?  Essentially, what is a luxury?  What is a necessity?  How useful are the concepts of exploitation and alienation in analyzing the relationship between production and exchange?  What is the connection between fat and global warming?  What about wars?  What have anthropologists and others to say about winners and losers in recent conflicts?  Does the term "forced migration" have analytic value?  Is it paradoxical that most development schemes, including fair trade displace and impoverish people within or close to the schemes?  We will address these issues contextually.  In all our readings and discussions, we want to ask if there are better conceptual frameworks that could help us make sense of and respond to the current madness that threatens us all.

703: WRITING THE FIELD
Dr Andy Roddick.  Start Date:  Wednesday, January 9, 1:30-4:30 in CNH-307

Writing the Field - What makes good anthropological writing? What defines a good conference paper, thesis chapter or academic article? How do scholars become stronger academics through critical reflection on tough feedback and peer review? What is a good scholarly workflow in the age of new media and "info glut"? This course will investigate these questions through case studies, writing exercises and work on a larger writing project relevant to the larger academic goals of the seminar participants. The class will consist of seminar discussion, group work, and class presentations. This course permits students from all three sub-disciplines to work on projects relevant to their development as scholars, while engaging with a wider literature on academic writing, research and critical thinking.

704: INTRODUCTION TO THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION
Dr. Cecilia Rothenberg  Start Date:  Thursday, January 10, 1:30-3:30 in UH-122

This course introduces the study of religion from the standpoint of anthropology.  Course materials provide a historical overview of theoretical developments in this field.  Current ethnographies focusing on religion will be covered, and students will receive an introduction to ethnographic methodology.

720: TOPICS IN POLITICAL CULTURE
Dr. Andrew Gilbert.  Start Date:  Monday, January 7, 9:30-12:30 in CNH-307

 Development, Democratization, and Humanitarian Intervention in the Contemporary World

This course explores the politics of social transformation by analyzing three distinct but related forms of foreign intervention.  Although they differ in scale, scope, and what they hope to accomplish, they have much in common. Each is explicitly concerned with improving the conditions under which people live, and yet each has also been criticized for making things worse rather than better.  These critiques include arguments that such interventions are inherently limited because they perpetuate a long-standing Western self-delusion, namely, they promote as universal a very particular historical and cultural model of how societies (ought to) work.  Others argue that this failure is intentional, and see such interventions as part of a hegemonic project of international order that works by establishing and ruling through difference.  But are these the best ways to understand the
politics, stakes, or effects of the intervention encounter?  Over the course of the semester we will analyze the strengths and weaknesses of such arguments, probe their conceptual underpinnings, and examine the evidence marshalled to support them.  The theoretical and
methodological approaches reflected in the readings will be purposefully diverse, selected with an eye towards developing a political analysis of directed social change under conditions of cultural difference.

740: BIOCULTURAL SYNTHESIS
Dr. Tina Moffat.   Thursday, January 10 at  10:30-1:30 in CNH-307.

This seminar is an examination of the ways that anthropologists have attempted to bridge the gap between the studies of human biology and socio-culture.  In particular we will critically evaluate recent attempts by anthropologists to bring political-economic perspectives to bear on issues of biology and culture.  Course readings will include theoretical perspectives and particular anthropological case studies that use biocultural theory as a framework for examining issues of health, disease and environment in past and contemporary settings.

 
741:    SUNBATHING AND SCURVY
Dr. Megan Brickley.   Start Date: Wednesday, January 9, at 9:30-12:30 in CNH-307.

This course explores the way in which conditions such as rickets and scurvy (along with other metabolic bone diseases) can contribute to our understanding of past societies. The focus of the course will be archaeological human remains and interpretations of past human health, but reading will also include current clinical literature and discussion of contemporary health problems. The course will include practical skills involved in identifying pathological conditions in archaeological human bone. Vitamin C deficiency, Vitamin D deficiency, age-related and other causes of bone loss and lesser studied conditions will all be reviewed. For each condition considered skeletal changes observable at the gross, radiological and histological level will be evaluated and cultural factors associated with the condition considered. In addition to the course text readings will include archaeological reports, contemporary texts from the periods considered and clinical literature, enabling students to gain experience of taking a bioarchaeological approach to past human health. Key text: Brickley, M. & Ives, R. (2008). The Bioarchaeology of Metabolic Bone Disease. Academic Press: San Diego. The class is to be run as a 3 hour class once a week. The course will use the facilities to be created by the Laboratory for Integrated Bioarchaeological Research in Health, Diet, Disease, and Migration (Bioarch-HDDM) and other resources around the campus.