classes.
anth 210.
Honors Cultural Anthropology
This course is an introduction to cultural anthropology, one of the sub-fields of Anthropology. As a sub-field, it seeks to define and study contemporary culture or behaviors, values, beliefs and power relations. This introductory course will provide an overview of four key areas: First, we will look at what anthropology is and how cultural anthropologists do research. Second, we will hone in on cultural foundations or how people make a living, reproduce, and raise children. Third, we will study how people around the world organize themselves into groups based on kinship and other forms of social ties, how they form political alliances and how they deal with conflict and the need for order. Lastly, we will focus on symbolic systems such as communication and language, religion and expressive culture.
anth 343.
Resource Wars of the 21st Century
This course examines new social movements to reclaim “the commons” in the wake of 30+ years of neoliberal reforms, which opened markets to global trade, privatized state-owned industries, and slashed social services. Such political and economic shifts have created much destruction across the globe: breakdown of social relations, welfare provisions, ways of life, attachments to land, habits of heart and ways of thought.
Students of this course create digital media pieces about Mountaintop Coal Removal. Example work here.
anth 370.
Environmental Justice
Toxic exposure is an unfortunate and increasingly common and increasingly common fact of life for many on the Planet. In this course, students will learn about the history of environmental justice (EJ) around the world, focusing especially on the ways that already marginalized communities have often been the “frontline” communities in these struggles. This historical and transnational perspective then serves as the context for engaging with contemporary EJ campaigns around air and water quality and community health in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, MD. The course will include a field trip (possibly), and students will have opportunities to hear from community activists, learn about citizen science, and engage with other students at Towson University studying similar topics. The course will end by imagining how and in what ways can we build more just, sustainable, and healthy communities. Prior coursework in anthropology is encouraged but not required. Students from environmental studies, pre-health fields, and other related disciplines are welcome.
HoNR 370.
Urban Economic Development and its Human Consequences
This course provides a framework for understanding the changing politics and culture of American urban life, with a focus on the political economy of place/space, neoliberal development model, globalization/migration, and new forms of racial, class-based, and gendered stratification. We will home in on the critical urban inequities of our era by using Baltimore as a backdrop to our readings and discussions. We will take the Philosopher Henri concept of (“The Right to the City”) and think about how we might apply this to Baltimore’s historic and contemporary forms of inequality. Over the past decade plus we’ve seen more political unrest around inequality, domination, and exclusion, than arguably any other time since 1968: What does the “right to the city”mean now? What conceptual and political opportunities present themselves at this moment? This seminar seeks to tackle these questions.
anth 401.
Contemporary Anthropological Theory
This course explores some of the foundational and more contemporary theories, texts, and authors of social and cultural anthropology. Obviously, it is impossible to examine the full range of ideas and theorists that might be considered integral to the discipline in just one semester—indeed, the very process of deciding what is/is not “foundational” is both highly subjective and deeply problematic. I have attempted to balance my own preferences with what I perceive to be a broader disciplinary consensus about key texts, and throughout the course we alternately sacrifice depth for breadth and breadth for depth. This set of readings will help us discern some of the theoretical continuities, trajectories, and conflicts over the past 150 years (more or less). I intend the sampling offered here to be a starting point for your own ongoing exploration of social theory.
We start with anthropology’s entanglement with and divergence from colonialism. The course then moves on to the Dubosian Legacy in Anthropology. In US or North Americanist anthropology, the theories that surfaced in the 1940s and 50s (coming directly out of anthropological analysis) defined much of the critique in the 1960s. We take some key texts around the culture of poverty or the idea that poor people (have dysfunctional cultures and are entangled in pathologies that are passed on from generation to generation). The tradition we focus on in the 1960s is historical political economy or Marxist Anthropology. We will take this framework to explore contemporary work in race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, and labor/immigration. Then at the end of the course we look at the current turn towards decolonization and abolitionist anthropology