This course is an introduction to urban anthropology through the study of diverse "urban experiences," how they are shaped by power relations as well as resistance, and how they change through the evolution of technology, shifts in capital investment, and flows of migration. We will examine a variety of ethnographic and historical examples from many regions of the globe to discuss how culture, class, race and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, inflect the experience of urbanity; and we will assess how different concepts and perspectives capture the variety of affects and dynamics of urban everyday life in the contemporary world.

• Days/Times: T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
• Room: Hodson 315
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/25
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR

This is a hands-on course that introduces students to the process of designing a project of social research, from the initial idea to the final proposal. The class provides tools on: how to frame a problem, ask key questions, review the relevant scholarly literature and determine the data needed to check hypotheses. We will discuss issues related to what defines social science inquiry: its quantitative and qualitative methods, its forms of collecting and evaluating evidence, using archives, doing fieldwork, conducting interviews and surveys, or interacting with various groups of people on the ground, and ethical concerns related to social research. Social science implies venturing into the real, empirical world and its contemporary problems. We will study how researchers analyze, interpret and make sense of multiple human experiences and social processes.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

What is gender? We talk so much about it, but what is it really? How does one distinguish between the social and historical life of gender vis-à-vis sex as a biological category? Yet even the category sex as biology is not as straightforward as it seems and often indicates arbitrariness and blurriness when it comes to demarking definite lines of difference between a binary gender model (male, female). Anthropologists are increasingly exploring gender in multiple contexts, from kinship structures and political economies, as well as in settings of piety and religiosity, to spaces in which the category of human itself becomes difficult to define. In this course we will engage in genealogies as well as current debates. We will learn and discuss a wide array of perspectives, debates, and theories that have shaped feminist anthropology, queer theory, and black feminist theory.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This course invites students to examine an idea central to theories of transitional justice: that holding perpetrators of mass violence legally accountable enables transitions from war to peace and authoritarianism to democracy. We will examine this idea by focusing on Latin America, where social movements for legal accountability and human rights prosecutions have flourished since the 1980s, influencing law and transitional justice mechanisms globally. By engaging ethnographies of transition, we will critically examine concepts such as justice, accountability, catastrophic violence, transition, and the rule of law, comparing how anthropologists and lawyers reason, formulate questions, and engage evidence.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Wherry, Anna Elisabeth
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/18
• PosTag(s): INST-CP

This course aims to teach basic fieldwork skills: Choosing and entering a community; establishing contacts; learning to listen and to ask questions and locating archival material that might be relevant. It is a hands-on course that increases student familiarity with various neighborhoods such as the Arts District in Baltimore. Recommended Course Background: two or more prior courses in anthropology (not cross-listed courses). Course is a requirement for anthropology major.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Students are invited to attend, for credit, the departmental research colloquium in anthropology. The colloquium meets most (but not all) Tuesday afternoons during the semester. Students are expected to attend and listen, encouraged to ask questions when they wish, and to write one brief reflection on contemporary trends in the field, based on what they have observed during these sessions. Prerequisite: Students must have completed one Anthropology course previously This course does not apply to Anthropology major or minors towards their minimum department requirement. It counts towards your total credit requirement to degree..

• Days/Times: T 4:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course will invite students to inquire into knowledge production in the context of the Cold War in Asia by exploring how our knowledge of wartime is selected, regenerated, and repressed by archives. The course will examine the dual nature of archives in documenting conflicts and serving as evidence of state violence. We will also consider how the archive may extend beyond documents to incorporate oral narratives and material artifacts.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Kim, Yuna
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/18
• PosTag(s): INST-CP

Governing health explores the vital relationship between governance and health. The class interrogates how the stratification and management of populations are linked with the diagnoses, categories, and inequities that make up our contemporary health landscape. We will explore how the concept of governance troubles our understandings of key concepts in medical anthropology like care, inequality, and the state. Moving from the level of the population to the individual body, from state institutions to the four walls of the clinic, this course traces governance as it generates and degenerates health.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Ziv, Tali R
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

The household appears as commonsensical to us. It is where people, most often those of a family, reside together, sharing its resources, labor and collective fate. However, anthropologists have been arguing against this commonsense since it emerged in the 1950s. Yet the household is back again in current policy discussions as being most vulnerable to the problems associated with temperature extremes, food insecurity, exacerbated disease, enhanced competition and political violence. How might anthropological debates and controversies relating to households and householding as an activity within the context of war, famine and migration, provide important insights into today’s urgencies?

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

African American Pioneers: Courses focusing on the history and canon of anthropology often fail to consider the important role African American scholars have played in shaping the discipline. This course serves as an intervention by focusing on the contributions these underrepresented intellectuals have made to the field. Restrictions: For advanced undergraduates who have taken anthropology or sociology. Requirement for Anthropology Majors

• Days/Times: M 4:00PM - 6:30PM
• Instructor: Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

The knowledge and practices of science and medicine are not as self-evident as they may appear. When we observe, what do we see? What counts as evidence? How does evidence become fact? How do facts circulate and what are their effects? Who is included in and excluded from our common-sense notions of science, medicine, and technology? This course will introduce students to central theoretical concerns in Science and Technology Studies and the Medical Humanities, focusing on enduring problematics that animate scholars. In conjunction with examinations of theoretical bases, students will learn to evaluate the methodological tools used in different fields in the humanities to study the production and circulation of scientific knowledge and the structures of medical care and public health. This problem-centered approach will help students understand and apply key concepts and approaches in critical studies of science, technology, and medicine.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Robbins, Gabrielle Lydia Marie
• Room: Krieger 304
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/18
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Before they are ever marketed or consumed, therapeutic resources must first be made. “Pharmaceutical manufacturing” today may conjure the sterile corporate lab, but such antiseptic images obscure the contested spaces – fields, forests, farms, factories, and more – worldwide where medicinal ingredients often begin their lives. This course therefore historicizes and contextualizes the development of global corporate medicine by examining the wide range of ways therapeutic resources (plants, animals, minerals, molecules, compounds) have been prepared and produced in different modern contexts. Students will engage with material from history, anthropology, science & technology studies (STS), and art and music to examine how medicine-making operates across cultures and time periods, as well as becomes integral to socio-political processes like social hierarchization, colonial expansion and anti-colonial struggle, and industrial development. By asking who can make medicines, with what, when, how, and where, this course offers interdisciplinary analytical toolkits to understand therapeutic substances as highly-contested things integral to the exercise of power, with profound effects on the world beyond the body.

• Days/Times: W 4:00PM - 6:30PM
• Instructor: Robbins, Gabrielle Lydia Marie
• Room: Gilman 119
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

You will learn about the efforts of ordinary, non-elite Muslims to shape the relation between their communities and the state as well as to (where applicable) the non-Muslim majority through collective organizing over the last forty years. We will read and discuss books by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists studying Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Henning, Stefan
• Room: Mergenthaler 266
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): ISLM-ISLMST, INST-CP

What do we call "home"? It seems that when we call (something) home, we are all reaching out toward different places or ideas. Is it a haven? a source of identity? the object of longing? a domain of hierarchy and oppression? This course offers a critical examination of the apparently self-evident notion of home. Through the lens of disciplines like anthropology, literature, or socio-legal studies, we will explore home in diverse cultural settings, as realms of care, intimacy, and belonging yet also as sites of subjection, discrimination, and gender/racial inequality. Our analysis will extend to a variety of media such as films, podcasts, music, museum exhibits, and personal experiences.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
• Room: Shriver Hall 001
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

• Days/Times: F 12:00PM - 1:15PM, W 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 111
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

How does language get entangled in our cultural and social understandings? How do we learn to locate a person correctly in a particular social class or ethnicity? This course aims to show the ways in which language is at the center of our daily interactions and our institutions. We will learn conceptual tools to examine the ways in which writers and leaders attempt to persuade their publics in important matters such as climate change, party politics, and religious differences.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

• Days/Times: F 12:00PM - 1:15PM, W 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 111
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

• Days/Times: F 12:00PM - 1:15PM, W 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 111
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

• Days/Times: F 12:00PM - 1:15PM, W 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 111
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

• Days/Times: F 12:00PM - 1:15PM, W 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 111
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

Historical archaeology might be defined as the study of the modern world's development through investigations of material and archival remains of past societies. Because of its focus on the post-Columbian era, Charles Orser drew attention to the “haunts” of historical archaeology, including colonialism, Eurocentrism, capitalism, and modernity. This course focuses primarily on the field in North America, including its history and development. Historical archaeology now provides crucial perspectives on the silenced, overlooked, and obscured histories and experiences of marginalized peoples. Anthropological approaches enable historical archaeologists to link past events and processes to our current moment and to better understand the enduring legacies of sociopolitical formations and institutions that perpetuate various forms of inequality.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Lans, Aja Marie
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-ARCH

An emerging body of literature argues that cities in the Global South work differently than Eurocentric theories of the city and urbanization suggest. This course will focus on such issues as the important role of cities in the nation’s economy, politics, and culture and interrogates the relationship between the city and its “outside.” This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that African cities, as an urban form, concept, and geography have been generative in anthropology, as well as in history, sociology, and urban studies. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of an African city outside of this limiting history? In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of African cities as an urban form, and lived experience, re-sorting its geographies and theorizations. We will explore issues of urban planning, (de)industrialization, urban race/ethnic relations, movement, and other issues important to the urban experience.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL

Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness.

• Days/Times: T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room: Krieger 170
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness.

• Days/Times: T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room: Krieger 170
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Is illness bound within an individual body, or is it entangled with our relations? What are the ethics and politics of the doctor/patient relation? How are medical technologies changing the way we experience illness and healing? How have global institutions responded to the problems posed by disease and development? Drawing on ethnography, film, and literature, this course introduces students to how anthropologists have explored and researched problems related to health and illness.

• Days/Times: T 10:30AM - 11:45AM, Th 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Han, Clara
• Room: Krieger 170
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Climate change is a vast topic, pervading our present and casting a pall of uncertainty over the possibility of a livable future. But, stepping back from a sense of climate change as a self-evident set of biophysical realities, how does climate, which unlike weather is only knowable in highly mediated ways, become sensible? What problems does it pose for thought? And how might we become more adequately responsive to its challenges? Departing from these questions, we will explore a variety of angles through which anthropologists have approached climate change, in dialogue with materials from other disciplines and media, to consider what anthropology may contribute to our understanding of life with climate change.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Maddox, Perry
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 17/18
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR, MSCH-HUM, ARCH-RELATE

This course examines ideological and imaginative encounters between Buddhism and modernity. Drawing on detailed case studies from various regions of Buddhist Asia, the course critically examines how Buddhist communities have responded to modernity and continue to navigate the complexities of the modern and contemporary world. Through readings, films, field trips, and creative projects, the course offers an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing various ideological, social, and cultural issues that intersect with Buddhist modernism.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Staff
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course examines, through an anthropological lens, the promise and limitations of local, grassroots social and economic forms of organization that propose alternatives to the market economy. Using the framework of "diverse economies," we will look closely at worker-run businesses; consumer cooperatives; community land-trusts; local currencies; self-help associations; fair trade organizations and knowledge networks; to inquire how these social economies propose autonomous forms of sharing resources, property, and labor. The course will involve research on some of Baltimore's burgeoning co-op endeavors.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Procupez, Valeria
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This class is an occasion for speculative anthropology, a chance to reimagine this place (an American city on the Jones Falls river) in a future beyond the bustle of our fossil-fueled present. What culture might people of that distant time produce, and how might they make creative use of the many things we leave behind? In this class, we will work together as anthropologists and artists of another time, crafting an inventive and collaborative story about a culture to come, and the material artifacts of a very different collective life. The class will be co-taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian and visual artist Jordan Tierney. We will nurture our imaginations through experiential practices of observing nature, collecting materials, and assembling artifacts. What we build will serve as the core of a spring 2025 local museum exhibition we will plan together.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandian, anand
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/18
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

The word for “medicine” in Malagasy, fanafody, can also mean “charm” or “magic.” This seminar uses that linguistic flexibility as a point of departure to explore practices for bodily healing and protection amid broader processes of social transformation, primarily in 20th- and 21st-century East Africa and the western Indian Ocean. How is the medical magical? How is the magical medical? How have separations between magic and medicine been erected, maintained, or questioned? From the role of faith healers to the region's experience of new "miracle drugs," class materials will integrate anthropology, history, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine various permutations of the magic/medicine duality over time. Topics will include facets of traditional medicine; encounters between indigenous and imported healing systems; medical pluralism; colonial and postcolonial conflicts; the rise of humanitarian global health; epidemic and pandemic politics; ritual and religious processes; and the roles of identity, inequality, and empire in healing and protection practices. Grounded in Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa, this course will also use magic/medicine to consider the region’s transcontinental and transoceanic connections.

• Days/Times: M 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Robbins, Gabrielle Lydia Marie
• Room: Bloomberg 176
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

Can care exist in a space of punishment? Institutions of incarceration are inherently spaces of violence and social control and, in the U.S.’s current context of mass incarceration, racial oppression. Yet prisons, jails, and detention centers are required to provide individuals access to health care. How can we understand this convergence of care for the body and psyche with multiple forms of carceral violence? This course will examine modes of health and health care inside institutions of incarceration as they are situated within broader socio-political contexts that shape society’s over-reliance on incarceration as a means of social and racialized control. Drawing on history, anthropology, sociology, legal theory, critical race studies, and public health, the course will explore the everyday realities inside institutions of incarceration as they relate to suffering and care and how those are connected to policies and processes of subjugation outside the institutions’ walls. Case studies for examining these relationships include pregnancy, COVID-19, addiction, and mental illness behind bars. Students will engage with concepts such as disciplinary power, biopower, carceral and anti-carceral feminism, theories of care, medical abolition, and dual loyalty. While the course will primarily focus on the U.S. context, we will also draw comparisons to non-U.S. settings. Throughout the course we will seek to understand how institutions of incarceration are not, as popularly understood, isolated places “elsewhere,” but implicitly porous with so-called free society—and therefore as exemplars for understanding the connections among health, inequality, and state institutions.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Sufrin, Carolyn
• Room: Krieger 308
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

One of the most significant transformations in human history was the “urban revolution” in which cities, writing, and social classes formed for the first time. In this course, we compare five areas where this development occurred: China, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Egypt, and Mesoamerica (Mexico/Guatemala/Honduras/Belize). In each region, we review the physical setting, the archaeological and textual evidence, and the theories advanced to explain the rise (and eventual collapse) of these complex societies.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Schwartz, Glenn M
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 32/40
• PosTag(s): ARCH-ARCH

Ever since the Chinese Empire fell in 1911, Chinese have tried to think of themselves as modern and to build a modern Chinese state. Among the Western concepts that Chinese appropriated to define and comprehend themselves were the notions of ethnicity, culture, nationality, and race. We will try to answer the following questions: What was the allure of arcane and elusive Western categories on culture, ethnicity, and race for Chinese scientists in the 20th century, and how did these categories come to underpin the rule of the Chinese state over its enormous population since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949? How have the Chinese state’s policies on nationality and ethnicity shaped the minds of American China scholars as they study ethnicity and nationality in China?

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Henning, Stefan
• Room: Mergenthaler 266
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL

Childbirth is an event that is highly cultural, and is accompanied by gestures and beliefs that say a lot about the society in which they can be observed. This class will be based on Ancient Egyptian texts (translated), images and objects related to beliefs and practices surrounding pregnancy, birth-giving and the first moments of human life. We will discover the Egyptian views on procreation, the objects, the spells and the formulas used to protect pregnancy and childbirth – one of the most dangerous moments in a woman’s life –, the divine entities invoked, the reactions caused by non-ordinary births (for example, twins), and the purification rites that punctuate the post-partum period. Finally, we will see that the first biological birth is a model on which many beliefs about life after death are based. Several guest researchers will present birth and childbirth in other ancient societies in order to broaden the discussion and establish comparisons.

• Days/Times: WF 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Arnette, Marie-Lys
• Room: Gilman 130G
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/20
• PosTag(s): ARCH-ARCH

This course explores the craft of ethnography as a mode of research and writing fundamental to anthropology. Through the close reading of several ethnographic works, we will consider the intertwining of description, local concepts, and analysis. We will undertake several observation and writing exercises to learn how to write in an ethnographic mode and translate field research into lively texts.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Haeri, Niloofar
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

The knowledge and practices of science and medicine are not as self-evident as they may appear. When we observe, what do we see? What counts as evidence? How does evidence become fact? How do facts circulate and what are their effects? Who is included in and excluded from our common-sense notions of science, medicine, and technology? This course will introduce students to central theoretical concerns in Science and Technology Studies and the Medical Humanities, focusing on enduring problematics that animate scholars. In conjunction with examinations of theoretical bases, students will learn to evaluate the methodological tools used in different fields in the humanities to study the production and circulation of scientific knowledge and the structures of medical care and public health. This problem-centered approach will help students understand and apply key concepts and approaches in critical studies of science, technology, and medicine.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Staff
• Room: Ames 320
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 2/18
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

On 13 October 2022, a middle-aged upper-middle class Chinese man staged a public political protest on an elevated road in Beijing. Peng Lifa, or “Bridge Man,” as he has become known in allusion to Tank Man from the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, demanded elections and reforms. How have urban Chinese been able to be so content or even happy despite their lack of political freedom? The class readings will introduce you to different kinds of activists who have confronted the authoritarian state since the late 1990s, among them human rights lawyers, reporters, environmental activists, feminists, religious activists, and labor activists. We will ask whether freedom, an obviously Western notion, is useful as an analytical category to think about China. Does freedom translate across the West/non-West divide?

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Henning, Stefan
• Room: Mergenthaler 266
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): INST-CP

Bangladesh, the small, populous Muslim majority country in South Asia, steadily moving into middle income status, offers an off-centered but important vantage point upon the political culture of the region. We will read several new historical and ethnographic works, combined with film, fiction and art, to get a feel for this perspective, even as we interrogate what Bangladesh presumes about itself.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Khan, Naveeda
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/13
• PosTag(s): INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL

Why are so many social media apps free? How did surveillance take place before the internet? What does the TSA see when you go through a body scanner at the airport? This seminar will help students answer these questions by introducing them to the historical development of surveillance cultures as well as their contemporary iterations. We will explore how surveillance shapes communities, politics, subjectivities, and more broadly, our everyday lives. Through readings of key academic texts, documentaries, literary texts, ethnographies, and current events, we will try to gain a full picture, through discussion, of how surveillance has evolved and come to permeate society. By understanding surveillance as a technology of power, we will analyze how this power is applied differentially across different marginalized groups and in different regional contexts. In addition, we will examine the political possibilities that emerge from activist and otherwise everyday tactics to counteract surveillance.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Staff
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

What is violence? Ubiquitous as a concept, it remains difficult to define both its essences and boundaries. How do we distinguish between criminality, organized, and unorganized violence? Is violence the antithesis of society, or a central component of it? In this course, we will disscuss the concept of violence, the challenges of writing about it and explore the potentials that emerge from bodies subjugated to racialized/gendered forms of violence. We will examine a number of different ethnographic spaces, including genocide in Rwanda, conflict resolution among the Nuer, the concept of criminality in Indonesia, largescale massacres in Thailand, and police violence in the United States

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): INST-CP, MSCH-HUM