Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Founded in 1981, the Anthropology Program offers a critical, advocacy approach to education. In 1997, the program expanded to include a doctoral track.
In 1999, the program was re-envisioned to prioritize issues of social and ecological justice in the context of a multicultural, postcolonial world.
The program engages cross-disciplinary frameworks, shifting the disciplinary boundaries that traditionally organized anthropology. Learning is empowered through dialogue and engagement, in classes, through community building and extracurricular activities, through residency in social and political worlds.
The program invites participation in shaping scholarship that takes an advocacy position, through rigorous engagement with the historical present. Effective advocacy demands ethical self-reflection, intellectual and affective development, and close alliances with communities of practice and traditions of thought.
- Learn more about the MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation
- Learn more about the PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Experience Education as Empowering and Relevant
- Explore the intersections of thought and action
- Integrate scholarship, research, and social action
- Practice multicultural alliance building
- Gain fluency in critical perspectives: postcolonial, subaltern, feminist, and poststructural
- Create knowledge that intervenes in dominant systems of truth
- Examine histories of colonialism, imperialism, globalization, development, and postcoloniality
- Engage issues of identity politics, nation building, environmental racism, indigenous cultural survival, statelessness, self-determination, social justice, and human rights
- Learn participatory, advocacy, and action research
Priorities
- Critical social analysis
- Diversity
- Imagination and possibility
- Social action
