Social and Cultural Anthropology MA and PhD Programs

Jump to section:
About the MA Program
MA Program Admission Requirements
About the PhD Program
PhD Program Admission Requirements
Admission to the PhD Program Without an MA in Anthropology from CIIS

Anthropology Program at CIIS

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.

• 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

Anthropology Program Priorities

Critical social analysis
Diversity
Imagination and possibility
Social action

About the MA Program

The Master of Arts Program in Cultural Anthropology is concerned with social and ecological justice, advocacy and activism, critical inquiry, new forms of alliance and cooperation, reciprocally beneficial knowledge formation, and cultural diversity.

The Gender, Ecology, and Society Emphasis in the Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation MA utilizes cross-disciplinary frameworks, shifting the disciplinary boundaries that traditionally organize anthropology.

The MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation provides students the opportunity to explore contemporary social relations through historical, postcolonial, feminist, poststructural, and cross-cultural frameworks.

The program facilitates self-reflection on our own cultural presuppositions as a prerequisite for sustained engagement with the realities of difference and culture.

Students focus on practices of creative intervention by developing skills in intercultural communication, critical social analysis, emancipatory research, strategic thinking, and alliance building.

Emphasis In Gender, Ecology, and Society
The Gender, Ecology, and Society Emphasis focuses on understanding global systems through multiple frameworks sensitive to dynamics of power, culture and history. What are some of the relationships between gender domination and the domination of nature? How can the study of race, class, gender, religion, nationality, sexuality, and culture elucidate some of the constraints and possibilities of our age? How do histories of colonization, new imperialisms and globalization mediate relations between the Global North and South?

What can we learn from the study of diverse movements internationally for social justice, sustainable ecology, postcolonial freedom, and responsible development? These are some of the questions explored in this community concerned with scholarship and action.

Students have utilized the MA degree in a variety of ways-some have become professional anthropologists working in applied and academic arenas. Others are already professionals who come to the program seeking cross-cultural and multicultural perspectives in their lives and work. Most seek ways to negotiate and make relevant anthropology and anthropological knowledge in understanding and responding to diverse worlds.

Graduates have specialized skills and experience that enables them to pursue careers as engaged scholars, teachers, and researchers, and as administrators and consultants in undergraduate and graduate academic institutions, nongovernmental organizations, or leaders in such areas as international development, environmental justice, intercultural communication, community organizing, cultural preservation, cultural diversity, diaspora and immigration, conflict zones, and alliance building and social change efforts (see sections on Student and Alumni Profiles).

MA Program Admission Requirements

Prospective students should have a demonstrated capacity to learn and work both independently and collaboratively, and should be able to participate in research that requires rigorous self-reflection and meaningful engagement with members of a shared learning community.

Students are expected to interact creatively with difference, cultivate capacities to think in multiple perspectives, and form alliances in relation to shared concerns. Applicants must meet the general admissions requirements of the Institute. In addition, two letters of recommendation, one from an academic advisor or someone familiar with the applicant's ability to do academic work, and one from a supervisor in a recent professional or volunteer setting, are required.

Applicants are also asked to include a recent example of scholarly writing. The required autobiographical statement should describe significant events in the applicant's life that have led to the decision to pursue admission to this department.

A goal statement reflecting areas of academic interest should be included. Applicants to the Gender, Ecology, and Society Emphasis need not have an undergraduate major in anthropology; however, it is necessary to have had at least three upper-division-level social science courses.

If lacking, these courses can usually be taken concurrently with graduate courses, although they will not be counted toward required degree units. The Gender, Ecology, and Society MA is a residential program.

>> Course of Study and Course Descriptions

Part-Time Curriculum
Students may pursue a part-time course of study in consultation with their academic advisor.

Taking Courses in a Particular Sequence
The graduate curriculum is designed to enhance student capacity to engage complexity, multiplicity, and self in world, and the courses are sequenced to further student development. Students are expected to follow the MA Semester Curriculum in the order that it is structured, unless advised otherwise by their academic advisor.

Culminating Integrative Seminar and the Learning Portfolio
The MA is a nonthesis track, and students must take ANTH 6901: Integrative Seminar as the culminating course. The integrative seminar is a scholarly process designed to demonstrate critical knowledge in the student's area of study.

In this course a comprehensive learning portfolio is completed and defended before the core faculty in the program. No thesis is allowed in lieu of the course and portfolio. The learning portfolio demonstrates the student's ability to design and assess research in anthropology and/or develop teaching syllabi.

It provides an opportunity for students to reflect critically upon all work accomplished during the course of the program, while at the same time clarifying professional goals. This seminar invites students to apply skills and content learned during the coursework portion of their studies to a substantial project of their own choosing with either a research or teaching focus.

Together with the other elements outlined below, the final project constitutes a professional portfolio, which can be used as a demonstration of competency for further studies or employment.

Portfolio Requirements
The portfolio reflects skills and knowledge gained during the student's progress through the program. The following required elements that make up the portfolio:

The Scholarship of Discovery: Defined as a disciplined, investigative effort in pursuing new developments in knowledge. Students complete an annotated bibliography, which explores new developments in an area of scholarship relevant to the student's emphasis.

The Scholarship of Integration: Defined as the ability to think in an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary manner. Students write a paper examining their involvement in community service, linking such actions to anthropology and at least one other discipline, elucidating the relevance of these disciplines to one's work.

The Scholarship of Application/Research: Defined as the use of scholarship to address contemporary social issues, or scholarship informed by activism, which critically engages disciplinary knowledge and cultural practices. Students write an essay describing and analyzing their own active involvement in a community, institution, or social site, elaborating the useful and problematic ways anthropology informs such involvement.

The Scholarship of Teaching: Defined as pedagogical activity that promotes learning relevant to a multicultural world. Students design a complete syllabus for an undergraduate or graduate course entitled "Introduction to Cultural Anthropology."

Students write an essay of 30 pages addressing their approach to teaching, goals and
objectives for the course, rationale for texts chosen and learning activities planned, and evaluation criteria used. Also included is an exposition of overall interests and concerns in introducing learners to the discipline of anthropology.

Essay on Postcolonial Anthropology: Students in the MA Program do not have comprehensive examinations. As part of the portfolio that is completed in the culminating course, ANTH 6901 Integrative Seminar, an essay on postcolonial anthropology of 20-25 pages is required. This is similar to one of the essays required of doctoral students in completing their comprehensive exams.

Joining an Organization: Evidence of membership in a professional organization. Scholarship Students in the MA Program are expected to develop skills in self-reflection, alliance building, and global citizenship as the context for scholarly production. Students are expected to develop capacities to critically appropriate anthropological frameworks, methods, histories, and practices for ethical, socially relevant, mutually beneficial practices of knowledge construction and social intervention.

Applied Research
Students in the MA Program must successfully complete three courses with a critical and applied relation to research. There are other courses that integrate applied research into the course assignments.

Language Requirement
Students in the MA Program are required to incorporate reflection on the relations between language, culture, history, and power throughout their studies. The development of scholarly and applied access to languages other than English is encouraged, but not required, at the MA level.

About the PhD Program

The doctoral degree offers students specialized skills and opportunities to practice an anthropology concerned with ethics and efficacy in elaborating the boundaries of the discipline.

This program offers the space and the possibility in which to critically shape a postcolonial anthropology that frames radical scholarship as an academic practice.

Graduates are prepared to embrace the challenges and tasks of a scholarly career of research, teaching, and advocacy that is rooted in an action approach to anthropology.

Anthropology has a legacy of challenging dominant truths and practices, expanding the voices that participate in knowledge construction. To further enable emancipatory scholarship requires transformations in the academy in order to shape an anthropology relevant to the complexities of the historical present.

How can graduate anthropology programs respond to these challenges to facilitate effective alliances between the academy and communities of practice locally and globally?

The Social and Cultural Anthropology PhD offers students specialized skills and opportunities to practice an anthropology concerned with ethics and efficacy in elaborating the boundaries of the discipline. This program offers the space and the possibility in which to shape a postcolonial anthropology that frames radical scholarship as academic practice.

Through intensive doctoral level education in the frameworks, methods, approaches, and perspectives of social and cultural anthropology organized as cross-disciplinary inquiry, students develop interests and projects undertaken within the MA, continuing their studies through close mentoring relationships with key anthropology faculty.

Students benefit from critical approaches to scholarship, engaging in dialogue with philosophy, history, psychology, education, public policy, sociology, cultural and ethnic studies, development studies, ethnology, and the law.

In an academic setting that appreciates and encourages intellectual and activist pursuit, students are challenged to confront their own embedded assumptions and cultural presuppositions within multicultural and cross-cultural frameworks. The program is distinctive in its emphasis on:

• Contemporary cultural critique.
• Issues of colonialism, globalization, new imperialisms, development, nationalism, indigenous cultural survival, social movements, identity politics, ecological and social justice.
• Postcolonial, subaltern, feminist, poststructuralist perspectives.
• Intersections of race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, ability, nationality, statelessness, and culture in critical social analysis.
• Integration of advocacy, activism, and scholarship, developing practical skills in intervention, intercultural communication, strategic thinking, alliance building, and emancipatory research.

Graduates are prepared to embrace the challenges and tasks of a scholarly career of research, teaching, and advocacy that is rooted in an action approach to anthropology. Many classes include an applied research component, and the doctoral dissertation is based on applied research, locally, nationally or internationally, utilizing various critical approaches conducive to scholarship with an emancipatory interest.

Research frameworks include ethnographic, participatory, narrative, oral history, action, and other qualitative and quantitative methods.

Part-Time Curriculum
Students may pursue a part-time course of study in consultation with their academic advisor.

Taking Courses in a Particular Sequence
The graduate curriculum is designed to enhance student capacity to engage complexity, multiplicity, and self in world, and the courses are sequenced to further student development. Students are expected to follow the PhD Semester Curriculum in the order that it is structured, unless advised otherwise by their academic advisor.

Required Coursework
The PhD requires 36 units of coursework. Thirty are for required units, including directed electives, and 6 are for electives. Student should consult with their academic advisor when selecting their directed electives. The six general electives should also be chosen in consultation with an advisor and may be taken from outside the Anthropology Program.

Comprehensive Examinations
After completing the PhD Specialization Seminar/Dissertation Proposal Writing, students are required to take the comprehensive exams before advancing to candidacy. The comprehensive examinations are in two parts:
(1) an essay in postcolonial anthropology, and (2) essays representing two of four approaches to scholarship derived from the reconsideration of scholarship by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Language Examination
Students are required to pass a written language examination to demonstrate competency in a second language before advancing to candidacy. This can be either a language of relevance to accessing scholarship in the student's area of specialization or adequacy in a language appropriate to applied research needs. The three-hour examination consists of translating scholarly work in the second language into English.

Dissertation Proposal Writing
Students are required to write a 115-page dissertation proposal and a 10-page summary (in the course titled PhD Specialization Seminar/Dissertation Proposal Writing). This course is taken on a flat-fee basis.

After the student receives a pass in this course, the dissertation committee, including an external reviewer, reviews the proposal and may require further revisions.

Dissertation Research, Writing, and Defense
The PhD dissertation is based on relevant and applied research conducive to scholarship with an emancipatory interest. After advancing to candidacy, students are required to undertake a minimum of one year of applied research, followed by a minimum of one year of dissertation writing.

The dissertation committee includes an external member. The dissertation is generally 250 to 300 pages. If the dissertation includes submissions in other media, the theoretical component is generally 100 to 150 pages. During the applied research and dissertation-writing phase, students are not expected to register for units but pay a flat fee toward maintenance of status. After the committee has approved the dissertation, students are expected to conduct and pass a public defense.

Methodology
The doctoral program has 9 units of research curriculum sequenced through a set of three rigorous and required methods classes: Anthropological Research Methods, Applied Advocacy Research, and Reading and Writing Culture. Anthropology students who enter the PhD program after completing their MA from CIIS are required to take Applied Advocacy Research, and Reading and Writing Culture again (with differing curriculum, assignments, and/or grading criterion), and a research seminar with their academic advisor.

The research process is organized to deepen student reflections on research and writing methods, to build a strong repertoire of practices for students to engage with their communities and the world.

Learning focuses on various and qualitative methodologies, such as participatory action research, policy research, advocacy research, autoethnography, oral historiographies, and oral mapping.

Students also engage with analytical frames in writing, such as feminist, postcolonial, and poststructuralist thought, deconstruction, archaeology and genealogy, which contextualize and problematize anthropological knowledge and research methods. Students are also required to attend an online research workshop, and one on quantitative research, offered every semester by the program.

Students are also taught how to undertake qualitative-quantitative surveys, and different interview and writing techniques.

PhD Admissions Requirements

Entry into the PhD program in Social and Cultural Anthropology requires a master's degree. Students with an MA from another school or from another department at CIIS may require up to one additional year of coursework as part of their PhD program.

Students with an MA in the Gender, Ecology, and Society emphasis in Cultural
Anthropology and Social Transformation from CIIS do not require additional coursework.

The Social and Cultural Anthropology PhD concentration is a residential program.
Prospective students should have a demonstrated capacity to learn and work both independently and collaboratively, and be able to participate in research that requires rigorous self-reflection and meaningful engagement with members of a shared learning community. Students are expected to interact creatively with difference, cultivate capacities to think in multiple perspectives, and form alliances in relation to shared concerns.

Applicants must meet the general admissions requirements of the Institute. In addition, two letters of recommendation, one from an academic advisor or someone familiar with the applicant's ability to do academic work, and one from a supervisor in a recent professional or volunteer setting, are required.

Applicants are also asked to include a recent example of scholarly writing. The required autobiographical statement should describe significant events in the applicant's life that have led to the decision to pursue admission to this department. A goal statement that includes areas of academic interest should be included.

Admission to the PhD Program Without an MA in Anthropology from CIIS

Students entering the PhD without an MA in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation from CIIS are required to take an additional 12 to 15 units of MA-level coursework within the Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation Program.

Students may require an additional year in which to complete these courses.
Once students are admitted, advisors will facilitate the drafting of a tailored curriculum contract that incorporates these additional courses and suggests a timeline. These additional courses may include the following:

ANTH 5000: Building Alliances across Differences
ANTH 5100: Critical History of the Human Sciences
ANTH 5200: Language and Culture
ANTH 6700: Understanding Global Systems
ANTH 6850: Cross-Cultural Issues in Social and Environmental Justice