Research and Scholarship in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Social and Cultural Anthropology (MA, PhD)
Theoretical Frameworks, Research, and Scholarship at the Intersections of Thought and Action
Through their journey in the program, students are expected to link their intellectual interests to inquiry within the humanities and an emancipatory, postcolonial anthropology, integrating scholarship, research and social action, practice multicultural alliance building, and create knowledge that intervenes in dominant systems of truth.
Students are expected to offer an understanding of social thought and action cross-culturally and historically, engender multicultural discourses that facilitate a rethinking of self and society, grasp the centrality of history in understanding current political realities, and effect the sacred through interventions in support of cultural diversity, ecological sustainability, and social justice.
Theoretical and Methodological Priorities
Within the framework of an emancipatory, cross-disciplinary, global and diverse anthropology, situated in the humanities, the program prepares students to practice thinking and research that critically engages multicultural and cross-cultural knowledge production.
The curriculum scrutinizes the cultural and political dimensions of knowledge production while strongly supporting the need for moving from interpretation to action and advocacy.
Toward a Critical Subjectivity
The curriculum respects individual experience, acknowledges diversity and dissonance, and uses it toward a critical subjectivity that facilitates emancipatory research. Within multi- and cross-cultural contexts of intersubjectivity, the curriculum affirms and problematizes the motivations, mediums and efficacy of research and intervention, question its outcomes, and address issues of alliance, power and privilege in relation to the construction and use of knowledge.
Foregrounding self-reflective approaches concerned with power, politics and ethics of research, the curriculum looks critically at contemporary perspectives on research, problematizing inequitable social relations, including those between “researcher-researched.”
Every analytical endeavor is embedded in particular forms of history and subjectivity; every process of inquiry privileges and represents particular ways of knowing the world.
Within postcolonial contexts, how can anthropologists raise issues of privilege, representation, participation, intervention, action and outcome and use deconstructive frameworks toward relevant knowledge production?
How do anthropologists contend that the process of decolonizing inquiry and decentering the “field” within anthropology involves mapping the interrelationships and complexities in and between spatial and political sites of inquiry?
Course materials and activities focus on the role, objective and process of research as it influences social transformation, advocating that inquiry impacting the lives of people and their ecology be made equitable through partnership.
Students challenge the role of the contemporary anthropologist, notions, ends and means of “research,” the distinctions (or lack of), and dislocations between “field” and “home,” “self” and “other,” qualitative and quantitative.
How can we as anthropologists look critically at our assumptions, representations and constructions of “self” and “other,” here at “home” and globally, as context, culture, race, class and gender mediate them?
How can anthropologists honor individual experience, acknowledge diversity and dissonance, and use it toward a critical subjectivity?
