Department Overview
CIIS’ Anthropology and Social Change department is renowned for its focus on activist research, anarchist anthropology, and social justice.
We bring together scholars and activists to engage in co-learning, inspired by a long and beautiful history of education developed in popular universities, modern schools, universities of earth and without walls, and free schools. Our learning community is a convivial space where we collectively consider social movement histories and create a shared understanding of how to influence the movements we are a part of.
Our programs reflect an integration of social, political, economic, and environmental themes and issues. Instead of analyzing them separately, we treat these themes as interconnected.
Our graduates are trained for professional careers in academia, policy, social-political journalism, advocacy, and community, legal, and environmental organizations. Our faculty have a wide range of research interests, among them urban social movements, agri-food studies, politics and filmmaking, post-structuralist philosophy, gender equality, forced migration and refugees, radical oral history, and psychoanalytic time.
Learn More About Our Programs
Our Approach
Anthropology and Social Change is part of the broader movement that seeks to return ethnography to the forefront of anthropology.
Our approach to ethnographic research is unique in that it dissolves traditional barriers between research and political activism, insiders and outsiders, and researchers and protagonists. We engage in the process of co-research to explore existing alternatives and possibilities for social change.
We are a department of post-capitalist studies. We study politics of alternatives in the here and now by engaging with concrete utopias that are already being built.
Using the critical concepts we bring from the field and returning those concepts back to the people we do research with, is what makes us both activists and anthropologists.
Meet Ph.D. alumna Talia Molé
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How to Apply
Application Open Dates
Apply for Spring 2023 starting September 15, 2022 - see a list of spring-admitting programs.
Apply for Fall 2023 starting November 15, 2022 - all programs accept fall applications.
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Questions? Contact us.
We are here to help! If you have any questions about applying to a program or registering for an Info Session, please reach out to the Admissions Office.
