This introductory lecture course serves both Anthropology and Biology & Society majors. Drawing a wide variety of students interested in medicine and the biological sciences, it enrolls about 100 students each year. Numerous students have told me that this class, more than any other, has helped them think through why they want to become a doctor as it balances the demands of their science classes with the philosophical, political, historical, and ethical questions raised in medicine. 

This course contributes to the arc of our medicine and healing concentration in anthropology but also regularly draws students from art and architecture, history, engineering, and elsewhere on campus who are interested in approaching the body as it is (re)shaped by culture, history, biology, technology, and ecology. Students investigate ethnographic and historical materials concerning healing and medicine, discipline and labor, governance and religion, aesthetics and desire. Readings examine the ways in which the (re)production of bodies and embodied experiences have been central to power. Together we track how a particular notion of bodily sovereignty has come to animate our politics today.

Accounts of healing and medicine on the continent describe ongoing struggles over what counts as knowledge and who has the authority to intervene in social and physical threats. This class discusses the expansion of biomedicine in Africa, the continuities and changes embodied in traditional medicine, and the shifting relationship between medicine, science, and law. Our readings trace how colonialism, post-independence nationalism, international development, environmental change, and globalization have shaped the experience of illness, debility, and misfortune today, as well as the possibilities for life, the context of care, and the meaning of death.

Scientific knowledge and practice have enabled the economization of life, labor, and land central to histories of colonial dispossession and postcolonial development. They have also animated diverse struggles to live otherwise. In this class, students examine the ways in which scientists, government officials, activists, and others are developing and mobilizing science in the service of diverse agendas. Our focus is on work that troubles geopolitical divides rooted in colonial imaginaries. Discussions are designed to elucidate the politics of scientific knowledge and practice. Readings draw attention to worlds outside colonial centers of power. 

Practices of identifying and managing the “toxic” are central to both the medical and environmental sciences. Toxicity also shapes community activism and public policy. This course takes up the subject of toxicity as a field of expertise, an object of knowledge, and an ethical substance (that is, a substance that has come to shape ethical subjects and matters in our contemporary world). Students consider the specific histories of industrialization and of the sciences that shape modern engagements with toxicity, and they explore other ways that the sorts of harms, poisons, and powers glossed as toxicity have been articulated. We examine the modern concept of toxicity as both a mechanism of power—shaping how authorities govern—and a catalyst for opposition. Texts draw from social theory, anthropology, science and technology studies, and history as well as art and activism.

In this graduate level course, we will take the body and bodiliness as spaces of ethnographic engagement and questioning. Discussion, text and other materials in this class will invite students to consider the ways that “the body” (as an epistemological and ontological object) is transformed through a variety of theoretical, scientific, economic and political projects. Because meditations on the body have rested — implicitly or explicitly — on theoretical and methodological approaches to experience, students will find themselves exploring histories of bodily senses, appetites, and capacities. Ultimately, our inquiry into contests over and reflections on “the body” and “bodiliness” aim to open up broader anthropological questions about knowledge, authority, agency, sovereignties, and material life.

This workshop-style seminar supports students to imagine and design their doctoral research through a focus on the procedures ethnographers use to carry out research and anthropological understandings of what those procedures afford when combined in different ways (that is the methods!). We with exercises that invite students to rooting their research in the values that drive their life and work more broadly as a PhD thesis orients the career that follows. Over the course of the semester, we discuss epistemological issues (i.e., what kinds of knowledge we think ethnography produces?) and conceptual questions (i.e., what counts as a properly anthropological subject of study?) alongside more practical matters (i.e., what might/could/should be included in the ethnographer’s toolkit?) and ethical and political dilemmas (i.e., what counts as fair and meaningful work, and to whom as well as how does one balance engagement and detachment?). For second-year sociocultural anthropology graduate students, this course precedes the proposal design class, which requires students to draft their first proposal for funding.