AP/ANTH 4340 6.00 Advocacy and Social Movements

This is a course on contemporary forms of social advocacy and anthropological approaches to studying social movements. Advocacy and social movements play a central role in challenging and (re)producing social and cultural norms around the world and have much to teach us about the diverse ways that people engage in social justice struggles.

In this course, we will study diverse social movements in their historical, local, and global contexts. We will address several important themes, categories and theories circulating in the current political and activist discourses, such as populism, fascism, dissent, and revolution from an ethnographic perspective. We will also examine recent political uprising and movements from an anthropological perspective and conclude the course with a reading of some ethnographies on protest activism and social movements drawn from different parts of the world. Our aim will be to extend our learning from advocacy, affect and ethics to other concepts in studying social movements in Social-Cultural Anthropology, like class, history, and hegemony, and deepen a theoretical understanding of all course themes by grounding them ethnographically, political-economically, and cross-regionally.

Course Director: S. Hussain - salhuss@yorku.ca