Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: Anthropology, a discipline grounded in the principles of cultural relativism, has been uncomfortable with the universalizing discourse of human rights since it was first codified in the United Nation's 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Initially, anthropologists rejected the Declaration's claims outright, asserting the superiority of their own pluralist understandings […]
Course Offering Fall/Winter 2025-26: 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 cultural norms around the world and have much to teach us about the diverse ways that people engage in struggles over cultural […]
Course Offering Fall 2025: L. Ameeriar- lalaie@yorku.ca Arthur Kleinman (2013) states that “Ultimately, caregiving is about doing good for others, and doing good in the world, as naive as it may sound” (p.1377). Remaining engaged in providing collective care while facing the enormity of contemporary health issues from local to planetary scales is a critical […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: Within a framework of the politics of identity, this course explore the tension between religious and national identities, the character and scope of transnational religious communities, and takes up fundamentalism as one response to developments in cosmopolitan modern societies.
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: On the first day of COP28 – last year’s UN climate conference – the world’s richest countries finally signed on to a ‘loss and damage’ fund to compensate those most vulnerable to the climate crisis who contribute least to it. It was a hard-fought victory with a sour note – […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course focuses on the fact that ethnographers enter their “fields” and conduct research in conjunction with theoretical ideas about anthropology alongside histories of experience and practice. Cultural anthropologists do “ethnography” and produce “ethnographies” through fieldwork. This course will primarily focus on contemporary cultural anthropology by introducing you to “digital […]
Course Offering Fall 2025:The Professional Anthropologist is a capstone course for the Certificate and Minor in Advocacy and Public Engagement. It is a placement course designed to offer students essential skills and experience in implementing anthropological knowledge and training in a workplace. Students will work as an anthropologist with an approved host organization. Each student […]
Course Director (Fall 2025): R. Coombe - rcoombe@yorku.ca What is the use of theory today? The purpose of this course is to explore and understand the possibilities of theory by acquiring a grounded and broad knowledge of different theoretical developments through the decades. In the first term our approach moves away from the purely chronological […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course examines debates amongst anthropologists about the study of Islam and Muslim societies, and Muslim expressions of Islam according to anthropological themes including the body, space, ritual, knowledge, agency and representation. Students design and undertake a field-based research project.
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course explores how humans make and understand the world through their senses, the history of the senses in a variety of systems of thought and experience, and the meanings and uses of the senses in a range of contexts. Students critically examine and evaluate particular aspects of the senses […]