Not Offering Fall/Winter 2026-27: This course examines the cultural forces that shape the tourist experience and the social, political, and economic consequences of tourist practice. The first part of the curriculum explores various aspects of the tourist experience, including the search for authenticity, the cultural construction of the ‘other’, postmodern encounters with spectacle, and the […]
Course Offering Fall/Winter 2026-27: How do the living relate to the dead? Covering topics from ancient burial rites to contemporary zombie lore, this course examines how people in cultures around the world – past and present – create, maintain, and renegotiate complex relationships between the living and the dead. The course introduces key concepts in […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2026-27: This course challenges students to think anthropologically about politics and how people act and think politically in their everyday lives. We explore responses to the inequalities left by centuries of colonialism, decades of neoliberalism, the impacts of war, conflict and dislocation, climate change and the rise of authoritarian populism.
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2026-27: As a vast assemblage of humans and non-humans, the city presents unique theoretical and methodological challenges for anthropology. This course introduces students to the theoretical frameworks and methodological tools used by anthropologists through experiential activities and critical readings of ethnographic case studies from both the Global North and South. Topics […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2026-27: 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 2026-27: 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 2026: Course Director - 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 […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2026-27: 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 2026-27: 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 2026-27: 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 […]