Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course explores three main themes. First, it examines the culture(s) of capitalism historically and ethnographically. This anthropology of capitalism covers the age of capitalist empires, the formation of corporations, and the directions and implications of postmodern and financial capitalism. We also examine the "world system" through to the age […]
Course Offering Fall 2025: This course explores the social and cultural basis of human food systems using a cross-cultural approach. Nutritional anthropology, a subfield of medical anthropology, integrates an understanding of human biology with the social and cultural basis of human food systems. Our study of food and eating requires assembling an understanding of the […]
Course Director (Fall 2025): Zulfikar A. Hirji - zhirji@yorku.ca The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the discipline, experience, and practice of anthropological research. The task of “doing anthropology” involves a broad range of considerations, such as: defining and selecting research problems, decisions concerning appropriate and/or feasible research strategies as well as […]
Course Offerings Fall 2025: This course is about anthropology and visual representations of culture, and cultural difference. It looks at a wide variety of visual media online, including art, photography, film, and digital technologies to explore the ways in which they shape both the perception and experience of cultural difference and identity. This course examines […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: We are living in a global pandemic. This moment has made the study of infectious disease, viruses, vaccines, and contagion more urgent as we grapple with COVID19 and the ways it has changed our lives. While many of our lives have been affected by COVID19 and subsequent restrictions such as […]
Course offering Fall 2025: The thought of experiencing immersion in another cultural context is both exciting and potentially anxiety producing. How can you develop intercultural competency skills in advance? This course is designed to help you develop those skills and become more confident about what you will experience in a university exchange placement. It was […]
Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: How does social science make social change? What do anthropologists have to offer the communities we work with and the world at large? Can we meet the current moment? This course is all about harnessing scholarship for public ends. Through advocacy, policy, and community engagement, it’s about applying anthropology’s methods […]
Course Director (Fall/Winter 2025-26): Is biology destiny? Are gender and sexual differences such as “male promiscuity”, “female monogamy”, “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality” genetically hardwired or socially constructed? How do we explain the range of sexualities people experience? Are all intimate relationships based on “love”? Is the “nuclear family” the basic building block of all societies? This […]
Not Offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: Drawing upon images produced by anthropologists, journalists, filmmakers, photographers, artists, and activists this course asks questions about how the visual continually challenges and shapes understandings of self, community and other. This course uses ethnography, film, video, visual art, photography and new media to explore issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, globalization, […]
Course Director (Fall 2025): L. Davidson - lmdavids@yorku.ca What are the different ways that we, as anthropologists, research and analyze culture? What is ethnography and what are anthropological approaches to ethnography? This course is designed to familiarize students to key concepts in sociocultural anthropology by focusing on the craft of ethnography; specifically, how ethnography is imaginative, […]