Courses

AP/ANTH 1120 6.00 Making Sense of a Changing World: Anthropology Today

Course Offering Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course will explore how Anthropology approaches social, economic, political, and belief systems, and survey contemporary issues of selected peoples and cultures by considering several real-world cases. The aim of this ...

AP/ANTH 1130 6.00 Anthropology of the Living and the Dead

Course Offering Fall/Winter 2025-26: 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 ...

AP/ANTH 1140 6.00 What does it mean to be human? Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology

Course Offerings Fall 2025: What is culture and how does it vary over time? What shapes people’s ideas and experiences of belonging and identity? How are people propelled to imagine who they are and how ...

AP/ANTH 2020 6.00 Race, Racism & Popular Culture

Course Offering Fall/Winter 2025-26: What can popular culture tell us about the world we live in? For anthropologists, it turns out that it can tell us quite a lot! This course takes an anthropological approach ...

AP/ANTH 2100 6.00 Global Capitalism, Culture, and Conflict

Course Offering Fall 2025: This course analyzes and critiques the foundations of historical and contemporary forms of global capitalism. The curriculum focuses on the examination of the social, political, and economic consequences of the production ...

AP/ANTH 2110 6.00 Core Concepts in Anthropology

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 ...

AP/ANTH 2120 3.00 Visualizing Ourselves, Visualizing Others: Media, Representation & Culture

Course Offering Winter 2026: This course interrogates the relationship between media and culture. It focuses on media representations in different cultural contexts in order to develop critical analytical skills for understanding the processes through which ...

AP/ANTH 2130 6.00 Anthropology Through the Visual: Images of Resistance/Irresistible Images

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. ...

AP/ANTH 2140 3.00 Introduction to Archaeology and Prehistory: Humanity's Journeys

Course Offerings Fall/Winter 2025-26:Course Director (Fall 2025): E. Yasui - eyasui@yorku.ca This course explores the methods that archaeologists use to study the past, the development of human societies from our earliest hominin ancestors to preindustrial ...

AP/ANTH 2170 6.00 Sex, Gender and the Body: Cross-Cultural Approaches to the Body, Gender, Sexuality and Kinship

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 ...

AP/ANTH 2210 6.00 Advocate and Educate for Change: Applying Anthropology

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 ...

AP/ANTH 2222 6.00 From Settler Colonialism to Multiculturalism - An Anthropological Approach

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: How do we live and interact with others in multicultural and multiracial communities in Canada? What is the relationship between settler colonialism and multiculturalism? What is the future of multiculturalism? ...

AP/ANTH 2280 3.00 Human Evolution and Biological Anthropology

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: Some of the biggest questions in biological anthropology are about how humans came to be and what defines us as a species. This course is a broad introduction to humanity’s ...

AP/ANTH 2300 3.00 Intercultural Training Skills

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 ...

AP/ANTH 2330 6.00 Outbreak! Contagion and Risk in Anthropological Context

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 ...

AP/ANTH 3030 3.00 Discourses Of Colonialism

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course examines the complex interplay of cultural and political forces that have created the conditions of possibility of Euro-American expansion and control on a global scale. Throughout the term, ...

AP/ANTH 3040 6.00 The Anthropology of Digital Media and Visual Representation

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 ...

AP/ANTH 3110 6.00 Acquiring Research Skills

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 ...

AP/ANTH 3120 6.00 The Anthropolgy of Tourism

Course Offering Fall 2025: 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 ...

AP/ANTH 3130 3.00 Archaeology and Society: Local Pasts in a Global Present

Course Director (Winter 2026): E. Yasui - eyasui@yorku.ca Archaeology and society are intertwined, locally and globally. This course interrogates those connections, examining the twin themes of (a) the role of archaeological heritage and archaeological investigation within ...

AP/ANTH 3160 6.00 Sex, Love and Marriage: Cross-Cultural Approaches to Kinship

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course seeks to develop cross-cultural perspectives on weddings, marriage, the formation of domestic groups, extended kinship ties and social networks, the kindred and various forms of descent groups, and ...

AP/ANTH 3190 6.00 Food, Eating, and Nutrition in Cross-cultural Perspective

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 ...

AP/ANTH 3200 3.00 The Anthropology of Global Health

Course Director (Winter 2026): M. MacDonald - maggie@yorku.ca Global health is a multidisciplinary field that endeavours to improve health and work towards health equity for all people worldwide. This course explores the field of global health ...

AP/ANTH 3220 6.00 Greed, Globalization and the Gift: The Culture of Capitalism

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, ...

AP/ANTH 3230 6.00 Women, Culture and Society

Course Director (Fall/Winter 2025-26): M. MacDonald - maggie@yorku.ca This course examines a variety of theoretical and ethnographic approaches to the intersectionality of womanism, class, sexuality, and race that developed out of and/or intensified by settler, ...

AP/ANTH 3270 3.00 The Anthropology of Outer Space

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26:  The Anthropology of Outer Space offers an anthropological voyage of exploration to other worlds, through human culture, popular imagination, science, and technology. Outer space is full of human paradoxes. Human ...

AP/ANTH 3280 6.00 Anthropology and Psychiatry in Global Context

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course is concerned with furthering the dialogue and mutual engagement between Medical Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry - in the context of localized communities, multicultural societies, and global networks alike. ...

AP/ANTH 3300 6.00 Life in Motion: The Anthropology of Transnational Human Migration

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course focuses on the anthropology of human migration. Through online modules and in-person seminars, students undertake an ethnographic investigation of various humanitarian, social, and political dimensions of human movements ...

AP/ANTH 3320 6.00 The Anthropology of Ritual & Religion

Course Offering Fall 2025:  Religion has long been a topic of interest to anthropologists, preoccupying the earliest anthropological theories of culture and society. Today, the topic of religion is seeing growing attention across the world. ...

AP/ANTH 3330 6.00 Health & Illness in Cross-Cultural Perspective: Learning and Doing Medical Anthropology

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course explores health, illness and medical systems from the viewpoint of social anthropology. It emphasizes medicine and health as culturally significant systems of knowledge and practice. The ways that ...

AP/ANTH 3350 3.00 Culture as Performance: The Anthropology of the Arts

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course focuses on the anthropology of performance. In this course, we will analyze performance theory, methods, and ethnographic examples of performance in various geographic locations and cultural situations. In ...

AP/ANTH 3370 3.00 Power & Violence: The Making of Modernity

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course will examine the place of organized political violence in the making of the most recent widespread, large-scale dominant social system: "modernity". During its making there has been a ...

AP/ANTH 3380 3.00 The Everyday Politics of Rage: Anthropological Perspectives on Populism

Course Director (Fall 2025): D. Winland - winland@yorku.ca The focus of this course is populism, political radicalism, the alt/new right, concepts that have generated a great deal of discussion and debate in media, academia and ...

AP/ANTH 3410 6.00 Race, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Us and Them

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: The world of the 21st century is so often thought about, if not arranged, in terms of things called “nations”. And this happens in countless different ways and different levels: ...

AP/ANTH 3420 3.00 Indigenous Minorities and Human Rights

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course focuses on how nation states define majorities and minorities, and how such definitions are contested by populations striving for cultural, political and human rights. Questions include: How do ...

AP/ANTH 3440 3.00 Governmentality & Development: Selected Cases

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course examines the idea of "development" in the context of European state formation, colonialism and globalization. It examines development in Indonesia or India, for example, through the lens of ...

AP/ANTH 3510 3.00 Indigenous Peoples and Archaeology: From Conflict to Coalition

Course Director (Winter 2026): E. Yasui - eyasui@yorku.ca This course examines the changing relationship of Indigenous peoples and archaeology. Previously marked by conflict, but now by cooperation, this relationship is improving as artifacts and ancestors ...

AP/ANTH 3520 3.00 The Social Lives of Places and Things: Material Culture and the Archaeology of the Contemporary Past

Course Offering Winter 2026: This course addresses the 'stuff of life' - the material things and constructed places around us. As the physical manifestations of culture, things and places both reflect and affect social relationships. ...

AP/ANTH 3530 3.00 The South Asian Diaspora, Anthropological Perspectives

Course Director (Fall 2025): L. Ameeriar- lalaie@yorku.ca This course considers anthropological perspectives on the history of migration from the South Asian subcontinent, and will examine the configuration of South Asian cultures, identities, and politics. We ...

AP/ANTH 3560 3.00 Anthropology of the Senses

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 ...

AP/ANTH 3570 6.00 Anthropology, Islam & Muslim Societies

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 ...

AP/ANTH 4010 6.00 Directed Reading

Course Offering Fall/Winter 2025-26: This is an independent study course granted to a limited number of Anthropology majors who wish to closely study a specialized topic not already covered by program courses. Directed reading courses ...

AP/ANTH 4110 6.00 Development of Theory in Social Anthropology

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 ...

AP/ANTH 4120 6.00 Anthropology Beyond the Academy: Bridging Theory and Practice

Course Offering (Fall/Winter 2025-26): L. Davidson - lmdavids@yorku.ca This course is a unique opportunity to explore the diverse applications of anthropological knowledge and skills outside of traditional academic settings. Through a combination of seminar discussions, ...

AP/ANTH 4130 6.00 The Professional Anthropologist: The Anthropologist as Practitioner

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 ...

AP/ANTH 4140 3.00 Anthropological Perspectives on Sound

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course explores the merging of sound studies and anthropology, with a focus on how social actors understand their environments through sound. We will consider how anthropologists frame their work ...

AP/ANTH 4150 3.00 Special Topics in Anthropology - Archeogaming and Playing with the Past

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: How do games shape the historical interpretation and portrayal of marginalized communities in archaeology? This course explores games and play from the perspective of archaeology. It will include the evidence ...

AP/ANTH 4200 3.00 Practicing Ethnography: Advanced Approaches to Ethnographic Methods

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course provides students with the opportunity to engage critically with and apply qualitative research methods toward the production, individually and collectively, of ethnographic analyses.

AP/ANTH 4220 6.00 The Cultures of the Web

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 ...

AP/ANTH 4240 3.00 Nature, Culture, Power: The Anthropology of Environment

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 ...

AP/ANTH 4250 6.00 Religious Movements in Global Perspective

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 ...

AP/ANTH 4270 3.00 Imagined Societies: An Anthropology of Nations Without Boundaries

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course explores questions of identity and belonging in a global framework. We will examine histories of migration and subsequent configurations of cultures, identities and politics. We will explore migration ...

AP/ANTH 4320 3.00 Ethnographic Approaches in the Anthropology of Christianity

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course provides an in-depth examination of anthropological theories and ethnographic approaches in the Anthropology of Christianity. With a focus on ethnographic texts and films, students are challenged to think ...

AP/ANTH 4330 3.00 Critical Issues in Medical Anthropology

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 ...

AP/ANTH 4340 6.00 Advocacy and Social Movements

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 ...

AP/ANTH 4350 3.00 Perspectives in Visual Anthropology

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: Visual anthropology is a sub-discipline of anthropology that studies the production and reception of visual media, the visual practices humans employ, human understandings of the visual, and the impacts of ...

AP/ANTH 4400 3.00 Speculative Futures: The Anthropology of What Might-Be

Course Director (Fall 2025): Zulfikar A. Hirji - zhirji@yorku.ca Speculative FuturesWhat might the future look like?In this course we engage with impossible, extraordinary, unimaginable and speculative futures envisaged by people who are dreaming, composing, conjuring, ...

AP/ANTH 4410 3.00 The Anthropology of Human Rights

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 ...

AP/ANTH 4420 3.00 The Gendered Politics of War

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This course explores how gender relations have been deployed in sites of militarized conflict to incite, exacerbate and fuel violence; the reasons for and the ways in which war is ...

AP/ANTH 4450 3.00 Anthropology of the City

Course Director (Fall 2025): O. Alexandrakis - oalexand@yorku.ca 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 ...

AP/ANTH 4530 3.00 The Anthropology of Race, Gender and Labour

Course Director (Winter 2026): L. Ameeriar- lalaie@yorku.ca This course examines anthropological perspectives on the politics of labour as impacted by race and gender. This class will focus on ethnographic texts and films. We will take ...

AP/ANTH 4560 6.00 The Anthpology of Science and Technology

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: Examines anthropological studies of science and technology to explore the power of scientific facts in contemporary cultures. Considers how facts are produced and stabilized in scientific laboratories, how facts are ...

AP/ANTH 4570 3.00 The Brain, Self and Society

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: This upper-year seminar course explores sociocultural perspectives on the brain, self, and society. Drawing on anthropological theories and methodologies, we will investigate how the brain and the self are understood, ...

AP/ANTH 4610 3.00 The Ethnography of Politics: Anthropological Research on Power and Resistance

Not offering in Fall/Winter 2025-26: 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 ...