Reading Ethnography

4.0 credits

This course is a general inquiry into the practice of ethnography, including fieldwork and writing, carried out through a close reading of materials that investigate the role of the built environment in the production of power and inequality. This course has two aims. First, it will enable students to analyze and evaluate how anthropologists create ethnographic knowledge. Second, it will introduce students to urban anthropology and in particular, to scholarship which examines the politics of urban restructuring (including urban renewal, gentrification, urban violence, deindustrialization, and other topics). Reading ethnographies that document struggles over space in the US and abroad, we will investigate different constellations of power, inequality, and resistance - - and how anthropologists study them.