Anthropological Imaginations

Graduate / Professional

This is the second course of a yearlong sequence for doctoral students in Anthropology and combined programs. The seminar explores anthropological imaginations as modes of experience, perception, and writing. Anthropology as a discipline has transformed from the frontline of colonial projects to critical reflections on power dynamics that produce and reproduce systems of oppression, injustice, and violence. Yet knowing and representing are never external to these power dynamics, and there is simply a vast unknowability of human and non-human experiences. How do we as anthropologists give meanings to the world out there that is so intertwined and complex beneath what we see and hear? How do we see what seems invisible and how to listen to silence? How do we account for our own implication in the encounters through which we experience and learn, and reflect upon? How do we weave stories through writing? While there are no right or wrong answers to these questions, in this seminar we explore how different imaginaries open up new possibilities as we embark on our ethnographic research. T 9:25am-11:20am