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Key Debates in Contemporary Anthropology (001AN)

15 credits, Level 5

Autumn teaching

On this module, you’ll explore key debates that have featured in contemporary anthropology. You’ll develop your ability to critically engage with significant theoretical frameworks and form your own views and opinions whilst preparing for Advanced Topic options. Your learning is shaped by debates active at ¹ú²úÄÚÉä, across the UK and beyond. While these debates draw on broader literature and trends in society, you’ll focus on how they are used within anthropology, and how they influence wider debates across the social sciences, arts and humanities.

You’ll be taught by experts in the field in topics that may include:

• migration, displacement, and mobility
• infrastructure, technology and cyborg sociality
• the ‘good’, the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly’: anthropology and morality
• society beyond the human: multispecies sociality and the anthropocene
• affect and emotional labour
• work and leisure
• precarity, politics and the popular
• secularism, religions and intolerance
• perspectivism, ontology and the new orientalism
• anthropology beyond ‘ethnography’: fiction, narrative and depicting the social
• anthropology beyond ‘logocentrism’: physicality and performance.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 20 hours of contact time and about 130 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2026/27. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.

Courses

This module is offered on the following courses:

• Anthropology BA
• Anthropology with a Language BA