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Anthropology

Key Debates in Contemporary Anthropology

Module code: 001AN
Level 5
15 credits in autumn semester
Teaching method: Workshop
Assessment modes: Essay, Coursework

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.

Module learning outcomes

• To demonstrate knowledge of a variety of current theoretical debates within anthropology.
• To demonstrate knowledge of anthropological contributions to broader theoretical debates within the social sciences.
• To critically assess/evaluate how key debates in the social sciences are informing contemporary anthropological research and writing.
• To demonstrate how key debates in anthropology are shaped by, and are shaping, contemporary empirical inquiry.