ANTHROPOLOGY DEPARTMENT
SPECIAL TOPICS COURSES
FALL 2016
ANTH390: Health and Medicine in the American South
MWF 11:15-12:05
Prof. King
The American South is experienced and imagined in a multitude of ways. Everyday lives in the South are continuously borne out by this region's literature, history, music, food, art, and material culture. Drawing from all of these sources, this course will focus on how Southern bodies have experienced health and illness. We will pose the questions: How can we understand the history and culture of a region through the experience of health and healthcare among its people? Using the approaches of anthropology, we will consider the individual, social, and political dimensions of medicalized bodies in the American South starting with slave histories and running through the current-day.
Anth 490: Environment, Population Dynamics, and Human Well-being
TTh 3:30-4:45
Prof. Leslie
Concern over the relationship between population and environment abounds. The most salient research and discussion has focused on one aspect of the relationship --human impact on the environment – but the relationship is in fact mutual and the two “directional arrows” are ultimately inseparable. In this seminar, we will be concerned withboth 1) how environmental characteristics (especially the physical and biotic environments, but also the social/economic/political environment as it interacts with the above) affect population characteristics and dynamics(seen primarily in fertility, mortality, household formation, movement/migration, and consequent population growth), and 2) with how changes in local and regional populations in turn affect theenvironment (biodiversity, land use and degradation, and more).
In this endeavor, we will use theoretical orientations and concepts such as life history theory, resilience, and complexity. We will also emphasize the nuts and bolts of population-environment research, keeping an eye on research design and methods, which are crucial for critical evaluation of reported research results and for developing new research projects.
ANTH490:
Prof. Wiener TBA
ANTH 590: Anthropology of Diet and Health
MWF 9:05-9:55 AR 215
Professor Corbett
This course is an examination of human nutrition focusing on the biological, evolutionary, and cultural aspects of human dietary adaptations. The concepts to be covered include the evolution of human diet, the biology of nutrition, prehistoric and historic nutrition transitions, sociocultural aspects of dietary intake, and subsequent health impacts from variation and changes in dietary intake.
ANTH 690: Living, Healing, and Dying in Russian Culture
T 6:30-9:00pm AL 308*
Prof. Rivkin-Fish and Prof. Gheith
This course explores the ways historical, cultural, and political forces shape major moments of the life course and the stories told to make sense of them. Specifically, we examine the changing experiences of living, suffering, healing, and dying in Russia through key moments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Team taught by a professor of literature and a professor of anthropology, we will focus on literary and ethnographic texts as windows onto cultural values, concerns, and debates that have shaped everyday life in Russia. Topics include family life, sexuality, childbearing and its prevention; biomedical health care and alternative healing; survival and the struggle for dignity in gulag (concentration camp) conditions; and care for the dead and dying. By examining compelling works from a range of genres—the short story, the ethnographic case study, the memoir, and the novel—students will learn analytical techniques from both fields, and hone their interpretive and writing skills. Knowledge of Russian is not required.*This is a combined UNC-Duke Course: half of the semester we will meet at UNC and half the semester at Duke.
ANTH 690: Proposal Writing and Research Design
M, W 10:10 to 11:25 in Anthropology Lounge
Prof. West
The purpose of this course is to guide PhD students in the preparation of dissertation research proposals. It combines proposal writing with the development of a research design students use to implement their fieldwork. The course is structured as a workshop/seminar and students are required to actively participate in all aspects of the class. Topics include: structuring a proposal; preparing budgets; identifying research questions and hypotheses; identifying funding; university proposal routing procedures; IRB protocols; fieldwork methods; peer-review processes; and proposal evaluation criteria. Students will draft, revise, and complete a research proposal. They will also engage in peer-review sessions to provide feedback to other students. Faculty and senior graduate students will also participate in mini-workshops to discuss review processes for major funding agencies such as NSF, Wenner-Gren, SSRC, etc.