杏吧论坛

Dr Imani Strong and Prof Laura Bear

This course is available on the MSc in Anthropology and Development, MSc in Anthropology and Development Management, MSc in China in Comparative Perspective, MSc in Empires, Colonialism and Globalisation, MSc in Social Anthropology and MSc in Social Anthropology (Religion in the Contemporary World). This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is a call to action - in the tradition of the movements and literatures it examines - that will provide students with a foundational understanding of race and contemporary racism, as well as approaches and theories central to their potential transformation. The course will focus on the discipline’s historical and present theoretical orientations to race, explore alternative modes and questions in the practice of anthropology raised by anthropologists and theorists of colour, and provide an understanding of the policies - institutional, economic, social, and bureaucratic - that maintain both an academic and social racial status quo. Explicitly asking students to engage with the concept of antiracist and decolonial futures for anthropology, the course centres non-white/non-Western thought and thinkers, “activist” anthropology as a norm, and racial subjectivities as central to theory and practice.

The course will ask:

• What has been the role of the anthropologists of colour in forming the basis of what is commonly thought of as anthropological theory? What can we learn from their theories and methods?
• How can we understand contemporary racisms and how, positioned in the legacy of anthropology’s contribution to its construction, can anthropology become an antiracist tool?
• Where can anthropology intervene on policy or re-orient theory to engage an antiracist epistemology in a transformative way? What is the scope of a so-called “activist” anthropology?
• What are the potential futures for anthropology as a discipline actively engaged in decolonising theory and methods?

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the MT.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of MT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the MT.

PG