Description

Module Content

While the maxim of Anthropology serving as the handmaiden to colonialism is often overstated, there is no doubt that the discipline has imperialism and racialising practices embedded within its DNA. As a result, many outside the academy still consider Anthropology a racist discipline, despite some anthroplogists also being crucial to dismantling the disciplines earlier, pseudo-scientific theories of ‘race’.

 

This module provides a critical approach to Anthropology’s theories and practices, problematising the discipline’s historical relationship with African enslavement, colonialism, racialisation and structural functionalism. Recognising that the discipline’s earliest engagement with applied, engaged, and militant forms of praxis significantly contributed to violently oppressing indigenous communities and establishing white supremacy as a global phenomenon - what is Anthroplogy’s relevance today? Can the discipline truly be “decolonised” or is its insider knowledge of social and institutional process intrinsically bound to reinforcing cultural hegemony.

 

By engaging with interdisciplinary perspectives and materials from post-colonial and non-western scholarship, this module will develop critical insight into questions of methodology, epistemology and positionality in Anthropology. The module will also explore how the critical perspectives developed within and of Anthropology can be productively applied to evaluate key social, political and historical events and issues of the 21st century and everyday life beyond the classroom and the academy.

 

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this module, students will have learnt

Critical engagement with anthropological theory and practice; Historical contextualisation and critique of anthropological approaches;
	Critical and constructive reflection on anthropological practice and pedagogical models.
	
	Decolonial methodological approaches for participatory research design seeking reparatory or social justice outcomes.
	
Delivery Method

One 3-hour seminar per week.