This seminar traces the historical roots and growth of the Black Lives Matter social movement in the United States and comparative global contexts. The movement and course are committed to resisting, unveiling, and undoing histories of state sanctioned violence against Black and Brown bodies. The course seeks to document the forms of dispossession that Black Americans face, and offers a critical examination of the prison industrial complex, police brutality, urban poverty, and white supremacy in the US.

Through a combination of classic and contemporary anthropological readings, this course considers how anthropologists locate "the political" and study it ethnographically. Drawing upon anthropological theory and ethnographic study, the course examines the ways in which social groups enact, contest, reproduce and transform power relations in different contexts. The course begins by introducing classic anthropological studies, followed by ethnographies that analyze the dynamics between nation and state. The final half of the course studies emergent political formations and power relations under a changing global political order.

Language determines our expressive capacities, represents our identities, and connects us across various platforms and cultures. This course introduces classical and contemporary approaches to studying language, focusing on three main areas: 1) language as a system of rules (structure), 2) language as a symbolic mechanism through which individuals and groups mark their presence (identity) and 3) language as a tool of communication (sign). The course examines various ways through which language molds our individual selves in cultures from Africa to the Americas to Asia to Europe: from organizing dreams and desires to shaping autobiographies.

The goal of this course is to understand what queer lifeworlds are like in diverse cultural and sociopolitical contexts. What is the relationship between queerness and larger forces such as culture, coloniality, global capitalism, religion, and the state? What counts as queer and whose recognition matters? What is the nature of the work of becoming that is involved, and what resources do they draw upon in doing so? What factors enable or curtail these possibilities? Is queer always radical and against the norm? We will answer such questions by reading ethnographies, theories, and biographies that focus on queer lifeworlds across the world.

This course begins with a discussion of the current state of affairs in anthropological theory to ask what lines of thought got us to where we are today. This includes situating anthropological theory within the context of social and political theory and seeing how post-structuralism, post-colonial theory, black studies, and feminism reshaped the discipline in a variety of ways. Throughout will aim to give students sharper tools to utilize the analytic power of theory to consider problematics of the field of anthropology writ large today, and to mobilize in the writing of the independent work in anthropology.

The spiritual and the sacred hold enduring significance across many realms of political and social life. Anthropological studies productively unsettle standard assumptions in many aspects of conventional thought, which often presume the declining importance of religion and spirituality in political life. This course draws upon classic and contemporary anthropological works on a range of topics concerning cultures of governing, including ritual theory, divine rule, stranger-kings, mysticism and magic, spirituality and embodiment, and law. Secondarily, the course engages materials from film, psychoanalysis, literature, and critical theory.

First term of a year-long course on sociocultural anthropology, required of first-year graduate students in anthropology and open to graduate students from other disciplines with the permission of the instructor. The seminar focuses on innovations in anthropological theorizing through writings that have historically shaped the field or revealed its shape as a distinctive discipline.

The "biocultural" turn in anthropological engagement has deep roots and significant diversity in theory and method. Rather than envisioning an interface between biology and culture, the anthropological possibility offers an integrative approach to human becomings wherein bodies, genes and neurobiologies are ubiquitously entangled and co-constituted with belief, behavior, society and lived experience. In this course we survey key aspects of such dynamic assemblages emphasizing what we might liberally call "biocultural" theory and method, and seeking points of connection with a broader anthropological discourse and practice.

Global health brings together a vast array of actors addressing urgent health and environmental issues with unprecedented financial and technological resources. The course is a critical analysis of the social, political, and economic processes underlying this expanding medical and humanitarian field. As we scrutinize the design, evidence-making practices and values shaping global health, we will place interventions in historical perspective, gauge their impact, and explore new paradigms in-the-making. Students are encouraged to find new, collaborative ways to understand and act in and through the field of global health.

In this course we will study borders, literal and imagined, and those who contest and enforce them. From internal, invisible gang borders in Central America, to the externalization of the US border, to barriers to belonging, we will look at movements that challenge borders (migrant caravans, immigrants' rights activism, coyote networks) and the enforcers of borders (the regional migration regime, the asylum system, and non-state actors who police mobility.) Tying together migration, deportation, and resistance, this course asks: how are borders maintained? What does transgressing them mean for those in power and for those who do the crossing?

This course focuses on the politics of health, environment, interspecies relations, and scientific/biomedical interventions in Latin America. We examine pandemics, diseases, and other public health concerns through the lens of interspecies/multispecies entanglements to analyze the ongoing effects of ecological and environmental changes in the Latin American region and the practices of world-making that drive new imaginings and becomings of natureculture. We analyze the rise of global health and examine the role of experts and recent projects of securitization, containment, and biotechnological control.