Courses

Sound, Music, and Noise: This course investigates human relations through sound, with a particular focus on the role of sound in mediating social life. We will analyze the categories of sound, music, and noise (and silence) in a variety of cultural and historical contexts, paying attention to how these categories change over space and time. Topics include, but are not limited to, the sounds of protest, audio reproduction technologies, noise control engineering, and public and private space. An exploration of how people, animals, and technological objects communicate through sound and sounding practices will further allow us to consider auditory perception as a social phenomenon in addition to a personal experience. Class activities include making audio recordings, going on soundwalks, and making a soundmap. These activities will be completed alongside readings in acoustic ecology, the anthropology of sound, media and communication studies, and musicology.

The Sensorium: Art, Life, and Online Worlds: This class examines sensory perception—hearing, smell, sight, taste, and touch—as a mode of ethnographic inquiry as well as an object of cultural analysis. The class begins with an investigation of vision in the history of Western philosophical traditions and proceeds to examine the legacy of a hierarchy of the senses in the study of diverse cultures and everyday knowledge practices. By analyzing the historical, cultural, and political valences behind sensory experience, the class will rethink classical modes of participant-observation outside of a visualist paradigm, as well as engage in ongoing anthropological debates about the senses as an area of shared, cultural knowledge. We will explore multimedia, experimental forms of representation and consider how anthropological investigations of the senses may be re-configured through genres such as graphic novels, podcasts, food blogs, video games, and other hybrid forms. As this course will be taught online, students will reflect on the sensorial experience of remote learning, investigate ways to conduct digital ethnography, and formulate research methods that reframe sensory studies in a time of social-distancing.

Urban Asia in the Twenty-First Century: In recent years, the Asia-Pacific region has become home to a majority urban population. The rapid growth of Asian cities has created new challenges in terms of housing, environmental sustainability, and infrastructure development. This course investigates the social, political, environmental, economic, and technological transformations in densely-populated urban centers, with a particular focus on East and Southeast Asia. Taking the city as a unit of analysis, the course asks, in what ways do cities function beyond the nation state? What forms of regional and transnational exchange emerge out of urban networks? How do cities confront the challenges of urban life, particularly with regards to climate change, infrastructure repair, gentrification, and social inequality? Starting with an examination of Asian cities, including their form and governance, the course continues with a comparative study of urban life, focusing on the role of various urban actors, such as local officials, activists, artists, laborers, pedestrians, and engineers, in the creation of livable cities. Students will develop an understanding of the unique features and challenges of urbanization and urban life in twenty-first century Asia. Course texts will draw from anthropology, Asian studies, environmental studies, geography, history, and urban planning.

Viscerality, Matter, and the Senses: How does the body come to know the world? How is the body set in relation to other bodies—from the human and technological, to the organic and inorganic? In this graduate-level course, we investigate anthropological approaches to the visceral qualities of modern life, those everyday sensory experiences that exist at the edge of linguistic apprehension. Drawing on readings in anthropology, science and technology studies, and phenomenology, as well as multimodal ethnographies including graphic novels and film, this course will think with and through life worlds and timeframes that stretch beyond the human, investigating how such shifts in reference points resituate twenty-first-century human subjectivity. Students will identify the stakes of anthropological research today, exploring how the work of ethnography is uniquely positioned to theorize about future possible worlds.

Traditions of Ethnology, Part I: This graduate-level course covers major debates in sociocultural anthropology up until the 1960’s (functionalism, functional-structuralism, structuralism). The phrase “major debates” is a somewhat problematic framing. To engage in a debate means that someone else considers you worthy of a response, and this creates a self-selecting group of writers and thinkers whose ideas get passed on. With that caveat, we will cover the different schools of thought in traditional ethnology, but I will also present to you those texts that have made the strongest impression on me as a scholar, texts that I continue to think with, and also those texts that I did not have a chance to read and wish to do so with you now. We will examine marginalized debates that were ahead of their time (a compliment that doesn’t quite make up for the lack of recognition these scholars experienced during their lifetimes). We will also read social theorists who did not receive a large reception among anthropologists at the time but have become influential today. As a self-reflexive discipline, sociocultural anthropology is not beholden to the canon and, instead, draws from a variety of disciplines, social theories, and empirical data in creative and thought-provoking ways. Hence, this class will examine the different strands of thought that are woven together with sociocultural anthropology and consider possibilities for working within a range of theoretical frames. We will navigate the tension of being twenty-first century readers of centuries-old texts, identifying that which resonates with us and that which is clearly a product of its time. In doing so, we will set up the initial building blocks to remake anthropology for the future.

Listening and Transduction Workshop: In this workshop, we present ways in which scholars have approached questions related to sound, technology, and human subjectivity. Starting with a discussion of the concept of soundscape as it relates to listening, the workshop will then present how transduction, or the conversion of signals, has been used as an analytic for sound studies. We then encourage attendees to engage with soundscapes and transductive practices through a variety of materials in group collaboration. Groups will share and discuss their resulting sound-related art-science installations. The Marin Headland soundscape (ocean, seagulls, cars, etc.) will also take part.  Co-organized with Owen Marshall for the California STS Retreat in Marin Headlands, CA, 2018.