This course explores and analyzes topics pertaining to sex, reproduction, and culture within and beyond the United States from a critical medical anthropological perspective. We center our thinking on experiences of sex and reproduction, with particular attention to reproductive justice, reproductive politics, and stratified reproduction. We learn and practice skills related to ethnographic research. Articles, films, books, and news reports will be used to discuss weekly case studies corresponding to each thematic topic.

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Community groups and networks of organizers, activists, and developers coalesce around efforts to create cooperative, democratic, and socially just ways of being in the world involving "alternative" economies: things like cooperatives, land-trusts, community-owned finance, fair trade networks, and so on. These projects are both grounded in local communities and linked into global networks including the solidarity economies movement aimed at creating economies that put people and planet before profit. This class will work with two solidarity economy networks in Massachusetts.

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Methods of studying cultures of homogeneous and heterogeneous societies among peoples of the world. Emphasis on various techniques of field work.

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This course will expand the student?s horizon to include an understanding of the cultural and environmental diversity of cultures on every continent with human habitation. Legends are created to help humans to understand the natural and cultural events of their specific culture in their specific ecological niche. Analyzing dragon legends enables students to have a holistic perspective and awareness of the interrelationships among cultural systems, individuals and their environments (cultural and physical) on every continent from Africa to Asia to Oceania, the Americas and Europe.

Introduces the full range of human cultural and biological diversity. Human evolution, rise and fall of civilizations, non-Western cultures, and the human condition in different societies today. Emphasis on the relationships among biological, environmental, and cultural factors. (Gen.Ed. SB, DG)

In an era when the economy dominates cultural and institutional practices as well as political discourse, this graduate seminar turns to the subfield of economic anthropology to address problems related to value, inequality, reciprocity, and solidarity. A critical feminist approach to knowledge production informs this seminar. In that spirit, our point of departure is Anna Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (2015) to address a key question: What manages to thrive in the ruins we have made?