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Independent Study

Independent Study

Not available at this time

Independent Study

Description not available at this time

This class brings together students and community members who are currently engaged in activist and organizing work to confront state violence, including: mass incarceration, the criminalizing of immigrants, policies that promote gentrification and displacement, and the school to prison pipeline, among others. The class is structured around a series of workshops and readings on critical organizing skills and concepts, as well as intentional relationship building between participants.

This class challenges assumptions about death and dying as we examine its meanings and related practices in various cultural contexts. We will ask, what is universal about death and dying, and what is socially constructed? What can the social sciences, biomedicine, literature, the arts, and our own qualitative research tell us about the processes of dying, of grieving, and of providing care? In essence, what does it take to approach death?

This course will focus on advanced quantitative methods used in anthropology, including ordination techniques, multivariate statistics, phylogenetic comparative methods, ecological modeling, and randomization approaches. Theoretical and philosophical issues related to hypothesis testing and inferential statistics will also be discussed. In collaboration with the instructor, students will design, implement, and write-up a research project applying the methods learned in the course. The R computing environment will be used extensively, though no prior experience is needed.