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We live in a world of excess stuff: commodities, garbage, pollution, and industrial ruins. As anthropologists, how do we approach the accumulating detritus of contemporary life? What can it teach us of our current era, and what critical potential does it hold for imagining different futures? Despite the seeming paradox of an archaeology of the present, over the past twenty years, archaeologists have turned their attention towards studying the material traces of the contemporary era.

This graduate seminar takes writing ethnography as its object of analysis and its subject of practice. The seminar provides students a supportive environment to gain perspective on the politics of representation and practice the arts of noticing. We delve into whether we are committed to ethnography as a genre, and if so how and why? In addition to reading ethnographies that address urgent contemporary topics, the seminar explores a range of strategies for representing social life and provides students a space to practice their own ethnographic writing.

Through studies, testimony, and reflection, this course will examine the history, practice (or praxis), and challenges of feminist ethnography. We will also read examples not only of feminist ethnographies that are widely recognized, but also those that tend to be marginalized due to layers of economic, racialized, national, and global processes. Ethnographic projects and assignments will reflect tenets in feminist anthropology.

This course introduces incoming graduate students in anthropology to the philosophies, research issues, and day-to-day practices of the department of anthropology at UMass Amherst. Basic skills in writing research proposals, cv's, and formulating career goals are emphasized. Enrollment is restricted to incoming students in the Department of Anthropology.