ANTH 5220 - Poverty, Power, and Privilege

This course critically explores anthropological approaches to understanding poverty as well as racial, class, and sexual inequalities. The course emphasizes inequalities within the contemporary United States, but situates those dynamics within an analysis of global processes and conditions. Particular emphasis is placed on analyzing ways that everyday practices, neoliberal social policies, economic restructuring, resistance efforts, and institutional practices play in producing, challenging, and maintaining structural violence. Feminist, post-structuralist, Marxist, cultural studies, and hegemony studies approaches are covered. Both ethnographic case studies and theoretical analysis are explored to inform collaborative required applied community based anthropological research on power, race, and class relations within the Kalamazoo region.

Prerequisites & Corequisites: Prerequisites: Junior/senior status and 12 hours of Anthropology.

Credits: 3 hours

Notes: The prerequisites to 5000-level courses are: Junior status and 12 hours of course work in anthropology, including the specified prerequisite for each class.