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.

Credits: 3 hours

Notes: Open to upperclass and graduate students.