Courses Relevant to the MA in Applied Anthropology

• ANTH-A 560 Graduate Topics in Anthropology (3 cr.) P: May be repeated for up to 9 credits. This seminar course provides a conceptual examination of selected topics in the field of anthropology.

• ANTH-A 565 Anthropological Thought (3 cr.) This course traces the development of anthropological theory from the early 20th century up to the present. Students will examine what is distinctive about an anthropological perspective and will analyze how anthropological ideas have shifted over the last century in accordance with the emergence of new social and political imperatives.

• ANTH-E 501 Fundamentals of Applied Anthropology (3 cr.) This is a graduate-level introduction to the history and underlying principles of Applied Anthropology. We will examine how understanding a specifically anthropological perspective can provide new insights into the workings of contemporary social policies and programs.

• ANTH-E 507 Popular Culture (3 cr.) This course studies how traditional anthropological insight can analyze social and political complex­ities of contemporary popular cultural phenomena.  Focuses on how anthropological subjects such as class, racism, and region­alism lurk within popular cultural phenomena including post-1950 music subcultures, civil religion, and consumer culture.

• ANTH-E 509 Modern Material Culture (3 cr.) This course examines how contemporary social experience is impacted by material culture ranging from toys to theme parks.  Focuses on how con­sumers perceive themselves and others in modern consumer culture through the medium of commodities and examines sys­tems of inequality that are reproduced and subverted through consumption.

• ANTH-E 521 Indians of North America (3 cr.) Assesses the complexi­ties of the academic study of the Indigenous peoples of North America, emphasizing the diversity of Native cultures, repre­sentations of them by the public and by scholars, and examin­ing cultural adaptations from Pre-Contact to Contemporary.

• ANTH-E 606 Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology (3 cr.) This course provides an introduction to the use of ethnographic field work methods, including participant-observation, semi-structured interviewing, and use of mapping, among others. Every year this course will focus on a community-based research project.

• ANTH-P 501 Community Archaeology (3 cr.) Community archaeol­ogy implies direct collaboration between a community and archaeologists. Collaboration implies substantial adjustment in archaeological methods and epistemologies incorporating community members in setting research agendas, working on excavations, and interpreting results. This course examines a wide range of issues and looks at both successful and unsuc­cessful projects to arrive at an assessment of best practices.

• ANTH-A 532 The African Diaspora (3 cr.) This course examines the cultural formation of the African Diaspora in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa. The course focuses specifically on the theorization of the African Disapora within the discipline of Anthroplogy.

• COMM-C 621 Persuasion (3 cr.) Takes a rhetorical/critical approach to persuasion in its broadest sense, how it affects our lives everyday and how we can find evidence of persuasive tactics in unexpected places. We will look broadly at theories of persuasion and their application across contexts and fields. In order to keep our attention to how these theoretical perspectives make their way into practice, we will devote considerable attention to specific examples of persuasion and analysis of persuasive phenomena.

• COMM-C 644 Political Communication (3 cr.) Examines the public communication involved in various political contexts. We will consider the communication involved in political campaigns, advertising, and oratory; social media, technology, and popular culture; the news, framing, and political media; citizenship, public deliberation, and decision making in what some argue is a divided political culture. We will read and discuss state of the art research in political communication and meet individuals who are currently working in a communication capacity in public political campaigns.

• COMM-C 650 Health Communication in Mediated Contexts (3 cr.) Focus on the effect of media on health behavior. Theories of health behavior change and media effects examined; applications of theory to health campaigns evaluated. Examples of mediated health campaigns and effectiveness discussed. Considerations include: interplay among theory, research, practice; how theory informs practice; how research aids in theory construction/refinement.

• COMM-C 680 Doctoral Qualitative/Rhetorical Methods (3 cr.) Focuses on health-related issues and topics through the complementary lenses of rhetoric and social sciences in communication. Qualitative social science-based approaches to research share numerous assumptions with rhetoric. These include, but are not limited to: Research based on inductive reasoning; methods cannot be detached from the objects of the reseach; researchers cannot separate themselves from the research; research is at least as much an art as it is a science.

• COMM-C 690 Doctoral Quantitative Methods (3 cr.) Course focuses on the principles and theory of descriptive and inferential statistics within the context of health communication research. Topics include t-test, ANOVA, MANOVA, ANCOVA, correlation, multiple regression, and SEM. Students will gain proficiency using SPSS to analyze novel data sets, and will conduct their own health communication research projects and report the results.

Courses Relevant to the Graduate Minor in Anthropology and Health

• ANTH-A 594 Independent Learning in Applied Anthropology (3 cr.) P: Authorization of instructor. Independent research/training using anthropological perspectives/methods in addressing social issues. The project must be a discrete activity with a concrete product, conducted in conjunction with the student’s anthropology advisor and the member of the organization where he or she will be located. (May be repeated for no more than 6 credit hours total.)

• ANTH-E 445 Medical Anthropology (3 cr.) A cross-cultural examination of human biocultural adaptation in health and disease, includ­ing biocultural epidemiology; ethnomedical systems in the presentation, diagnosis, and treatment of disease; and socio­cultural change and health.

Research Methods in the Anthropology of Health

• ANTH-B 521 Bioanthropology Research Methods (3 cr.)

• ANTH-B 523 Anthropometry (3 cr.)

• ANTH-B 525 Genetic Methods in Anthropology (3 cr.)

• ANTH-E 404 Field Methods in Ethnography (3 cr.)

• ANTH-E 606 Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology (3 cr.)

• ANTH-L 605 Field Methods in Anthropological Linguistics (3 cr.)