General Education Courses

Course Description: Human beings across the globe live and work according to different values and beliefs. Students will develop the tools for acquiring knowledge, awareness, and appreciation of cultural differences, and in turn enhance their abilities to interact across cultures. The course accomplishes these aims by examining the relationship between individuals and their communities, and the dynamics of ritual, religious, political, and social life in different parts of the world.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: Anthropology is the holistic science of the human condition, and professional anthropologists engage in experiential, empirical and humanistic research. Cultural diversity and change are explored through the anthropological techniques of immersion (ethnographic fieldwork) and cross-cultural analysis. In-depth and comparative analysis of critical issues may include transnational migration, ethnic nationalism, racism, changing and clashing views on gender and sexuality, indigenous peoples’ rights, religious fundamentalism, genocide, war, hunger, famine, and cultural and economic dimensions of globalization. The specific topic varies from year to year.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: Archaeology is the study of the human past, from the origin of our species through to the development of modern, industrial states by means of the physical remains of past human behavior. In studying the past, archaeology seeks to explain how we, modern humans, came to be. This course investigates how archaeologists study the past, explains how human society has changed over time, and presents an overview of world prehistory. Specific topics include the evolution of modern humans, the peopling of the world, the development of agriculture, the rise of state-level societies, and associated social and material technologies such as writing and urbanism. Case studies will be used throughout to demonstrate how archaeological research is conducted and how archaeologists use their research to formulate explanations of the past that have relevance for the present.

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Course Description: Language has a crucial role in our lives as a functional system of human communication. Language is central to our cultures and societies. This course provides an introduction to the field of linguistics. It considers both how language is described and analyzed by linguists and how evidence from language can shed light on a variety of social, cultural, and cognitive phenomena. The course provides an orientation both to human language and the field of linguistics. It introduces the languages of the world, how languages have been described, the diversity in language structure, the issue of language endangerment and death, and the efforts to document and preserve the world’s languages, among other topics.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: This course introduces students to the relations between food, drink, and place. Food production, circulation, and consumption will be examined critically through examining their local and global import and the assumptions that inform different food systems. Alternatives to industrialized food will be explored through both organic foods and the slow food revolution. Other themes to be examined will be food and identity, social class, and gender in particular. Students will have the opportunity to sample diverse cuisines and to discuss their relation to both place and culture. Field trips will be taken to the Rochester Public Market and to various Rochester urban gardens.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: Research is the primary pathway to theory formation in the social sciences. This course focuses on how ideas about social life emerge through research in sociology and anthropology. This course is designed as a seminar, in which students discover how scholars in these disciplines formulate research questions in relationship to theory and issues of public concern.

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Course Description: This course explores the politics and poetics of writing about society and culture. Writing is a form of power, in that our representations of people influence the way that others think about and act toward them. The way that social researchers write is therefore shot through with ethical implications and weighty decisions. Critical issues include whether people are objectified, cast as wholly Other, culture-bound or creative, out of the past or coeval, racialized or of a common humanity, problematic or multifaceted, passive or agentive, mystified or perceptive, and mechanical or extraordinary. Writing about society and culture is also poetic. We can convey something of people's life experiences, thoughts, agency, and the constraints within which they lead their lives. How well we do so depends upon our ethical reflexivity and attention to the poetics of language. In this course, we will consider these ethical questions, read experimental texts, and discuss how writing style implicitly conveys social theory.

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Course Description: By exploring critical issues of globalizing culture, we examine how ideas, attitudes, and values are exchanged or transmitted across conventional borders. How has the production, articulation, and dissemination of cultural forms (images, languages, practices, beliefs) been shaped by global capitalism, media industries, communication technologies, migration, and tourist travels? How are cultural imaginaries forged, exchanged, and circulated among a global consumer public? How has the internationalizing of news, computer technologies, video-sharing websites, blogging sites, and other permutations of instant messaging served to accelerate cultural globalization? Students will be introduced to anthropological perspectives on cultural globalization, the transmission of culture globally, and the subsequent effects on social worlds, peoples, communities, and nations.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: This course introduces students to the methods of archaeological fieldwork. The course begins with the student’s development of a research question and design. We then explore the feasibility of this research through the examination of sampling techniques, site survey, and excavation. Field methods of recording, photography, and artifact conservation will also be discussed. Students will be able to analyze the usefulness of the field techniques in light of the archaeological scientific methods for dating, and organic and inorganic analyses. Students should emerge from the course understanding the values of the techniques necessary for proper archaeological excavation towards the reconstruction of the past and the development of an understanding of our present.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: This course introduces students to the methods of archaeological fieldwork. The course begins with the student’s development of a research question and design. We then explore the feasibility of this research through the examination of sampling techniques, site survey, and excavation. Field methods of recording, photography, and artifact conservation will also be discussed. Students will be able to analyze the usefulness of the field techniques in light of the archaeological scientific methods for dating, and organic and inorganic analyses. Students should emerge from the course understanding the values of the techniques necessary for proper archaeological excavation towards the reconstruction of the past and the development of an understanding of our present.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: Language is a core element of culture, both as a repository of meaning, and also because it is the primary means through which humans carry out social relationships, share ideas, and contest received understandings. Linguistic anthropology investigates this interplay between language and culture. Topics will vary by semester, and may include metaphor and narrative; language acquisition in relationship to childhood socialization; language, thought, and worldview; language and identity; multilingualism; the social contexts of language change; literacy; and the politics of language use and language ideologies.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: This course introduces students to processes of interconnection, local, regional, national, and global, that have altered and continue to impact life in Africa, taking into account the enormous impact of Africans on one another and on those of us living outside of the continent. In the course, we will focus on how past, present, and anticipated future events in African movements of people, ideas, and things, across time and space effect the reception of new events. We will pay particularly close attention to how the relationships of time and space are formulated and understood by Africans in the present. While the historical past is never completed, but continuous in the present, its diverse contours lead to differently remembered, embodied, and enacted expressions. We will evaluate these diverse expressions in pre-colonial, colonial, and neo-colonial encounters as they have changed ideas of self and other, political philosophies and political economic systems, genders and sexualities, generational relations, religions, expressive arts, violence, and health on the African continent and around the globe.

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Course Description: People have been interested in their ancestors and the lives of past people likely for as long as we have been human. But this interest has rarely been disinterested. People have exploited, destroyed, or ignored the remains of previous societies. And how the past is understood has profound effects that ripple through all of society, at different times influencing group identity, political philosophy, art, architecture, literature, and film. The emergence of scientific archaeology in the last 150 years has created its own cultural references, including Indiana Jones and Lara Croft. Each semester this course is offered, a specific topic will examine the cultural context in which archaeologists do their work, what is made of their efforts, and how these are related to larger issues in society.

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Course Description: This course examines immigration to the U.S. within the context of globalization. We examine the push- and pull-factors that generate immigration, and changing immigration policies and debates. We consider how changes in the American workplace have stimulated the demand for foreign workers in a wide range of occupations, from software engineer to migrant farmworker and nanny. We review the cultural and emotional challenges of adapting within the American cultural landscape, transnationalism and connections with the homeland, the experiences of refugees, and how immigration has changed since 9/11. Special attention is given to immigration from Latin America, the largest sending region.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: How do we imagine the people that we design for? How do social differences around race, gender and class impact how we design for others? How is design a cultural process? How can ethnography make for better design? This course introduces the fundamentals of the field of design anthropology. The course explores how designers—from industrial designers, game designers to biomedical engineers—can use research-based practices to design better, reflecting the RIT mission to “leverage the power of technology, the arts, and design for the greater good.” We will begin by orienting ourselves to design thinking, exploring key conceptual frameworks from feminist scholarship, science and technology studies, (dis)ability studies and approaches to the social aspects of technical thinking. We will then explore different design domains, including urban planning, furniture design, access technology, and user experience design. Throughout the term we will learn about how ethnographic methods can create human-centered design by starting with lived experiences, exploring power relations and ultimately learning about the perspectives of those whom we design for.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: The world’s cultural diversity is most vividly and dynamically displayed through ritual and festival. Ritual is anything but superfluous; rather, some of the most important work of culture is accomplished through the performance of ritual. Through cross-cultural comparison, by way of readings and films, we explore the following dimensions of ritual: symbols, embodiment, emotion, discipline, contestation of tradition and authenticity, and the orchestration of birth, childhood socialization, gender, maturation, marriage, community, hierarchy, world renewal, and death. Written expression is enhanced through drafting, revision, and peer review.

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Course Description: This course examines connections between gender and health that are both conceptual and empirical. Students will explore the causes of gender-based differences in health outcomes through case studies of sexual and reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS epidemics and violence. Students will also examine global gender and health trends. The course concludes with an examination of gender inequity in health care and policy implications of these inequities.

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Course Description: One of the most fascinating dimensions of archaeology is the discovery that people have done essentially the same things in different places and different times, independently of developments elsewhere. Agriculture, writing, urbanism, complex economies, and so on, all have been independently invented multiple times in different parts of the world. This fact raises some intriguing questions about what it means to be human. By comparing how these developments occurred in different places and times, archaeologists can, in a sense, perform experiments on the past. Each semester this course is offered we will focus on a separate theme in archaeological research, such as the transition to agriculture; production, trade, and exchange; the origin of writing; imperialism, colonialism, and warfare; pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology; or human evolution. We will study competing theoretical perspectives and different world regions to gain a broad understanding of the theme and how both theory and data are used to create a comprehensive understanding of the human past.

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Course Description: Since the first humans set out from Africa nearly two million years ago, our ancestors and relatives managed to settle in almost every continent. Wherever they went, they left traces of their lives that are tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years deep. We call these traces the archaeological record. Almost everywhere our ancestors settled, they did many of the same things, such as inventing agriculture, cities, writing, and state-level societies. However, they did this in ways unique to each region and time. This course examines the archaeology of a specific region, such as the Middle East, Mesoamerica, North America, or East Asia, in detail. We examine the geography, culture, archaeological record, and significance of the region to various key themes in archaeological research with respect to other world regions.

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Course Description: This course examines the persistence and change in Native American cultures using archaeological, ethnohistorical, socioeconomic, ethnographic, linguistic, and autobiographical sources among others. In addition to broad regional and historical coverage, we will read about and discuss culture change, colonialism, federal law, gender, race, and places in Native American contexts. Our goal is to understand the lived experiences of Indian people and the many forces that shape Native American lives.

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Course Description: This course will examine the parallels of anthropological works and resulting government policies in the late-19th and 20th centuries as they relate to the genre of Native Americans film, both popular and ethnographic works. In addition, an extensive regional and historical literature review will complement the possible films.

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Course Description: Physically, culturally, and socially, humans live through food and drink. Spanning the globe, as nearly limitless omnivores, humans have developed myriad ways of collecting and cultivating food and taking advantage of local environments. We also put food to work for us socially by creating cuisine. Through cuisine, we forge and nourish relationships, commune with deities, and through luxury choices, demonstrate our "taste" and lay claim to elite status. Through the cultural practices of production and consumption of food and drink, we wield power. Food and drink consumption patterns have sustained slavery, poverty, malnutrition, and illegal immigration, and have laid waste to the environment. In this class, we explore physical, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions of food and become more aware of how the private, intimate act of a bite connects us to the rest of humanity.

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Course Description: This course examines the spread of Islam beyond its origins in the Middle East, and the cultural and social clashes, but also the mutual adjustments that have followed. This course explores core tenets of Islam, but also how its practices and beliefs are altered as practitioners in different countries alternately adopt, co-opt, massage, react to, and reject elements in accordance with the meaningful social, cultural, and political lives they build for themselves. The compatibility of Islam with Western society is often debated in contemporary public discourse. This debate is typically marked by an assumption that Islamic beliefs clash with Western secular democratic ideals, an assumption which results in tensions over mosque building, headscarves, and other public signs of Islamic faith. We will explore the diverse ways of being Muslim from a cross-cultural perspective and the sometimes-challenging negotiation of fulfilling these religious tenets while living in Muslim-minority places.

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Course Description: With a focus on the indigenous languages of the Americas, we explore language contact among peoples, study various writing systems, and the sociolinguistic and cultural contexts in which these languages are spoken. Students learn how indigenous languages have been studied and classified. In addition to providing an overview of the languages' structural and typological attributes, we will also discover their histories as well as present-day challenges.

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Course Description: Global health is a term that reflects a complex series of problems, policies, institutions and aspirations that have only recently made their way to the global stage. From its earliest days, global health was guided by principles in public health that situate the nation-state as responsible for the health of its population. While international health and tropical medicine, the precursors to global health, was driven by the distinction between wealthy and poor nations, global health today, as this course explores, is oriented to the unequal burden of disease around the world. The course will consider major global health challenges, programs, and policies through an integrated social science lens. After placing global health in historical context, we will focus on how the science of disease cannot be dissociated from the social context and policies that both drive the emergence of disease(s) and respond to the unequal burden of disease around the world. We will analyze current and emerging global health priorities, including emerging infectious diseases, poverty, conflicts and emergencies, health inequity, health systems reforms, and major global initiatives for disease prevention and health promotion.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: This course explores influential classical and contemporary theories regarding society and culture. Students will assess the utility of different theories in addressing key enduring questions regarding human behavior, the organization of society, the nature of culture, the relationship between the individual and society, social control and social conflict, social groups and social hierarchy, the operation of power, cultural and social change, and the interplay between the global and the local. Theories will be marshaled to shed light on contemporary social and cultural phenomena and problems such as crime, violence, exploitation, modernity, and globalization.

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Course Description: Learning about social and cultural groups is a complex and ethically sensitive process. We explore common qualitative research methods for social and cultural research. We evaluate the utility of such methods for different purposes and contexts, including cross-cultural contexts. We consider common ethical dilemmas in research with human subjects, the ethical responsibilities of researchers, and common techniques for minimizing risks to subjects.

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Course Description: The research conducted by sociologists and anthropologists generates large, complex data sets that are difficult to interpret subjectively. We will explore the basic quantitative tools that sociologists and anthropologists can use to understand these data sets and learn how to craft a research question and research design that utilize quantitative data, how to select appropriate quantitative techniques and apply them, how to present results, and how to critically evaluate quantitatively based knowledge claims.

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Course Description: The research conducted by sociologists and anthropologists generates large, complex data sets that are difficult to interpret subjectively. We will explore the basic quantitative tools that sociologists and anthropologists can use to understand these data sets and learn how to craft a research question and research design that utilize quantitative data, how to select appropriate quantitative techniques and apply them, how to present results, and how to critically evaluate quantitatively based knowledge claims.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: All languages change through time, but how do they change? Where do these changes come from? In exploring traditional and contemporary approaches to historical linguistics, the study of language change, we compare different languages, different dialects of the same language, or different historical stages of a particular language, and investigate the history of languages and also language groups (or families). We investigate hypotheses about the grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation of languages long dead, and we explore how languages can give us insights to understanding human prehistory.

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Course Description: This course considers the diversity, contours and synergies of African films and filmmaking, traversing the continent to view films from Senegal, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Egypt and Mali. Though much scholarship has focused on influential African filmmakers and nationally located cinemas, the straight-to-video systems of the 1980s and 1990s had a profound impact on African films and filmmaking. Nollywood and other video film industries began to dominate film production and transnational mobility, influencing new film technologies and industries, accessibility and addressability across the globe. Topics in this course include the influence of African film directors on filmmaking, and critical developments in major industries; Nollywood and beyond, and the cultural aesthetics, politics and economics that affect their global mobility and popular appeal; postcolonial identities and power; music and oral traditions of storytelling; didactic, post-colonial cinema with moral, political missions vs. ‘arthouse’ approaches; Afrofuturist and speculative cinema; channels such as African Magic that are shown in more than 50 African countries; and the effects of video streaming on global stardom and popularity. Students will learn about diverse African films and approaches to filmmaking, and the vibrant people and creative cultures that make up these film industries.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: More than half the global population today lives in densely populated urban areas, which are further surrounded by complex networks of smaller communities. Yet, the earliest cities appeared less than 6,000 years ago, a small fraction of time since our species’ first appearance. The characteristics that define us as human were forged in radically different social universes from those of today. We lived our lives among not much more than 20-30 other people at any one time, hunting and gathering our food, and occasionally moving from place to place. This lifestyle was so successful and adaptable it endured pressures from more complex societies well into the 20th century. Understanding what life was like in such these small-scale societies is important because the material and social world in which they lived is the foundation for societies where food production, social hierarchy, and occupational specialization are the norm. This course will examine both the ethnographic and archaeological record of hunter/foragers from around the globe in an attempt to understand how it proved to be such a versatile and resilient way of life and how its successes, in fact, laid the foundation for social inequality, complexity, and food production.

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Course Description: The long course of the human existence has been marked by a series of revolutions that have profoundly changed society and that ultimately produced the world we live in today. One of the key revolutions that made our world possible was the invention of urbanism. Cities first appeared in Mesopotamia about 6,000 years ago and since then have been independently invented in many different parts of the world. This course focuses on the prehistorical trajectories of urban development in different world regions, the multiple roles of cities, and their impact on the development of complex societies. We attempt to understand and explain how the city has developed and contributed to the constitution of modern society. Throughout the course we will work on developing a working definition of the city that encompasses urbanism in all its many forms.

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Course Description: Our bodies are more than mere physical entities; they are conditioned by culture, society, and history. We will take a comparative approach to the cultural construction of bodies and the impact of ethnic, gender, and racial ideologies on body practices (i.e. surgical alteration, mutilation, beautification, surrogacy, erotica). We will critically investigate the global formation of normative discourses of the body (regarding sexuality, AIDS/illness, reproduction, fat/food) in medical science, consumer culture, and the mass media. The course features discussion, writing, and project-oriented research, encouraging students to acquire a range of analytic skills through a combination of text interpretation and research.

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Course Description: Tourism is a global industry and an important part of the human experience. There are many forces within tourism that act upon people’s lives, and in particular their environments, economies, cultural heritage, and identity. This course will explore tourism and its many dimensions. Beginning with an examination of kinds of tourism, this course unpacks tourism’s ancient trade and pilgrimage roots as well as its class dynamics of post-industrialization. Other aspects of tourism to be explored include strategies and effects of tourism development and production, nationalism and cultural identity, commoditization and marketing of culture and the ethics of development, labor and infrastructural changes, social inequalities, ecological impact, sustainable tourism, the experience of tourists, ritual and authenticity, and the relationship between tourists and tourism workers. This course provides opportunities for cross-cultural analysis of tourism sites, for participant-observation of the tourist experience, and for evaluation and recommendation of tourism site development in and around Rochester.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: This course critically examines the visual culture of war and terror in a global world from an anthropological perspective. Representations of violence are endlessly transmitted on television, on the internet, in print media, in cinema, and in recreational games to become part of our everyday visual culture. Whether disseminated as news, documentary truth, or entertainment, the ubiquitous encounters with images of violence require a new form of visual literacy that not only highlights the intersection of the local and the global, but also recognizes the ways in which visual technologies, cultural politics of memory and history, media practices, and national ideologies intervene in the formation of a visual culture of war and terror.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: This course introduces cultures of Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in the context of political and economic forces that have shaped them. We examine Spanish and Portuguese colonialism and its modern-day legacies, including ethnic inequalities, economic vulnerability, and social unrest. We look at how art, music, and literature have engaged critically with the forces of fascism, revolution, socialism, dictatorship, and neo-colonialism. We consider indigenous activism, religious diversity, changing experiences and expectations of women and men, rebellion and revolution, impacts of and creative responses to globalization, and Latinos in the U.S.

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Course Description: This course evaluates global forms of “addiction” in medical, cultural, national, and transnational situations of encounter. Though primarily a EuroAmerican concept of illness, addiction is now discursively and experientially widespread, assuming the status of a “global form.” Addiction narratives and experiences shape people and social life everywhere, as scientific and cultural or national knowledge intersect to form subjectivities, identities of addicts, and communities of addicted bodies. Concepts of will, morality, the addicted self and other, and living and dying also impact the cultural, national and international infrastructures we build—whether and how, for instance, we put resources into medical or criminal justice systems and networks. A closer look at the intimate lives of addicts thus enables us to consider identity boundaries and crossings; addiction languages; family relations and parenting; self-made communities and social bonds; work at the economic fringes of society; personal and institutional violence; policing and navigating enforcement or incarceration; homelessness and legal, medical and social service bureaucracies; as well as transnational production, trafficking, forms of addiction, and policing. By the end of the course, students will comprehend concepts and theories of addiction, and global perspectives on people living with addiction.

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Course Description: The destruction and survival of societies hinges on collective ideas of identity. In times of social stress, identities—whether racial, ethnic, religious or national—become critical “sites” of conflict over the sovereignty of nation-states, and the legitimacy of social, cultural practices. When ideas fail to incorporate people, essentialist categories of identity, historical grievances, and accounts of extreme violence become interrelated, potent sources of destruction. Slavery and exclusive ownership of resources leave people starving or living in perilously polluted environments. Global cultural economies threaten local systems and self-representation. In this course, we will take critical, anthropological approaches to studies of ethnocide, genocide and transitional justice. Students will assess the destruction and survival of societies, from the 19th century slaughter of Native Americans and Amazonian Indians to more recent genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Sudan, Iraq, Myanmar, Bangladesh and China. Students will consider similarities and differences in the social experiences of mass violence, and the ethics of protecting particular identity-based groups, and not others, in international, national and local laws. Students will become familiar with multiple inter-related justice systems, for instance, the International Criminal Court, national and United Nations-backed tribunals, and local justice systems such as the Rwandan Gacaca courts. Recent developments in legal ethics and international law will enable students to see how public sentiments, legal advocacy and other social, political processes facilitate enhanced protections for the world’s most vulnerable people.

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Course Description: Humans and their societies have always been shaped by their environment, but as human societies became more complex, their relationship with their environment changed from one of simple adaptation to one in which they had the power to change their environment. Often, the changes they have wrought have had unintended consequences, forcing societies to adapt to the changes that they themselves have brought about. Although we tend to think that this is a relatively recent phenomenon, humans have been altering their environment since the first human societies made the transition to agriculture over ten thousand years ago, if not longer. In this class, we will use the tools of environmental archaeology to explore the history of human interactions with their environments and to draw lessons on how we could manage that interaction today.

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Course Description: Much of the knowledge of our social worlds has been digitized. This course explores how social technologies shape our relationships, personal lives, and sense of self. The metric manufacture of diversity has produced new forms of population management and inequality. Our biographic histories as citizens, consumers, workers/professionals, parents, lovers, and social media users are collected as data-bites and assessed in metric terms, thereby forging new sets of identities. The transformation of people into numerical entities is an act of statistical objectification. This process frames the creation of social and racial typologies, and is well demonstrated by the US census. Students will investigate the formation of racial, ethnic, and gender identities in the context of the accelerated desire to digitize humanity.

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Course Description: With a focus on everyday life in families, communities, and nations, we examine the diverse cultures and peoples of the Middle East in the context of political and economic forces that have shaped their lives in the past and present. We examine European colonialism and its modern-day legacies, including ethnic inequalities, economic vulnerability, labor migration, urbanism, and social unrest. We look at how art, music, oral traditions, and literatures have engaged critically with the forces of political change and neo-colonialism. We consider political activism, religious diversity, changing experiences and expectations of women and men, rebellion, revolution, and war, and the impacts of and creative responses to globalization. The cultural, political, social, and religious dynamics of Middle Eastern peoples will be discussed from a humanistic perspective.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: The cultural importance of mass media has undergone tremendous growth in the context of globalization. Analysis of the global flows of media images across national borders emphasizes the cultural, social, and political impact of global media culture on communities in different parts of the world. How, for example, do mass media represent or shape cultural values and beliefs in developing societies? What is the role of mass media in forging national and ethnic identities, body images, cultural constructs of sexuality and gender, and the perceptions of war and violence in different societies?

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Course Description: Indian nations have substantial interests in access to and control of their cultural resources. In addition to land, those resources may include objects, traditions, and symbols. Many of those interests may be treated under tribal, federal, and/or international law as forms of property (including access to sacred sites, possession of funerary objects, masks), intangible resources (such as intellectual property of tribal names, symbols, stories), and/or liberty interests (including religious freedom, preservation of tribal languages, customs, Indian arts and crafts). Classroom lectures will be supplemented with roundtable discussions and instructions by museum professionals, guest speakers, and Native American representatives. At the conclusion of the course, students will comprehend the breadth of federal legislation regulating tribal cultural resources as well as the complex legal and social issues facing museums, academic institutions, and the community.

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Course Description: Nationalism is often described in terms of strong sentiments and acts of self-determination on the part of members of a nation as distinct from the state that is necessarily a territorially and politically defined entity. This course will explore leading theories related to the origins of contemporary nationalism and nationalism's importance within the context of state societies, especially in Europe. The past as an invented historical or imagined reality will be highlighted, as invented pasts contribute to claims for exclusive national culture and both exclusive and contested identities. The relationships between culture, literacy, and capitalism will be applied to understanding select historical and ethnographic cases of nationalism.

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Course Description: The relationship between anthropology and history is not always self-evident due to cultural anthropology being focused largely on living peoples and cultures and history’s focus on the past, yet the two share similarities of method and theory. We utilize the careful analysis of select texts serves to raise critical questions concerning the theoretical and methodological similarities and differences between the two disciplines as well as the potential contributions of anthropology and history to critical scholarship and writing.

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Course Description: This course examines the impact of global dynamics on cities from the early 20th century to the present. By tracing urban formations from metropolis to global city, emphasis will be placed on the making of identities, communities, and citizens in the architectural spaces, cultural places, ethnic zones, and media traces of urban life in the context of globalization.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: Archaeology is one of the few social sciences that lends itself well to the application of analytical techniques from the physical sciences. This is due to the fact that archaeology relies primarily on physical evidence, artifacts and features, whose origin, composition, age, and manner of production can be elucidated through application of the physical sciences. This course examines the application of physical science techniques to archaeological questions, including the age and origin of materials, how things are made, what people ate, their daily activities, and their state of health throughout their life. The course will include in-class labs in which students have the opportunity to apply some of these techniques and a final research project in which the student picks their own archaeological question to answer.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: Archaeology is one of the few social sciences that lends itself well to the application of analytical techniques from the physical sciences. This is due to the fact that archaeology relies primarily on physical evidence, artifacts and features, whose origin, composition, age, and manner of production can be elucidated through application of the physical sciences. This course examines the application of physical science techniques to archaeological questions, including the age and origin of materials, how things are made, what people ate, their daily activities, and their state of health throughout their life. The course will include in-class labs in which students have the opportunity to apply some of these techniques and a final research project in which the student picks their own archaeological question to answer.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.

Course Description: While it is commonplace to describe the present era as one dominated by technology, humans have always been critically dependent on technology. Many of today’s key technologies such as agriculture, writing, ceramics, woodworking, textiles, glass, and metals were invented before the dawn of recorded history. In this class, we will explore these ancient technologies, how they came to be invented, how they evolved, and how they were integrated into the social and economic life of ancient peoples to become the foundations of modern society. This course features lectures, readings, and hands-on laboratories and projects on ancient technology and experimental archaeology. Laboratories and projects will focus on how scientists create new knowledge about the past by testing hypotheses about ancient technology. The course concludes with either an individual project, such as replicating a particular artifact or process, or a class project, such as building and using a Mesopotamian glass furnace.

For prerequisites, availability, other details and to register, go to http://sis.rit.edu/.