Teaching

Email Nikhil at nikhil.anand@sas.upenn.edu for any of the course syllabi.

ANTH 294 Global Cities: Urbanization in Most of the World

Even as the air, earth and water are being irrevocably transformed in the Anthropocene, cities of the global South poised to host 90% of the global urban population growth in the next generation. Taken together, environments in cities of the South are critical sites to learn what might become of cities and citizens in the future. Today, these cities continue to be imagined, analyzed and planned using theoretical frameworks that have been developed by studying a handful of cities in Europe and North America in the middle of the twentieth century. Rather than take these cities to be imperfect models of urbanization in the Global North, or of urbanization in a different time, in this class we attend closely to urban processes on the ground in "most of the world" to ask: How do rapid economic and environmental shifts restructure and reorganize urban space in postcolonial cities? How are economic, racial and colonial histories and desires reproduced through the everyday practices of urban development? Finally, how and why do marginalized groups live in the city without access to economic and political power? By reading key texts in urban studies together with ethnographies of cities in Asia, Latin America and, the course will explore how transnational capital, policy, and everyday practice are producing new kinds of cities and “cityness” in most of the world.

ANTH 297 Nature Culture Environmentalism

Water wars, deforestation, climate change. Amidst many uncertain crises, in this course we will explore the relationship between people, society and the environment in different parts of the world. How do people access the resources they need to live? How and when does ‘nature’ come to matter for social groups?Why does it matter? Drawing together classical anthropological texts and some of the newest debates in the field of Environmental Studies, in this class we focus on the social processes through which different groups of humans imagine, produce and protect the environment.


ANTH 539 Advanced Readings in Environment and Society

As capitalist relations remake the earth through projects of intensified mineral extraction, carbon-based energy consumption and the production of 'waste', in this course we will examine the diverse histories and practices through which nature-society relations have been studied in anthropology and related disciplines. The course will follow a genealogical approach to understand some contemporary theoretical developments in environmental anthropology, including multispecies ethnography, the anthropology of infrastructure, and ontological anthropology. In what ways do these modes of doing anthropology recapitulate or address some of the earlier debates on race, indigeneity, materiality and alterity? How might recent work in the field generate new ways to remake the world and our understanding of it?

ANTH 574 The Lives of Infrastructure: Politics and Technics in the Anthropocene

Infrastructures are technical systems that differentially move people, ideas and things. Their everyday management produces a range of political institutions and publics. Yet, how do social actors trouble and constitute the workings of infrastructure in uncertain environments? In this class we read recent work in Anthropology, STS and Environmental Studies to examine the unstable relations between the technologies of state politics (maps, laws, and plans) and the politics of technology (energy, material surfaces, wires and engines). Amidst a heightened concern about the continued viability of our sociotechnical systems, the course will rethink the formations of the political with the material forms that regulate our lives.

ANTH 577 Everyday States: The Anthropology of Power and Politics

While anthropologists have long been interested in political systems, they have in recent years made the modern state a critical site of ethnographic analysis. By focusing on the everyday practice of officials in the Global North and South, anthropologists have drawn attention to the creative ways in which state actors and subjects of rule make and maintain its powerful institutions. Even as bureaucracies are formalized and instituted as sites of rational order and even-handed administration, scholars of everyday state formation have drawn attention to the ways that state authority depends on and reproduces racialized, gendered, and geopolitical inequality. Indeed, like many other social institutions, racialized states are constituted through differentiated relations between government workers and the governed, through everyday rituals of violence and sovereignty, discipline, and improvement. The class is structured so as to enable students to read and theorize states through and with ethnographies of political life. The class begins by engaging with scholars of state formation and spectacular performances of state power. We attend to the colonial, racialized, and gendered workings of states- particularly through their efforts to discipline black and brown bodies through sovereign violence and differentiated plans and programs of development. Next, we attend to the everyday practices through which states of inequality are maintained, paying particular attention to the mundane practices of documentation through which this is accomplished. Finally, the course concludes by attending to the political work of subordinated groups as they demand distributive justice, equity and full citizenship in 'most of the world.’

ANTH 617 Contemporary Approaches to the Study of Culture and Society

This course orients students to ideas that have shaped twentieth-century cultural anthropology and that continue to play a critical role in the twenty-first century. It emphasizes the key contemporary concepts of cultural anthropology, but links these to their deeper roots in anthropological and modern social theory. We will explore ideas in relation to theoretical movements as well as in terms of national traditions of scholarship. Moreover, we will seek to situate the questions anthropologists ask alongside the broader socio-economic and political contexts in which they find themselves in an attempt to better understand how and why knowledge is produced, reproduced, and/or challenged. This endeavor will also push us to think about the changing object of anthropology, and about what our discipline contributes to broader conversations about the nature of the world, past, present, and future.

ANTH 620 Foundations in Urban Anthropology: Theory, Methods, Practice

In this course, we shall examine the key contributions to urban anthropology over the last half century. We shall attend closely to urban processes on the ground in "most of the world" (Chatterjee 2004) to ask: How do rapid economic and environmental shifts restructure and reorganize urban space in postcolonial cities? How are economic, racial, and colonial histories and desires reproduced through the everyday practices of urban development? Finally, how and why do marginalized groups live in the city without access to economic and political power? By reading key texts in urban studies together with ethnographies of cities in Asia, Latin America and, the course will explore how transnational capital, policy, and everyday practice are producing cities and “cityness” in most of the world. In particular, we examine different practices of urban design and imagination, the differentiating work of everyday urban government, and the ways in which urban subjects inhabit the city despite the inequalities of states and market. The class is also oriented towards focusing on methods for doing urban research. Drawing together studies of cities in the Global North and Global South, as well as of powerful and marginalized groups, the course asks after the possibilities of comparative and multi-sited research. The course will be anchored by seven urban ethnographies we will read through the duration of the course, many of which will demonstrate different multimodal methods through urban research in conducted and presented.