Spring 2010 Course Descriptions

Professors Leith Mullings and Dana-Ain Davis - Anthropology for the Public
This seminar explores the role of anthropological knowledge in shaping public debate and social policy through research, practice and engagement. Seminar participants will interrogate the domains of theoretical, applied and advocacy/activist anthropology, consider classical and recent writing on the role of the public intellectual and review current debates in anthropology. We will then investigate examples of the use of anthropology in reframing and influencing public discussion, policy and advocacy. The seminar will also assess writing styles and other communication techniques (e.g.visual images) appropriate for reaching non-academic audiences; uses of traditional media, digital media and other forms of information dissemination; performance; and community collaboration in research. Seminar participants may meet the requirements for the course through a variety of projects including: exploring an anthropological approach to a topic of interest to the public; working with a community or grassroots organization on research of interest to the organization; writing an article in a format accessible to non-academic audiences; as well as a traditional research paper.
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Prof. Skurski - The Caribbean in the Atlantic World
The region of the Caribbean has played a fundamental role in the emergence of the modern world. As a crucible of modern social and cultural transformations, this region has been at the center of competing imperial formations and contending globalizing forces. As the site of the devastation of indigenous populations, the importation of African slaves, the establishment of plantation systems, the only successful slave revolution, and the immigration of diverse populations, it has been marked by widely divergent forms of political response and of cultural identity, ranging from ethnic to nationalist, from dictatorial to revolutionary. Processes of cultural creativity and transformation have marked the Caribbean, as reflected in arenas such as literature, the visual arts and music. Yet the Caribbean has only recently been studied as a site of theoretical significance, central in the definition and the critique of disciplinary formations and conceptual categories, including concepts of race, class, and civilization.

This course examines major themes in the formation of the Caribbean as well as currents of social thought that have defined its study. Drawing on an Atlantic studies perspective, it explores the processes that have connected the making of the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. While the course focuses on the Spanish speaking Caribbean, it emphasizes intersections and movements across the region and the Atlantic. The course will integrate the study of political change, cultural transformations, and reflections on the geopolitics of empires. Music and popular religion will provide an important perspective through which to understand these processes as well as the views of non-elites. Authors will include Caribbean thinkers as well as analysts of the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, such as Martí, Ortiz, CLR James, Fanon, Cesaire, Kincaid,Flores, Guilbault, Moore, Ortiz, Sublette, Los Van Van, Davis, de la Fuente, Dubois, Mintz, Price, Matory, Harrison, Holt, Scott, Torres, Trouillot, Turits, Wade, and Yelvington. Students will write comments on the readings as well as a final paper, which may be either a literature review essay or a research paper.
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Prof. Coronil - Producing Anthropological Works: Methods through Studies of Nature, the State, and Commodification
Academic disciplines are knowledge formations constantly transformed not just by each other, but by the changing historical conditions of their production. Among the social sciences, anthropology has been particularly receptive both to the influence of other disciplines (e.g. history and linguistics) and to the changing waves of a wide range of intellectual currents (such as liberalism, marxism, structuralism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and feminism). Treating as its focus the creative moments of anthropology’s trans/formation, this course seeks to prepare students in anthropological methods, understood as techniques intertwined with theoretical approaches,  by examining texts that instantiate current practices and significant shifts in the field.

The seminar is at once practical and theoretical. It addresses questions of method by examining how texts—articles and monographs—have been produced. Since one of the premises of this course is that academic knowledge is at its best when it subordinates disciplinary matters to substantive issues, it focuses on disciplinary methods by exploring central  questions concerning the interrelations among the state, nature, and commodification. The course is thus designed for students interested in these questions as well as in methods and frameworks to study them.

The course is intended for students at any stage of their studies. It is structured as a workshop; students will be required to read texts carefully, prepare comments for class, and produce a text related to their interests—a paper, research proposal, a review of the literature, a chapter of a dissertation or an article for publication.
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Prof. Maskovsky - Proposal Writing
This seminar helps graduate students to prepare fieldwork grant applications and dissertation proposals. Topics addressed include defining researchable questions, designing an effective fieldwork plan, IRB protocols, research proposal evaluation criteria, peer-review processes, and other theoretical and methodological topics that are relevant to the task of proposal writing. (Please note that some knowledge of the techniques of collecting, coding, analyzing and interpreting ethnographic and historical evidence is presupposed.)

The seminar is organized as an intensive workshop, and each student is provided with numerous opportunities to prepare draft proposals and to present them for discussion and review.  Before the semester begins, each student must complete a proposal writing exercise, the content of which becomes the first draft of a grant application.  He or she then makes incremental revisions to this draft until a proposal is ready for submission to a major funder.  The goal of the workshop is for each student to produce two fieldwork grant applications by the semester’s end.  

For maximum benefit, participants need to be open to constructive criticism and to the possibility of rethinking parts of their own research projects while also maintaining a supportive and non-competitive, yet rigorous approach to the review of other people’s proposals. 

Download proposal writing exercise.

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PhD Program in Anthropology - The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016-4309
phone: 212.817.8005 fax: 212.817.1501 email:

This departmental publication supplements the official Bulletin of The Graduate School as well as the current Graduate Center Student Handbook and "Announcement of Courses."