New Classes for All Students!

Professor Kailey Rocker will join Anthropology in Fall 2022.  Dr. Rocker just earned her PHD in Anthropology this past May 8, 2022 from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In Professor Rocker's words: "My research and teaching bring together the ethnography of postsocialism and globalization with issues of justice, activism, body-politics, state-building, and memory politics. My dissertation, Translational Justice: Facing the Past to Take on the Present in Albania, explores the work of local nongovernmental organizations, state institutions, and young adults across Albania to confront the country's twentieth century past amidst the challenges of building and enacting a twenty-first century democracy."  Dr. Rocker's dissertation was awarded the UNC Anthropology Department’s 2022 Manning Award for the Best Dissertation in Sociocultural Anthropology.

For the 2022-23 academic year, Professor Rocker will teach the following courses:

Fall 2022

ANTH 110 Cultural Anthropology (TR 12:40-2:25): An introduction to the nature of culture, the organization of social relations, and the relationships between values and behavior. Attention to language, kinship, and religion as cultural systems, as well as to forms of social control, stratification and inequality in relation to culture (including gender, race, ethnicity, and class). Social patterns and processes within and across cultures examined through ethnographic cases studies from around the world.

ANTH 300 Topics in Anthropology:  Migration & Health (TR 8:30-10:15) This course explores the intersection between migration and the political, economic, and social dimensions of health and well-being among migrants, their families, and their communities. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary ethnographic case studies, we will explore how global and local processes structure the ways migrants are rendered differently vulnerable, while also recognizing how they actively assess and navigate these challenges in their daily lives. While experiences of movement are critical to this course, we will also consider the experiences of those “left behind,” such as the children of migrant parents. Issues to be explored include transnationalism, race, gender, citizenship, structural violence, and health disparities.

Winter 2023

ANTH 110 Cultural Anthropology (MWF 9:50-11:00) An introduction to the nature of culture, the organization of social relations, and the relationships between values and behavior. Attention to language, kinship, and religion as cultural systems, as well as to forms of social control, stratification and inequality in relation to culture (including gender, race, ethnicity, and class). Social patterns and processes within and across cultures examined through ethnographic cases studies from around the world.

ANTH 300 Topics in Anthropology: Ethnography of (Post)Cold War Europe (TR 10:25-12:10) This course explores some of the profound ways that socialist ideals and politics structured lives in the region of Eastern Europe and Eurasia and, in many critical ways, continue to shape lives in a post-Cold War era today. We will draw on ethnographic case studies to consider the meaning and utility of the term “postsocialism;” problematize geographically fixed entities such as “Europe” and “Eastern Europe;” and explore the various cultural logics, shared political histories, and experiences of state socialism and postsocialism. Issues to be explored include materiality, precarity, class, gender, memory politics, activism, and identity construction.

Spring 2023

ANTH 500 The Ghosts of Our Past (TR 12:40-2:25) In this course, we will think about various contemporary practices that summon the past, or its ghosts, into the present. Some of the topics will include making and consulting archives, creating World Heritage sites, building and destroying monuments, exhuming the dead from mass graves, establishing truth and reconciliation commissions, and even feeling nostalgic. Drawing on a range of case studies from the United States and abroad, we will explore the ways that memory practices interface with key anthropological concepts, such as temporality, space, identity, nationalism, and globalization.

ANTH 210 Research Methods in Cultural Anthropology (MWF 1:50-3:00) An introduction to basic assumptions and methods of research in sociocultural anthropology, including participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, focus groups, cognitive methods, and surveys. Students gain hands-on experience in research.