Course Descriptions
SPRING 2025
Queer and Trans Ethnography (WGSS 691E) ~ 3 credits
Svati Shah
In this seminar we will read ethnographies on queer and transgender people, politics and social movements from around the world. We will also read ethnographies that focus on non-heterosexual objects and non-cisgender forms of gender expression and identity amongst people and places that do not use the language or form of identity politics. The syllabus curates work that outlines the state of the field of Queer and Transgender Anthropology. It will give us a shared frame from which to ask key questions that arise from this literature. These include questions on the history and status of identity-based social categories, the relation between binary gender and cis-heteronormative social reproduction and neoliberal governance, biometric surveillance, and administrative legibility. We will emphasize class, race, caste and racializing materialism as central concerns within this literature. Supplemental readings will allow us to place this literature within wider concerns about the idea of the ‘diffusion’ of queer and trans liberation from the West to the rest of the world, the idea of state homophobia in the Global South, and the historical drives of modernity.
Care: Doing, Knowing, Being (ANTHRO 614) ~ 3 credits
Lynette Arnold
What counts as care? For whom? In what contexts? And to what effects? In this course, we will draw on a range of ethnographic work, including medical and linguistic anthropology, as well as feminist and indigenous theory, media, and activist literature, to explore contemporary issues of care. In the three aspects of the class - doing, knowing, being - we examine care as a concrete everyday practice, one that is rooted in and shapes ways of understanding the world, and which has far-reaching implications that both reproduce and resist multiple intersecting inequalities.
FALL 2024
Community-Based Research and Practice (ANTHRO 603) ~ 3 credits
Felicity Aulino, Ph.D.
This graduate seminar introduces students to theoretical frameworks, controversies, methods, and other topics of community-based research and practice in the anthropological tradition. Students will understand the history of applied anthropology, critiques of anthropology coming from the global south, and critical epistemological approaches of contemporary engaged researchers and practitioners. Through studies of theoretical debates as well as case studies of engaged research and scholarly practice, students will leave this class with a foundation for thinking about their own work with diverse community-engaged projects. In addition to historical and theoretical foundations, this course will provide an introductory framework for thinking about ethics, evaluation, communication of research, and professional development in the field. Finally, this course will introduce methods and tools of community-engaged and applied research and action.
Qualitative Methods in Communication Research (COMM 620) ~ 3 credits
Jonathan Corpus Ong, Ph.D.
This course is designed to a) engage you at a doctoral level of study with the logic and epistemological underpinnings of qualitative methods, including relationships among research questions, theory, methods, and findings, b) offer guidance in critically evaluating qualitative communication and media research, and c) expose you to practical issues and contemporary challenges with using qualitative methods. Topics to be discussed include but are not limited to: qualitative research design, textual and visual analysis, participant observation, interviewing, digital ethnography, engaged or action research, public communication, and research ethics. Our learning approach involves practical activities: conducting visual analysis, writing fieldnotes about social media trends and practices, authoring ethnographic “portraits”, reviewing for media and communication studies journals, preparing public communications about qualitative research, giving feedback on research presentations, and conducting original qualitative research.
SPRING 2024
Theory and Method in Linguistic Anthropology: Language, Culture, and Power (ANTHRO 691) ~ 3 credits
Lynnette Arnold
This course introduces graduate students to linguistic anthropology, a fundamentally ethnographic approach to the study of language and its embedding in social life. We will engage deeply with both foundational writings and emerging scholarship to grapple with the cultural meaningfulness and systematic nature of language as a consequential form of social action. Through the lens of ethnographic research, the course will explore the ways that language works to shore up intersecting inequalities along the lines of race, class, gender, and more. Students will gain a theoretical toolkit for understanding the fundamental role of communicative processes in sociocultural life, while also exploring the range of analytical insights to be gained from investigating language ideologies and linguistic practices through an ethnography of communication.
Arts-Based Research (EDUC 723A) ~ 3 credits
Sally Pirie
This course will provide an introduction to and survey of arts-based research methods in the social sciences for students already familiar with qualitative methods, including ethnographic fieldwork. We will explore techniques in visual, performance/movement, and creative writing methods with an eye toward developing and exercising creativity in our work as qualitative researchers. Students will develop an understanding of the theoretical and practical foundations of arts-based research and will be able to critically assess the appropriate application of arts-based work. Students will create a folio of visual and performative artistic explorations of their existing body of qualitative data or new data gatherings as appropriate for their project. Students are required to have completed at least one qualitative methods course, and should come to class with a body of their own qualitative data with which to work OR meet with the instructor to plan an alternative exploration. We will work together to build a critical and supportive community for arts-based work through our time together.
Political Ethnography (POLISCI 791PA) ~ 3 credits
Timothy Pachirat
What does it mean to study politics from below? How does immersion of the researcher in the research world contribute to the study of power? What are the promises, and perils, of social research that invites the unruly minutiae of lived experience to converse with, and contest, abstract disciplinary theories and categories? In this practice-intensive seminar, we explore ethnographic and other qualitative fieldwork methods with specific attention to their potential to subvert, generate, and extend understandings of politics and power. Readings draw on exemplary political ethnographies and narrative journalism as well as discussions of methodology and method in political science, sociology, and anthropology. Participants will also be expected to make significant weekly commitments to field research activities. The seminar is intended as preparation for students planning to conduct independent fieldwork for their MA or PhD research, but those interested in the epistemological, political and ethical implications of studying power from below are also welcome.
Fall 2023
Writing Ethnography (ANTHRO 638) ~ 3 credits
Elizabeth Krause
This graduate seminar takes writing ethnography as its object of analysis and its subject of practice. The seminar provides students with tools for thinking through the politics of representation and practicing the arts of noticing. We examine the ongoing consequences of the representational crisis that plagued ethnography, with vehement moments across recent decades, and investigate how and why the genre has recovered and evolved. We explore whether we are committed to ethnography as a genre, and if so how and why? In addition to reading ethnographies that address urgent contemporary topics, the seminar explores a range of strategies for representing social life and provides students a space to practice their own ethnographic writing. In both our reading and writing, we explore conventional as well as unconventional forms of representation, including critical ethnography, narrative ethnography, cross-cultural memoir, and blurred genre experiments.
Ethnography of the Digital (COMM 690E) ~ 3 credits
Burcu Baykurt
Ethnography of the Digital is a practice-intensive seminar to rethink ethnographic methods as our social lives are increasingly mediated by digital technologies. What does fieldwork entail when we center digital technologies in our research? How should ethnographers negotiate access, trust, and proximity as they vacillate between the online and the offline? How should we retool ethnographic tools and techniques (e.g., fieldnotes, participant observation, interviewing, and multimodal ethnography) as we navigate the materiality and politics of digital media? We will explore these questions while paying attention to the ways digital technologies complicate dilemmas that arise due to gender, race, class, and other power relations in the field. Readings draw on an interdisciplinary corpus from communication and media studies, sociology, anthropology, and information science. Participants will craft and conduct a digital ethnographic project related to their areas of interest.
Qualitative Methods in Communication Research (COMM 620) ~ 3 credits
Jonathan Corpus Ong
This course is designed to a) engage you at a doctoral level of study with the logic and epistemological underpinnings of qualitative methods, including relationships among research questions, theory, methods, and findings, b) offer guidance in critically evaluating qualitative communication and media research, and c) expose you to practical issues and contemporary challenges with using qualitative methods. Topics to be discussed include but are not limited to: qualitative research design, textual and visual analysis, participant observation, interviewing, digital ethnography, engaged or action research, public communication, and research ethics. Our learning approach involves practical activities: conducting visual analysis, writing fieldnotes about social media trends and practices, authoring ethnographic “portraits,” reviewing for media and communication studies journals, preparing public communications about qualitative research, giving feedback on research presentations, and conducting original qualitative research.
Performance Ethnography (COMM 795M) ~ 3 credits
Claudio Moreira
What is Ethnography? What is Performance (auto) Ethnography? How can we think about Performing Ethnography? This performance-based seminar will focus on the implications of decolonizing emancipatory epistemologies for critical, interpretive inquiry. Drawing heavily in the works of Dwight Conquergood, Norman Denzin, and D. Soyini Madison, we give a rest to traditional forms of qualitative inquiry as we disrupt the notion of "business as usual" in the academic space. We will examine the interpenetrating relationships among performance, ethnography, and culture. The readings and assignments forefront localized critical pedagogy, critical personal narratives, decolonizing and interpretive inquiry as moral, political discourse. From the everyday space where gender, race, class, and performances intersect, we will examine how the practices of critical inquiry can be used to imagine, write and perform a free democratic society.
Anthropology of a Childhood (EDUC 795G) ~ 3 credits
Sally Campbell Galman
This course provides a survey of the relevant research literature in cultural anthropology and popular culture addressing diverse childhood(s) and child and family studies across contexts. The course also provides an introduction to the special concerns around doing ethnographic and qualitative work with children.
Health Communication (PH 608) ~ 3 credits
Aline Gubrium
This course provides students with a critical understanding of the effects of narratives, storytelling, and media communication—mass, social, and participatory—in promoting and impeding the achievement of public health goals. Students will develop communication skills to strategically advance public health policies and social change, with ethical considerations paramount. The course covers the design, implementation and evaluation of health communication campaigns to promote public health goals, examines theories and research on health communication influences with respect to its potential harmful effects—as well as its potential emancipatory or empowering effects—on wellbeing. Students will design a digital media-based health communication campaign. Students learn participatory storytelling processes to promote active sense making among participants.
Spring 2023
Qualitative Research Methods (ANTH 635 / SPP 636) ~ 3 credits
Krista Harper
Qualitative research methods, including ethnography, provide essential tools for applied, client-based research. Today’s public institutions and community organizations operate in complex societies and serve an increasingly diverse set of constituents and stakeholders. Anthropological research provides tools for understanding diverse perceptions, practices, and social problems in cultural and historical context. The centerpiece of this course is a team research project here in western Mass: students will work together to design a research project, conduct field research with a partner organization, organize and analyze data, and present research findings in two ways: 1) a team poster or multimedia presentation that presents findings and offers recommendations for the partner organization and 2) an individual final research portfolio and written analytic summary. We will read texts related to the specific topical area of the semester’s research project. Students will learn key concepts of qualitative and ethnographic research design, participatory action research, methodological strategies, and the ethics of applied anthropological research.
Political Ethnography (POLISCI 791PA) ~ 3 credits
Timothy Pachirat
What does it mean to study politics from below? How does immersion of the researcher in the research world contribute to the study of power? What are the promises, and perils, of social research that invites the unruly minutiae of lived experience to converse with, and contest, abstract disciplinary theories and categories? In this practice-intensive seminar, we explore ethnographic and other qualitative fieldwork methods with specific attention to their potential to subvert, generate, and extend understandings of politics and power. Readings draw on exemplary political ethnographies and narrative journalism as well as discussions of methodology and method in political science, sociology, and anthropology. Participants will have the opportunity to craft and conduct locally based ethnographic research projects related to their primary areas of interest and will be expected to make significant weekly commitments to field research. The seminar is intended as preparation for students planning to conduct independent fieldwork for their MA or PhD research, but those interested in the epistemological, political and ethical implications of studying power from below are also welcome.
Fall 2022
Writing Ethnography (ANTHRO 697CC) ~ 3 credits
Elizabeth Krause
This graduate seminar takes writing ethnography as its object of analysis and its subject of practice. The seminar provides students with tools for thinking through the politics of representation and practicing the arts of noticing. We examine the ongoing consequences of the representational crisis that plagued ethnography, with vehement moments across recent decades, and investigate how and why the genre has recovered and evolved. We explore whether we are committed to ethnography as a genre, and if so how and why? In addition to reading ethnographies that address urgent contemporary topics, the seminar explores a range of strategies for representing social life and provides students a space to practice their own ethnographic writing. In both our reading and writing, we explore conventional as well as unconventional forms of representation, including critical ethnography, narrative ethnography, cross-cultural memoir, and blurred genre experiments.
Community-Engaged Theory and Methods Seminar (ANTHRO 603) ~ 3 credits
Jen Sandler
This graduate seminar introduces students to theoretical frameworks, controversies, methods, and other topics of community-based research and practice in the anthropological tradition. Students will understand the history of applied anthropology, critiques of anthropology coming from the global south, and critical epistemological approaches of contemporary engaged researchers and practitioners. Through studies of theoretical debates as well as case studies of engaged research and scholarly practice, students will leave this class with a foundation for thinking about their own work with diverse community-engaged projects. In addition to historical and theoretical foundations, this course will provide an introductory framework for thinking about ethics, evaluation, communication of research, and professional development in the field. Finally, this course will introduce methods and tools of community-engaged and applied research and action.
Arts-Based Qualitative Research Methods (EDUC 797G) ~ 3 credits
Sally Campbell Galman
This course will provide a basic introduction to and survey of arts-based research methods in the social sciences for students already familiar with qualitative methods generally and ethnographic methods specifically. In this course we will explore techniques in visual, performance/movement, and creative writing methods with an eye toward developing and exercising creativity in our work as qualitative researchers. Students will develop an understanding of the theoretical and practical foundations of arts-based research and will be able to critically assess the appropriate application of arts-based work. Students will create a folio of visual and performative artistic explorations of their existing body of qualitative data. Students are required to have completed at least one qualitative methods course, and should come to class with a body of their own qualitative data with which to work. We will work together to build a critical and supportive community for arts-based work through our time together.
Health Communication (PH 608) ~ 3 credits
Aline Gubrium
This course provides students with a critical understanding of the effects of narratives, storytelling, and media communication—mass, social, and participatory—in promoting and impeding the achievement of public health goals. Students will develop communication skills to strategically advance public health policies and social change, with ethical considerations paramount. The course covers the design, implementation and evaluation of health communication campaigns to promote public health goals, examines theories and research on health communication influences with respect to its potential harmful effects—as well as its potential emancipatory or empowering effects—on wellbeing. Students will design a digital media-based health communication campaign. Students learn participatory storytelling processes to promote active sense making among participants.
Spring 2022
Political Ethnography (POLISCI 791PA) - 3 credits
Timothy Pachirat
What does it mean to study politics from below? How does immersion of the researcher in the research world contribute to the study of power? What are the promises, and perils, of social research that invites the unruly minutiae of lived experience to converse with, and contest, abstract disciplinary theories and categories? In this practice-intensive seminar, we explore ethnographic and other qualitative fieldwork methods with specific attention to their potential to subvert, generate, and extend understandings of politics and power. Readings draw on exemplary political ethnographies and narrative journalism as well as discussions of methodology and method in political science, sociology, and anthropology. Participants will have the opportunity to craft and conduct locally based ethnographic research projects related to their primary areas of interest and will be expected to make significant weekly commitments to field research. The seminar is intended as preparation for students planning to conduct independent fieldwork for their MA or PhD research, but those interested in the epistemological, political and ethical implications of studying power from below are also welcome.
Arts-Based Qualitative Research Methods (EDUC 797G) - 3 credits
Sally Campbell Galman
This course will provide a basic introduction to and survey of arts-based research methods in the social sciences for students already familiar with qualitative methods generally and ethnographic methods specifically. In this course, we will explore techniques in visual, performance/movement, and creative writing methods with an eye toward developing and exercising creativity in our work as qualitative researchers. Students will develop an understanding of the theoretical and practical foundations of arts-based research and will be able to critically assess the appropriate application of arts-based work. Students will create a folio of visual and performative artistic explorations of their existing body of qualitative data. Students are required to have completed at least one qualitative methods course and should come to class with a body of their own qualitative data with which to work. We will work together to build a critical and supportive community for arts-based work through our time together.
Qualitative Data Analysis (EDUC 797A) – 3 credits
Sally Campbell Galman
In this course, we will learn about and practice analytic techniques for use with qualitative data. This is a hands-on, practical course that combines readings with workshop-style seminars. You will work with your own materials from mini-studies you have conducted in previous qualitative methods seminars or with approved data gathered prior to class. While you will practice a data analysis sequence-based largely on Grounded Theory, you will also gain experience with other forms of data analysis, including arts-based data analysis. Students will also have an opportunity to see and learn about the data analysis procedures favored by faculty members, who will be coming in as guest speakers. The course culminates with a mini-poster session of completed works.
Qualitative Research Methods (ANTH 635 / SPP 636) - 3 credits
Krista Harper
Qualitative research methods, including ethnography, provide essential tools for applied, client-based research. Today’s public institutions and community organizations operate in complex societies and serve an increasingly diverse set of constituents and stakeholders. Anthropological research provides tools for understanding diverse perceptions, practices, and social problems in cultural and historical context. The centerpiece of this course is a team research project here in western Mass: students will work together to design a research project, conduct field research with a partner organization, organize and analyze data, and present research findings in two ways: 1) a team poster or multimedia presentation that presents findings and offers recommendations for the partner organization and 2) an individual final research portfolio and written analytic summary. We will read texts related to the specific topical area of the semester’s research project. Students will learn key concepts of qualitative and ethnographic research design, participatory action research, methodological strategies, and the ethics of applied anthropological research.
Ethnographic Methods II (SOC 797o) - 3 credits
Millie Thayer & Fareen Parvez
This yearlong seminar offers both hands-on training in ethnographic methods, with an emphasis on the extended case method, and an opportunity to read and analyze ethnographic work situated in different epistemological and representational traditions. Students conduct their own field research over the course of two semesters, acting as participant-observers in a field site for a minimum of 4-5 hours a week, taking fieldnotes, situating the project in a body of literature, and producing a final paper at the end of the year, based on your research. We will cover technical, epistemological, ethical, representational and political issues related to the process of doing this kind of study, and will spend a number of class sessions discussing one another’s fieldwork and helping each other “make sense” of the data. Reading and other assignments will take into account the time required for fieldwork. In the fall, we will focus our attention on urban ethnography and studies that emphasize questions of class, race, gender, politics, and work, because of their historical importance for the development of the methodology. In the spring, we will read ethnographies and expand the range of topics to include international as well as US-based studies, and new trends, such as “carnal,” “embodied,” or “virtual” ethnography.
Queer Ethnographies (WGSS 691E) - 3 credits
Svati Shah
Ethnography, the signal methodology of anthropology, is now a widespread research method, taken up by scholars across disciplines seeking to understand social processes in everyday life. Queer scholars in the United States pioneered the use of ethnographic methods within the US, arguing that queer communities constituted 'subcultures' that should be studied in their own right. This course begins with these earlier works, from the 1970s and 1980s, and will quickly move to a survey of contemporary queer ethnographic work. The course will end with a consideration of ethnographic film that addresses the everyday lives of LGBTQI people and movements from around the world. Students will come away from the course with a better understanding of the theoretical critiques that ethnography makes available for scholars of sexuality and gender, and of the history of ethnography within anthropology.
Fall 2021
Ethnographic Data Analysis (ANTHRO 697ED) - 3 credits
Elizabeth Krause
This graduate seminar surveys methods of ethnographic data analysis. Students will become familiar with a range of approaches to analyzing qualitative data. The focus will be on developing skills to conduct systematic and interpretive analysis of textual data in ways that honor what human participants have to say, treasure the stories and artifacts they create, and respect the complexity of social life as it is lived and represented. Skills can be extended to images, audio, and video. The course covers approaches that cut across traditions, including identifying themes, defining codes, developing codebooks, and collaborating in teams. Exposure to advanced traditions of text-based analysis include critical discourse analysis and word-based approaches. Hands-on assignments will make use of computer software to facilitate learning (e.g., MAXQDA). Exercises draw on toy data and civil rights oral history archives. Students may use their own data for the final project but are not required to do so. Classes meet weekly and are divided between lectures and labs.
Performance Ethnography (COMM 795M) - 3 credits
Claudio Moreira
What is Ethnography? What is Performance (auto) Ethnography? How can we think about Performing Ethnography? This performance-based seminar will focus on the implications of decolonizing emancipatory epistemologies for critical, interpretive inquiry. Drawing heavily in the works of Dwight Conquergood, Norman Denzin, and D. Soyini Madison, we give a rest to traditional forms of qualitative inquiry as we disrupt the notion of "business as usual" in the academic space. We will examine the interpenetrating relationships among performance, ethnography, and culture. The readings and assignments forefront localized critical pedagogy, critical personal narratives, decolonizing and interpretive inquiry as moral, political discourse. From the everyday space where gender, race, class, and performances intersect, we will examine how the practices of critical inquiry can be used to imagine, write and perform a free democratic society.
Qualitative Research Methods (EDUC 619) – 3 credits
Sally Campbell Galman
In this course we will learn about a wide variety of data gathering techniques as well as about the epistemological and ontological foundations of qualitative study design and fieldcraft. As part of the course you will read essential texts on method as well as exemplar studies. Additionally, and most importantly, you will be designing and conducting a mini-study of your very own. This is a project that will begin almost immediately and will require your dedicated attention as you work to define your question, plan data gathering, enter the field, and begin preliminary data analyses. Research methodology and fieldcraft are skills that a scholar refines over a lifetime, and I am so glad to be with you on this first step. Your instructor has been a member of two large university Institutional Review Boards and will provide a robust introduction to human subjects approvals and research ethics for qualitative researchers.
Health Communication (PH 608) - 3 credits
Aline Gubrium
This course provides students with a critical understanding of the effects of narratives, storytelling, and media communication—mass, social, and participatory—in promoting and impeding the achievement of public health goals. Students will develop communication skills to strategically advance public health policies and social change, with ethical considerations paramount. The course covers the design, implementation and evaluation of health communication campaigns to promote public health goals, examines theories and research on health communication influences with respect to its potential harmful effects—as well as its potential emancipatory or empowering effects—on wellbeing. Students will design a digital media-based health communication campaign. Students learn participatory storytelling processes to promote active sense making among participants.
Distance, Deceit, Denial (POLISCI 792DD) - 3 credits
Timothy Pachirat
This course explores the roles of distance, deceit, and denial in structuring, reproducing, and contesting relations of domination and exploitation. Drawing on a wide range of ethnographic, historical, sociological, psychological, architectural, and anthropological case studies, as well as novels, short stories, and military manuals, the course aims to stimulate imaginative theorizing and generative research projects about the operation of distance, deceit, and denial in three specific dimensions: language (euphemism, dysphemism, public and hidden transcripts, etc.), space (borders, walls, checkpoints, special economic zones, camps, policing and surveillance technologies, modes of experience-distant warfare, etc.), and social organization (the division of labor, hierarchy, chains of command, etc.). In addition to exploring distance, deceit, and denial as mechanisms of domination and exploitation, specific attention will also be given to the efficacy and ambiguities of movements and technologies that aim to collapse distance.
Ethnographic Methods I (SOC 797o) - 3 credits
Millie Thayer & Fareen Parvez
This yearlong seminar offers both hands-on training in ethnographic methods, with an emphasis on the extended case method, and an opportunity to read and analyze ethnographic work situated in different epistemological and representational traditions. Students conduct their own field research over the course of two semesters, acting as participant-observers in a field site for a minimum of 4-5 hours a week, taking field notes, situating the project in a body of literature, and producing a final paper at the end of the year, based on your research. We will cover technical, epistemological, ethical, representational and political issues related to the process of doing this kind of study, and will spend a number of class sessions discussing one another’s fieldwork and helping each other “make sense” of the data. Reading and other assignments will take into account the time required for fieldwork. In the fall, we will focus most of our attention on urban ethnography and studies that emphasize questions of class, race, gender, politics, and work, because of their historical importance for the development of the methodology. In the spring, we will read ethnographies and expand the range of topics to include international as well as US-based studies, and new trends, such as “carnal,” “embodied,” or “virtual” ethnography.