College Seminar (101-7-3)

Topic

Constructing College Communities

Instructors

Elizabeth Smith
Dr. Elizabeth Smith’s PhD is in Sociocultural Anthropology from New York University. Her research concerns material culture and nationalism in museums, race and media images of Nubians in Egypt, identification with archaeological sites in nostalgia for Nubia, and how photographs of Nubia circulate in popular culture. Professor Smith has taught courses on cultural anthropology, gender in the Middle East, tourism and museums, and the history of anthropology. Prior to coming to Northwestern in 2013, she was an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California-Berkeley.

Meeting Info

Willard Hall B72: Wed, Fri 12:30PM - 1:50PM

Overview of class

How do students build community at Northwestern University, an elite, private, PWI (predominantly white institution) in the midwestern United States? How do cultural anthropologists think and write about people and places? What is your place at Northwestern? To find out, you will research, write, and communicate using anthropology's most famous methods: participant observation fieldwork, writing fieldnotes on your observations, and creating a final ethnography on one aspect of life on campus you choose to study throughout the quarter. Weekly readings and class discussions inform your observations, building toward a final creative/academic project presentation. We pay particular attention to intersecting power structures such as racialized identities, gender, sexuality, economic inequality, and cultural production. An important part of the course consists of in-class roundtables where we host guest speakers from NU student groups alongside local organizations for dialogue on current issues facing our communities. Conducting your own participant-observation research will empower you to 1. make sense of your environment in the current moment, 2. turn an analytical eye toward Northwestern as an institution, and 3. critically develop your new role as a college student. Requirements include contribution to class discussion, hosting roundtables, developing your field research project, and your final project presentation of your research results which can be creative, analytic, or a mix of both—past students have written and performed songs and poetry or created podcasts, maps, and hand-drawn illustrations as well as more traditional academic analyses. Course materials include one book for purchase ($15/ebook or $36/print) and book chapters, articles, and film/media accessed online in Canvas (free).

Registration Requirements

First-year only

Class Materials (Required)

Field Notes: A Guided Journal for Doing Anthropology by Luis A. Vivanco. Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN: 9780190642204 for ebook rental or find print copy online.

Class Attributes

WCAS College Seminar

Enrollment Requirements

Enrollment Requirements: Weinberg First Year Seminars are only available to first-year students.
Add Consent: Department Consent Required
Drop Consent: Department Consent Required