Example courses

• Environmental Anthropology

  This course explores human relationships with ecological and material environments. It will examine diverse cultural perceptions of and approaches to the environment, the relationship between nature and culture, and anthropology’s contribution to contemporary ecological and climate debates.

• Gender, Sexuality and Kinship

  This course examines anthropological approaches to kinship, sexuality and gender. It will explore the shifting social norms surrounding gender, sexuality, the family and relatedness across diverse cultural settings. It will reveal how practices of gender, sexuality and kinship intersect with new reproductive technologies, media, nationalism, capitalism, colonisation, class and race.

• Medical Anthropology

  This course explores what roles our cultural beliefs and practices play in shaping our understandings of health, wellbeing, illness and medicine. We ask how culture mediates our experiences of our bodies, our emotions and diseases, and how local and global inequalities affect health outcome. The course takes a comparative approach, asking students to consider cultural approaches to disease categories, illness experiences, and systems of healing in their own societies and communities as well as in a range of globally diverse settings.

• Migration, Culture and Identity

  In this course we explore migration as both empirical phenomenon and subject of anthropological study. We compare the intentions, outcomes and experiences of migrants, considering citizenship, belonging, and the nation-state, and look critically at recent models of transnationalism and diaspora which have challenged earlier ideas about migration and culture.

• Social and Cultural Diversity

  This course introduces students to the study of social and cultural diversity by exploring culture and its role in our lives. Topics include ritual, symbolism, the body, exchange, belief, inequality, globalisation, kinship, gender and class. Case studies are drawn from New Zealand, the Pacific, Asia, Africa and the Americas.

• Special Topic

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