Courses Taught as a Teaching Fellow (Teaching Assistant)

ANTH 250 Anthropology of Development and Globalization
2004. Instructor: Eric Worby

From the syllabus: At the dawn of the new millenium, we live in a world that seems ever more closely knit together into a common, if increasingly uncertain, fate. The fashionable term given to this process is globalization. If we take the global media as our guide, the future of our species in a globalizing world often looks grim indeed. Images of poverty, famine, and environmental destruction are paraded before our eyes alongside a numbing catalogue of ethno-nationalist conflicts and genocidal wars. National borders (both "ours" and "theirs") are shown to be hemorrhaging with refugees seeking to escape the predations of their own governments or the volatility of money and stock markets. Yet this apocalyptic vision is countered by another, more optimistic scenario. In this view, the end of the cold-war arms race, the formation of transnational economic and cultural communities, and the empowerment of marginalized peoples through newly imagined forms of civil society and new communications technologies seem to promise or make possible an era of increasing peace, prosperity, cooperation, and freedom. The puzzle or dilemma of "development" is largely summarized by these two, apparently contradictory, scenarios for the future of humanity. The events of 9/11 and their aftermath, including the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq have introduced a third scenario, in which the elusive specter of terrorism is used to authorize selective forms of violence in the name of securing sovereignty, security, and new opportunities for transnational corporate investment in development. The consequences of this we can only begin to guess at.

. . .

The term "development", as we will use it in this course, has three main connotations:

1. It describes a set of processes that are assumed to follow a progressive trajectory (such as the "growth" of national wealth, or the "globalization" of production, trade, and consumption).

2. It implies a set of moral assumptions or imperatives (e.g. the felt obligation to reduce poverty and inequality, or the perceived need to foster respect for human rights).

3. It refers to a set of institutions (e.g., the World Bank, Oxfam) as well as institutional discourses and practices (e.g., the identification of "target groups", the distribution of international aid, the implementation of "projects" and so on) whose raison d'etre is the implementation of planned strategies for social change.

This course will take an interdisciplinary view of each of these aspects of "development", subjecting each of them to close analytical and critical scrutiny. But the course is grounded in a broadly anthropological sensibility. That is, we will be concerned with the culturally and historically distinctive ways in which people have made sense of, and made meaningful, their involvement with, subjection to, or appropriation of all that is done in the name of their "development"

Throughout the course, we will be asking what a broadly anthropological approach might contribute to our capacity to understand, engage with, and effectively critique some of the more widely disseminated theories, fantasies, and hysterias that "development" is supposed to solve. Even more important, however, will be our vigilant attention to discovering how we are implicated in the practical consequences of development both locally and abroad, and to our responsibility to turn our critical judgments into positive work that contributes to the imagination and creation of new and more just forms of society.

F&ES 747 / ANTH 581 Society and Environment: Introduction to Theory and Method
2002. Instructor: Michael R. Dove
Course lecture by Jonathan Padwe: Environmental Security

This is an introductory graduate-level course on the scope of social scientific contributions to environmental and natural resource issues. It is designed to be the first course for students who will be specializing in social science approaches as well as the last/only course for students who take only one course in this area. The approach taken in the course is inductive, problem-oriented, and case study-based. The course is divided into four main sections. Section I deals with the way that environmental problems are initially framed. Case studies focus on placing problems in their wider political context, new approaches to uncertainty and failure, and the importance of how the analytical boundaries to resource systems are drawn. Section II focuses on questions of method, including the dynamics of working within development projects, and the art of rapid appraisal and short-term consultancies, and cross-cultural challenges of commensuration. Section III deals with new approaches to environmental perturbation and change, examining public discourses of natural disaster and deforestation and other degradation. Finally, Section IV is concerned with local peoples and the environment. Case studies address the issue of indigenous knowledge and its transformation, environmental security, and formal modeling of local resource-use systems.