NEW SEMINAR Spring 2022 ANP 892 URBAN ANTHROPOLOGY

As Interdisciplinary Urban Studies has grown in importance, so too has the contribution of a reinvigorated and rigorous New Urban Anthropology. It pursues not simply ethnography in urban spaces, but rather an Anthropology of the City. This includes historically situated peoples in their myriad relations and connects them to architectures and infrastructures and to the discourses within which they take on meaning and agency. It draws upon analytical tools of Urban Planning, Architecture, History, and Political Economy and enables us to uncover and explore how the city mediates the articulation of forces and dynamics that we commonly understand as universal or particular, global or local, and to do so without losing site of people's aspirations and their triumphs and struggles in daily life.

This course explores questions of urban form, identity and the construction of place. How do people make places and places make people? How have discourses of architecture and urban planning articulated with projects of state formation, political projects of nationalism, and contemporary capitalist globalization? How do they produce new identities and solidarities or produce new hierarchies and exclusions?

Readings cover a range of cities including Beirut, Brasília, Cairo, Delhi, Detroit, Jaffa, Jakarta, Lahore, New Orleans, and New York

Open to Graduate Students and Undergraduate Seniors and Honors Students.