ANS4400W RESEARCH ESSAY/PROJECT
30 NQF credits at HEQSF level 8
Convener: Dr H Macdonald
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme.
Course outline:
An individually supervised research exercise that is based on directed reading, regular assessed participation in a graduate seminar and field-based research. The course culminates in an ethnographic research essay based on primary research and part of which may be an ethnographic film or submitted as new-media text. It must demonstrate that the student has been able to
- conceptualise and design a field-based ethnographic research project that is informed by issues in the anthropological literature or that will use an anthropological perspective, drawn from the literature, to address policy or other practical/lived social-cultural concerns;
- develop a set of methods in order to gather apposite material using a range of interrelated ethnographic techniques; and
- structure and prepare a mini-dissertation/research essay (10,000 to a maximum of 15,000 words for submission by the end of October the year of registration) that demonstrates ability in the points bulleted above and is structured to develop a clear and consistently systematic argument.
DP requirements: Submission of chapter outline for research essay.
Assessment: Research essay: 100%.
ANS4401F ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH METHODS
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 8
Convener: Dr H Macdonald
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme; a major in Anthropology or permission of Head of Section.
Course outline:
Theory and practice in ethnographic research methods, including participant observation, interviewing skills and visual anthropology. Contextual qualitative data collection methods and analysis. Research proposal writing skills; preparing a proposal and research design. The course may include a fieldwork exercise based on a short field trip.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments and satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars by due dates.
Assessment: Coursework 100%.
ANS4402S THINKING ANTHROPOLOGICALLY
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 8
Convener: Dr M Swai
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme; a major in Anthropology or permission of Head of Section.
Course outline:
The course is designed to develop an understanding of the foundations and history of anthropological thought, particularly as it pertains to processes of social-cultural change, including development, transformation and conflict. The course uses ethnographic materials, with a special focus on southern Africa but looking elsewhere also in order to develop a comparative approach and to illustrate a wide range of social and cultural anthropological perspectives, theories and methods that have been used to analyse societies in transition. The course is compulsory for students registered for the honours in Anthropology programme and for students in the master’s in Practical Anthropology and master’s in Anthropology programmes who have not completed it (or equivalent). DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments and satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Coursework 100%
ANS4403F ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER & SEXUALITY
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 8
Convener: K Mohamed
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme; permission of Head of Section.
Course outline:
The anthropology of gender and sexuality. The diversity of women's as well as men's sex roles, experiences and self-conceptions in a number of societies. How women and men shape and are shaped by particular forms of, and changes in, social and cultural life. The expression of sex, gender, and sexuality and the sources of power and inequality embedded in such expressions.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments and satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Coursework 100%.
ANS4404F SPECIAL TOPICS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 8
Convener: Professor F Ross
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme; permission of Head of Section
Course outline:
Special-topic courses will normally include advanced work on an issue dealt with at the undergraduate level or emanating from current departmental research. Details of such special-topic courses will vary from year to year and they will only be offered if there is sufficient demand and adequate personnel.
DP requirements: Submission of work-in-progress.
Assessment: Coursework 100%.
ANS4405S MULTIMODAL AND VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 8
Convener: K Mohamed
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme; permission of Head of Section.
Course outline:
Comparing and contrasting key debates in anthropological research and documentary film-making; strategies for communicating scholarship in the public sphere. Critical insight into the relationships of power implicit in socio-cultural research and film-making. Ethnographic and similar documentaries from diverse parts of the world and with a wide range of topical focuses examined in the context of Southern African issues.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments and satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Coursework 100%.
ANS4407FS MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGIES: WELL-BEING IN A PRECARIOUS WORLD
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 8
Convener: Professor F Ross
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme.
Course outline:
The course explores the subdiscipline of medical anthropology through a range of theoretical perspectives on well-being in relation to the body, medicines, and political economy. The overall theme of the course concerns the intertwining of body, sociality and illness. It seeks to demonstrate the ways in which illness and well-being are imbricated in a precarious world. Theoretical themes in medical anthropology are discussed alongside ethnographic work to inspire students in the importance of a detailed revisiting of local worlds and their global connections. Four major themes are: Phenomenological approaches to embodiment; Questions of power; Marginalisation, history and discourse; Knowledge and ethics in relation to biology, science, and biomedicine. The overall aim is to examine how well-being is constituted and to understand the ways in which contemporary arrangements of power, knowledge, resources enable or inhibit health, broadly understood. The course examines the entailments of practical medical anthropology.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments; satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Coursework: 100%
ANS4416F SCIENCE, NATURE, DEMOCRACY
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 8
Convener: Associate Professor L Green
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for an honours programme.
Course outline:
This course focuses on the relationship between science and governance, drawing on current debates in science studies about the mediation of different versions of nature, truth and world in a democracy. Whether those concerns arise in relation to different disciplinary knowledges, the interests of capital, religious or indigenous movements, or between scientists and parliamentarians, the production of evidentiaries and procedures for verification are a central concern in decision- making in contemporary public life. The course explores the unstable knowledge terrain where state, science, publics and capital meet, with the goal of developing insight into the mistranslations and incomprehensions that occur, and to explore options that might resolve them. Building on emerging work on scholarly diplomacy in the scientific humanities, with a particular interest on science studies in the south, the course focuses on emerging strategies of mediation, equivocation, translation and contestation that are part of democratic processes and activism.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments; satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Coursework: 100%