ANS5401W MINOR DISSERTATION
96 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Dr Kharnita Mohamed
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master’s programme.
Course outline:
Master’s in Anthropology: Candidates undertake an approved and supervised anthropological research project based on engagement with appropriate literature and at least two months of field- based research (normally in southern Africa). It culminates in a 25,000 word ethnographic dissertation (part of which may be an ethnographic film or new-media text).
Master’s in Practical Anthropology: Candidates complete an approved internship which produces a written report and dissertation. The internship is based on an approved consultancy brief requiring at least six weeks of anthropological work with a public sphere agency and/or in social-cultural interventions. Following the internship and internship report, candidates write a separate 25,000 word dissertation.
MPhil in Environmental Humanities: Candidates undertake an approved co-supervised and cross- disciplinary research project, based on engagement with appropriate literature, and one to two months of field-based research. It culminates in a 25,000 word ethnographic dissertation.
Programmes other than the above three: Candidates undertake an approved project applying anthropological perspectives to a field of study appropriate to their programme of registration. It comprises a supervised research exercise based on directed reading, participation in a graduate seminar, and primary and/or secondary research. It culminates in a minor dissertation appropriate to the candidate’s programme of registration.
DP requirements: Submission and approval of a consultancy report in terms of brief and a chapter outline for dissertation.
Assessment: A dissertation of no more than 25,000 words.
ANS5403F FURTHER SPECIAL TOPICS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Professor F Ross
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master’s programme: permission of Head of Section
Course outline:
Further Special Topics courses will normally include further advanced level work on an issue dealt with at the 4000-level or emanating from departmental research. Details of such further special 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%.
ANS5404S FURTHER SPECIAL TOPICS IN ANTHROPOLOGY
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Professor F Ross
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master’s programme: permission of Head of Section.
Course outline:
Further Special Topics courses will normally include further advanced level work on an issue dealt with at the 4000-level or emanating from departmental research. Details of such further special 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%.
ANS5405F/S MEDICAL ANTHROPOLOGIES: WELL-BEING IN A PRECARIOUS WORLD
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Professor F Ross
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master’s programme.
Co-requisites: N/A
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%
ANS5406S ANTHROPOLOGY OF YOUTH IN RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Associate Professor D Fuh
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master’s programme.
Course outline:
The aim of the course is to equip learners with knowledge of current thinking in the social sciences around theories of childhood and youth, with a critical focus on the place of youth in contemporary social world-making. The course offers critical comparative approaches to the study of those deemed to be ‘young’, and interrogates the conventional modes of analysis of young people’s worlds and activities. The course may include a fieldwork exercise based on a short field trip.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments; satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Long essay (40%); 3 response papers (30%); project (20%); class participation (10%).
ANS5407S ANTHROPOLOGY AND CONTEMPORARY THEORY
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Professor F Nyamnjoh
Course entry requirements: AXL4402S plus candidacy in one of master’s specialising in Anthropology or Practical Anthropology, or permission of Head of Section.
Course outline:
Beginning with the Archie Mafeje’s critiques of anthropology, the course explores current theoretical interventions regarding coloniality and modernity in contemporary social sciences and humanities. With a particular emphasis on the possibilities that open when critiques of coloniality extend to the categories inhering in modernist thought, the course focuses on the possibilities for radical and innovative ethnographic accounts of the world. The course pays particular attention to modes of theorising relations, and seeks to undo a Western epistemology that takes distancing, objectification and war as its primary modes of engagement.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments; satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Two 5000 word essays (40% each); presentation (20%).
ANS5409F/S ETHNOGRAPHIC PROBLEMATIQUES
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Professor F Nyamnjoh
Course entry requirements: Candidacy in one of master’s specialising in Anthropology or Practical Anthropology or permission of Head of Section.
Course outline:
The course provides students opportunity to engage with ethnographic texts on selected anthropological themes and to develop an historical synthesis of ethnographic work pertaining to a selected anthropological research problem such as they will have to face in undertaking their own research for their minor dissertations. Students devise individual projects within a collaborative framework.
DP requirements: Submission of work-in-progress; oral presentation of final paper.
Assessment: Term paper 100%.
ANS5410F ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH METHODS AND METHODOLOGY
12 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Professor F Ross
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master’s programme.
Course outline:
The course comprises theory and practice in ethnographic research methods, including participant observation, interviewing skills and visual anthropology. The emphasis is on contextual qualitative data collection methods and analysis. Students will develop research proposal skills and will be required to prepare a proposal and research design.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments and satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars by due dates.
Assessment: Coursework 100%.
ANS5412F CRITICAL MEDICAL HUMANITIES IN AFRICA
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Associate Professor S L Levine
Course entry requirements: Acceptance into an honours or master’s programme. There are limited spaces in the course and as a result, and to ensure as far as possible an even split between Health Sciences and Humanities students, applicants may be interviewed for acceptance into the course. This will occur during the week before classes in the course begin.
Course outline:
Critical Medical Humanities in Africa is a course for postgraduate students in the Humanities and Health Science faculties. It contributes to new interdisciplinary research initiatives underway at UCT, and provides an unparalleled opportunity for students from the Health Sciences and Humanities to engage with the production of knowledge of and about the body, from multiple perspectives. The course also provides an intellectual platform for students in the Health Sciences and Humanities to explore new possibilities, already activated on the global stage, about the ways in which the arts can constructively engage with medical pedagogy and practice, and to engage in key debates relating medicine, the arts and medical anthropology.
DP requirements: Attendance at a minimum 8 of the 12 scheduled seminars.
Assessment: Written assignment 1: a discussion of the literature (20%); written assignment 2: a reflection on project (10%); individual project: a performance, composition, artefact, film, exhibition or publication (20%); final examination (50%).
ANS5413F ANTHROPOLOGY OF GENDER & SEXUALITY
24 NQF credits at NQF level 9
Convener: Dr K Mohamed
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master’s programme.
Course outline:
Gender/sexuality is a crucial component in imaginaries of the subject, the nation and the geopolitical and thus is central to reimagining decoloniality. Whilst the study of gender and sexuality crosses disciplinary boundaries, this course explores the possibilities and limits of thinking gender/sexuality
from anthropology. The genre and praxis of ethnography holds both potentials and limitations. Ethnographic praxis treats the locatedness of our interlocutors and our own subject positions as central to the epistemic and ontological grounds for anthropological world-making. The conceptual
apparatus through which we think gender/sexuality, whilst in conversation with the concerns of the contemporary academy and popular theories of gendered subjects and gender regimes, are also deeply inflected by the intimacies and duration of our research methodologies. Within Southern
Africa (and globally), the ethical and political demands of the present require ethnographic practitioners to be alert to the ways in which formations of knowledge animate possible futures or explain pasts. The course seeks to understand the formation of conceptual apparatus within conditions of inequality, the relationship between the local and the geopolitical, the escape of and perdurance of colonial histories in the present and the possibility for decolonial futures. A central question throughout the course is: who is included in the category of the human? How does gender/sexuality make visible social reproduction and the generation of normative conceptualisations of the human? Given multiple ontological and epistemic erasures, how are we to
assert and insert the diversity of being human into the archive without imposing oppressive hierarchies of value? In which ways can the anthropological toolkit we’ve inherited facilitate a proliferation in the category of the human that simultaneously asserts the right to live-giving worlds?
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments and satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Coursework 100%
ANS5414S RESEARCHING THE ANTHROPOCENE
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Associate Professor L Green
Course entry requirements: Acceptance into an honours or master’s programme.
Course outline:
The term “anthropocene”, taken up by geologists to describe the era in which the effects of collective human action have become “significant on the scale of Earth history”, compels a rethinking of the divides between the human sciences and the natural sciences. The implication: not only are conceptual divisions between society and nature to be rethought, but that new approaches to research are needed to speak to the challenges of comprehending the interconnections of human life, earth systems, and species. This course offers an introduction to research methods that are needed in order to bring these interconnectivities and parts and wholes, into public life and decision-making. Building on current conversations across the south on the engagement of decolonial literatures and the post-humanities, this course explores the research methods proposed by leading scholars in these fields.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments; satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Two 5000 word essays (40% each); prepared seminar presentation (20%).
ANS5416F SCIENCE; NATURE; DEMOCRACY
24 NQF credits at HEQSF level 9
Convener: Associate Professor L Green
Course entry requirements: Acceptance into an honours or master’s 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: Two 5000 word essays (40% each); prepared seminar presentation (20%)
ANS5418FS ANTHROPOLOGY OF DISABILITY AND DEBILITY
24 NQF credits at NQF level 9
Convener: Dr K Mohamed
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a Master's programme.
Course outline:
Inequality and structural violence is frequently manifested by the capacity to debilitate populations,erase and normalise the impairing effects of precarity and subjugation. Taught from a decolonial, feminist perspective the course thus critically explores the connections between structural violence, and the experience and production of disabilities and debilities from a geopolitical, transnational andinterdisciplinary perspective. To think about how those who inhabit unequal societies are madevulnerable to impairment and debilitation, we will engage with contemporary debates on race andcoloniality, heteropatriarchy, gender and sexuality, toxic ecologies, and neoliberal capital amongst other world-making forces. The course will, in particular, consider the ways in which epistemic violence obscures the capacity to contend with the persistent and continual embodied and psycho-
affective effects of inequality.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed assignments; satisfactory attendance and participation in coursework seminars.
Assessment: Coursework: 100% - 2 x long essays; 1 x presentation
ANS5419FS THE MEAT OF THE MATTER - FOOD, GENDER, AND PLANETARY HEALTH
24 NQF credits at NQF level 9
Convener: Associate Professor C Tsampiras
Course entry requirements: Completion of Honours level degree and acceptance for Master’s programme.
Course outline:
How does a hamburger link to gender identities, violence, the planetary crisis and health? It is complex questions like this that the vibrant and growing field of Medical and Health Humanities (MHH) in Africa (and across the world) - underscored by concerns for inclusion, access, and social justice - is interested in addressing. The Meat of the Matter course contributes to these discussions and MHH, by exploring topics and theories linked to food access, systems, creation, production, preparation, and social significance. The course will consider the gendered nature of food and explore how this relates to the health of individuals, communities (of various species), and the health of the planet. The course will investigate the inter-relationships between food, gender, sexuality, 'race', class, species, and health and draw on theories and notions such as ecofeminism, queer ecologies, slow violence, and the capitalocence to examine them. It allows students to investigate and understand how food and health (human, non-human and planetary) has been shaped by socio-political, economic, and environmental concerns and promises to feed your intellect.
DP requirements: Submission of all prescribed coursework assignments, essays, or research work;satisfactory attendance and participation in seminars.
Assessment: Three strongest coursework assignments - 100% of final mark
ANS5502FS EARTH POLITICS: ECOPOLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS
24 NQF credits at NQF level 9
Convener: Dr N Solomon
Course entry requirements: Acceptance for a master's programme.
Course outline:
This course aims to create a transdisciplinary space in which students from the sciences, applied sciences, health, economics, law, humanities and social sciences can meet and engage with questions of how to develop more effective engagements between scholarship on environmental
crises, and environmental activism. DP requirements: Attendance at all seminars and submission of all assignments. Assessment: One essay of 2500-3000 words, reviewing theoretical approaches; Weekly written responses to course materials shared on class website; Course project of 7000-8000 words, designed as a publishable paper on a case study.