ANTH 042D. Political Anthropology

This course examines the anthropology of rights, justice, and the state. Its focus is citizenship: as both an ideal of formal equality and a lived practice of political belonging that reflects and reproduces social inequity. The first half investigates how citizenship intersects with forms of difference such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Ethnographic examples include debates about the legal recognition of gay marriage, spatial struggles over the right to the city, and disability activism and the biopolitics of citizenship. The second half examines how new forms of mobility of people, ideas, and capital challenge the nation-state as the site of political membership. What is the state’s responsibility towards its “others”: from transnational entrepreneurs to illegal migrant workers, and from political refugees to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay?
Social sciences.
1 credit.
Eligible for ESCH
Catalog chapter: Sociology and Anthropology
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/sociology-anthropology

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