ANTH 316 - Movement: Theory and Practice

Credits: (3)
For many of us, movement is so inherent to our human experience that we take it for granted. ”Movement/Mobility/Migration” is a seminar in which we aim to reveal and challenge the assumptions we associate with movement. We examine how anthropologists, historians, philosophers, physicists, artists, and scholars in interdisciplinary fields such as disability studies and indigenous studies have examined movement both as a practice that humans and nonhumans do(or are limited in doing) and also as a concept that we construct. As a practice, we will consider various forms of small and large-scale movement, including migration, pilgrimage, dance, trade, and navigation. As a concept, we will examine both the qualities associated with movement, such as dynamism, fluidity, flexibility, ephemerality, impermanence, rootlessness, vagrancy, etc. and also how these qualities are constructed as positive and/or negative depending on the socio-political, cultural, and historical context.