Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

Seminar courses are subject to selected topics. See departmental website for annual offering details.

This course is designed for graduate students in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology who plan to write their research proposals and to design their field projects in the near future. It will examine different kinds of fieldwork design and data collection techniques.

This course addresses the place of personhood and subjectivity through debates around themes such as the "Religious Subject," the "Precarious Subject" and "Beyond-the-Subject." The goal of the course is to introduce students to theoretical frameworks that have effectively been employed by anthropologists and critical theorists when studying personhood, subjectification and human nature, and also to think them through themes such as colonialism and post-colonialism. This course will be run as a seminar with evaluation based on participation, one oral presentation, weekly reports, and a final paper.

This course takes a comparative and critical approach to discourses and policies surrounding "Diversity" and other related terms such as "Multiculturalism" and "Multiracialism." How are practices and histories of colonialism, settler-colonialism and post-colonialism interacting with and impacting expressions of "Diversity"? How do they affect Indigenous, racialized, or minority groups in several countries across North America, Asia, and Africa differently? Decolonization as a method and practice will also be addressed in this course — can we truly decolonize the institutions that claim to study or practice "Diversity" including Anthropology? What does it mean to want to "decolonize" institutions, universities, and research methods in academia? How can anthropologists learn to do better?

In recent decades, anthropologists have become self-reflexive about the role that history has always played in anthropology, and on how anthropologists have contributed to what is considered History both in and outside academia. Anthropological methods, especially ethnography, have become of particular interest in this context, to both anthropologists and historians. The topic of the course fits into the broader problematic of the constructedness of History.

This graduate research seminar explores the core genealogies of feminist anthropology and anthropology of sexuality, with a focus on how scholarly conversations which emerged in 20th century anglophone sociocultural anthropology reverberate in the discipline today. We will examine the theoretical and methodological innovations that scholars enacted in the shift from "women anthropologists" to an "anthropology of women" to feminist and transfeminist ethnography. We will also analyze the production on anthropological texts within colonial and postcolonial contexts as they connect with local and transnational understandings of sexuality and gender. In doing so, we will ask: How has the field as a whole responded to feminist critiques of knowledge production? Moreover, how has anthropology contributed to the emergence of today’s robust, transnational gender and sexuality studies? What is an anthropological approach to gender and sexuality? How ought anthropologists reconcile the prescriptivism of gender and sexual identity politics with the descriptivism of the ethnographic project? How does the anthropological perspective challenge assumptions about human gender and sexuality across culture and over time? What theoretical underpinnings hold together the core logics of the anthropological approach to gender and sexuality? Throughout, we will problematize normative cultural paradigms of: biological sex, social gender, and sexual attraction; kinship and marriage; masculine and feminine divisions of labor; and sexuality and gender in racializing and colonizing projects. Texts include works by scholars such as: Jafari Allen, Ruth Benedict, Tom Boellstorff, Dána-Ain Davis, Claude Levi-Strauss, Ellen Lewin, Martin Manalansan, Margaret Mead, Esther Newton, Elizabeth Povinelli, Gayle Rubin, Kamala Visweswaran, Gloria Wekker, Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Tiantian Zheng, and others. While the focus of this course is on sociocultural anthropology, the course is appropriate for graduate students from across the discipline, and students are invited to integrate related scholarly conversations in archaeology and biological anthropology into discussions and coursework.

This graduate research seminar explores the emergence of disability anthropology as a subfield at the intersection of medical anthropology and critical disability studies. Students will examine the theoretical and methodological innovations that scholars enacted in the shift from "anthropologists with disabilities" to an "anthropology of disability" to a "disability anthropology" that tracks the work that the category of disability does. In doing so, students track systems of ableism that emerge across different cultural settings. Throughout the course, we will ask and engage the following questions: What is an anthropological approach to the study of disability? How has disability anthropology emerged as an area of research for sociocultural anthropologists? What epistemological concerns does disability anthropology provoke regarding human ways of knowing and coming to know, and what are the implications for ethnography? Moreover, how has anthropology as a field and ethnography as a research practice contributed to the emergence of today's robust scholarly debates in global disability studies? How ought anthropologists reconcile the prescriptivism of disability pride politics with the descriptivism of the ethnographic project? How does the anthropological perspective challenge assumptions about about disability vis-à-vis human capacities and socialities across social worlds and over time? What theoretical underpinnings hold together the core logics of the anthropological approach to disability, and what divergent theoretical approaches characterize recent disability anthropology? Throughout, we will problematize normative cultural paradigms of: a biological and curative approach to bodily and mental difference; cartesian dualism in perceptions "normal" bodyminds; patriarchy, racialization, and colonization as bound to logics of ableism; and ableist hierarchies of productivity.

This course draws upon writings from anthropology, geography, sociology, science and technology studies, and the humanities to explore how infrastructures organize and are organized by cultural, economic, political, and social life. What is the genealogy of infrastructures in the contemporary world? What do these infrastructures enable the movement of, and how? What does an ethnography of infrastructures look like? How does studying infrastructure push our thinking of the political in liberal democracies and under capitalism? And what can these studies reveal about questions of violence, racism, and inequality on a global scale?

This seminar explores the production and politics of legal evidence, scientific proof, and uncertainty. It unpacks the ways in which technical-scientific knowledge production processes are mobilized within the legal field, and enable certain legal and political outcomes, while making others impossible. Drawing on the fields of political and legal anthropology, science and technology studies and critical human geography, the seminar brings foundational texts investigating epistemological and ontological conditions of evidence, certainty, and uncertainty together with the recent ethnographies of controversies in the fields of law and science. The seminar will examine various cases that include, but are not limited to, injury claims, environmental contaminations, systematic human rights violations, and political asylum cases.

Climate emergencies, forced migration, energy finitude, poverty, racism, mediated mass-surveillance, conspiracies, alternative facts, populism, pandemics — all provide unsettling markers of our times. As chroniclers and theorists of the moment, anthropologists are providing key insights into some of today’s most pressing problems as well as new analytic tools with which to examine them. This advanced seminar surveys a range of contemporary concerns and explores some of the ways current anthropologists are engaging — methodologically, analytically, theoretically — with them. It should thus be of interest to students who have yet to choose a research topic, and/or who wish to expand their knowledge of the discipline today. The seminar’s second concern is less with an anthropology of troubled times than with an anthropology in them. This concern arises from the observation that anthropology is part of the world it seeks to apprehend: a world that enables and constrains, invites and inhibits particular modes of anthropological thinking, theorising and practice. The seminar thus interrogates anthropology’s own grounds of knowledge, dwelling on some of the epistemological, ethical and political conundrums that anthropology’s real-world entanglements unavoidably entail. This will take us well beyond "troubled times," inviting students to interrogate that curious set of Euro-American knowledge practices we call "Anthropology."

The aim of this graduate seminar is twofold: 1) to examine the potential and challenges of "more-than-human" approaches to ethnography; and 2) to explore what more-than-human ethnographies could offer to the social debates about the Anthropocene that demand a critical and fundamental rethinking of the position of the human in the world. More-than-human approaches to ethnography have received growing attention in the last two decades as a critical response to anthropocentric frameworks in documenting and analyzing culture and society. Based on the realization that human exceptionalism has contributed to abrasive resource extraction and industrialization, colonialism, planetary scale environmental degradation and a variety of injustices associated with the above, more-than-human ethnographies start from the premise that the human is inseparable from what is called "the environment." Various strategies have been experimented with in order to focus on the “entanglement” of various actors, including humans, and to examine how specific entanglements shape social relations and politics. In this seminar, we will read ethnographies that highlight the entangled relationship between humans and other beings — such as animals, plants, insects, fungi, microorganisms, land, water, wind, technological devices — that together shape the world.

As an introduction to the history of anthropological thought, this MA-level core course aims to familiarize students with the key thinkers, theoretical approaches, and ethnographic innovations that shaped the discipline in the twentieth century. It likewise considers the kinds of knowledge, ethics, and modes of both representation and analysis these different approaches have demanded. An understanding of the historically situated character of our discipline is a crucial component of our contemporary practice, and this includes taking seriously the intellectual genealogies out of which — and often against which — contemporary thought has emerged.

This seminar aims to assist doctoral students in the socio-cultural and linguistic field to develop thesis and research grant proposals. Throughout the seminar, the participants will be guided step by step to produce effective proposals for anthropological fieldwork. The seminar is designed as an intensive writing workshop that is based on timely sharing of work and peer-discussion. Run in workshop style, the seminar will help participants to develop skills of giving and receiving constructive comments on each other’s writing.

This advanced seminar aims to equip students with a partial intellectual history of sociocultural anthropology. Such courses are often structured chronologically, moving from classical to contemporary social and anthropological theory (e.g., ANT6100H). This course instead assumes a familiarity with the theoretical canons, their critiques and historical emergence, and attends to particular foundational questions and epistemological concerns that have long preoccupied anthropologists. Thus, each week serves as a minor genealogy of anthropological thought. Through the seminar students should come to appreciate not only the varied theoretical positions and projects that have animated anthropology at specific sociohistorical moments, but also the recursive nature of anthropological theorising itself — the many ways that old questions are continually being revisited, revised and reanimated through new lexicons and lenses.

Participants in this class conduct an independent ethnographic inquiry, analyze data, write it up and publish it on the Ethnography Lab website as an original contribution to knowledge. The premise of the class is that the most effective way to learn how to do ethnographic research is by actually doing it, with guidance and plenty of opportunity for feedback. The format of the class is collaborative. Each year the class has a common theme. All students identify a research site related to the theme, usually a site within the University of Toronto where they conduct primary ethnographic research, and bring issues of research design, ethics, theory, and analysis to the weekly group session for collective brainstorming. Assignments include individual weekly blog posts, collective synthesis and writing for the website, and an individual final report.

Offers a graduate level introduction to current work in the field of medical anthropology that is informed by sociocultural anthropology. Readings address many topics and geographic locations, and will be selected to highlight differences — at the level of questions asked, literatures and disciplines engaged, methods used, writing style employed, and intended audience. May feature some virtual visits by scholars whose work the class will read.

Humans are exquisitely social animals and shared care of young is crucial to survival and adult functioning. In this class we sample, explore and discuss the variety of forms of human infant and young child care across space and time, of which parenting is just one. Specifically, we explore perspectives generated by anthropologists, international public health practitioners and others interested in variation in childcare practices and its social determinants and health effects. We consider the complex, biocultural and bi-directional relationships between care and health in different social and ecological settings. Students can: expand their understanding of patterns of human care-giving, and theories offered to explain them; think about the design, techniques and goals of anthropological and interdisciplinary research; consider the evolutionary history of childcare and its potential contemporary relevance; identify differences and commonalities in cross-cultural patterns of childcare; reflect on the salient care needs of human young; discuss variation in practice through the alternative “lenses” of diversity, disparity, and inequity; understand the relation between child care contexts and global health indicators; address implications for policy and the future of human well being and planetary health.

This course examines the field of global health from the perspectives of socio-cultural and medical anthropology. The course provides an introduction to the history, concepts, issues, ideologies, and institutions of international health, focusing on the contributions and critiques provided by medical anthropology.

All students of human development are interested in two questions: What develops? What influences development? In this course we are also interested in a third question: What is the role of formal education in human development? This course will provide an opportunity for students to construct an overall perspective on development and education, and to be introduced to the main areas of expertise among the faculty.

This course addresses issues and developmental changes in children and the factors involved in child development. Infancy, the preschool period, early school years, intermediate years, and adolescence are covered. Clinical and/or educational issues may be covered in some sections of this course.

Theories and Techniques of Counselling and Psychotherapy - Part I will introduce students to the process of psychotherapy and associated theories and techniques. Students will learn to conceptualize presenting issues from a number of theoretical orientations. Additionally, they will have an opportunity to engage in experiential exercises to practice relevant counselling skills and interventions through peer counselling activities. Being a culturally-responsive and self-aware practitioner is central to providing ethical and effective psychological services. Therefore, students will be invited to critically reflect on the theories discussed and the applicability of each to working with diverse client populations and concerns.

This course is intended to provide students with basic skills in clinical assessment and counselling interventions. Among others, issues related to the assessment of risk, history taking, clinical formulation, and the relationship between assessment and intervention will be addressed. Basic counselling interventions such as empathic responding, exploration of client's affect and cognitions, and problem solving will be explored. The course emphasizes the therapeutic relationship as well as the importance of ethical and legal issues in the provision of therapy. While the course presents didactic material, students have extensive opportunity to role play, and self-knowledge as well as issues related to boundary maintenance, power relationships in the provision of therapy and future self-development are also examined. This course involves sequenced skill training, with extensive counselling simulation and supervision of practice in a field setting. In addition to regular class meetings and time spent in group supervision with the instructor, M.Ed. students in Counselling are required to be in attendance one full day per week at their practicum settings. Some students may spend two full days in their practicum setting. MA students are required to be in attendance at least 2 full days per week at their practicum settings. All full- and part-time students must arrange their practica in consultation with the department's Coordinator of Internship and Counselling Services. Continuing students should plan to contact the Coordinator by March 15, and new students by May 15, in order to arrange the best match between student needs and field placement availability. The Counselling committee reserves the right to make any final decisions when questions arise concerning the placement of a student in a setting.

Current theories and research on personality are reviewed from several perspectives, including psychoanalytic, interpersonal, humanistic, trait, psychobiological, operant, and social cognitive. Topics include personality development and consistency, personality change, conscious and unconscious functioning, aggression, learned helplessness, personality disorders, sex and gender issues, and cross-cultural personality theories. Major theoretical approaches to personality within the context of clinical counseling psychology. This will include philosophical assumptions, key concepts, the process of change, and applications. Designed for those interested in personality development, change, and treatment issues. Specific content relevant to diverse socio- cultural contexts has been included. Upon completion of this course students will be able to: Understand the development of various Western psychology personality theories; understand the issues relevant to personality theory and development in culturally diverse contexts; and articulate a critical understanding of one of the major theories presented in class.

This course provides students with an overview of legal, ethical, and professional issues as they relate to the practice of psychology. The current regulatory model of psychology in Ontario and its implications for practice are reviewed. The Canadian Code of Ethics, College of Psychologists' Standards of Professional Conduct, federal and provincial legislation, and case law that apply to practice in Ontario are reviewed as they relate to issues of confidentiality, record keeping, consent, competence, professional boundaries, and diversity issues in assessment, psychotherapy, and research. Throughout the course, a model of ethical decision-making designed to assist practitioners with ethical dilemmas is reviewed and practised with a variety of case examples in the context of small- and large-group discussion.

The aim of this course is to provide a graduate level overview of a rapidly emerging field of research and application: Mind Brain and Education, also called Science of Learning, or Educational Neuroscience. The goal of this field is to bring together the theories, findings and methodologies of cognitive science, developmental science, education and neuroscience to understand the human mind/brain and its development and to devise effective ways to support learning and education.

This course will review the research findings and clinical case literature in selected areas of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender psychology with reference to their implications for professional practice in counselling psychology. Particular emphasis will be given to the clinical and research implications of sexual orientation identity acquisition, bias crime victimization, same sex domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, gender dysphoria, and alcohol and substance use. Students will come to a greater appreciation and understanding of the special counselling needs of clients from differing sexual orientations and gender identities through a combination of lectures, seminar presentations, discussions, bibliographic and Internet research, and original student research projects.