MPhil in Social Anthropological Research - Course Structure

Students taking the MPhil in Social Anthropological Research are supervised on an individual basis. In addition, students attend a core course seminar, run fortnightly throughout the year, and choose a total of six specialist modules to attend during Michaelmas term and the first half of Lent term. 

Assessment

Students are examined on 

• One 13,000 word dissertation;
• Two 5,000 word essays on subjects chosen by the candidate, which may not be the same subject as the dissertation; 
• One 2,000 word practical writing exercise. The range of possible formats will be announced before the course begins, and can include a PhD research proposal, a blog post, newspaper article, policy report.

Core seminar

The core course runs fortnightly and covers contemporary themes in social anthropology as well as professional and skills development. The latter includes training in writing research proposals, blogs, news items and comment pieces; producing podcasts or other audiovisual material; preparing research presentations. 

Provisional specialist modules for 2026-27

Specialist modules are reading- and discussion-intensive seminars that take place in four-weekly blocks over Michaelmas and the first half of Lent. MPhil SAR students choose a total of six modules to attend.

These seminars do not have assessments; rather, they are opportunities for students to engage with current research on specific topics that they may use to further their own research interests or as the basis of their 5,000 word essays.

The specialist modules are as follows:

Research Methods I  & II (various lecturers) 

Research Methods I & II consist of a combination of lectures (held together with other cohorts) and postgraduate-specific seminars at which each method, and its relation to your research, is discussed in greater detail. These sessions will be especially useful if you’ve had limited experience of doing in-person research/fieldwork or would like to explore unfamiliar methods for your dissertation research.

Sessions may include: participant observation, interviews, audiovisual methods, digital ethnography, archives, life histories, extended case methods, anthropology ‘at home’.

The Anthropology of Power (Prof David Sneath)

In this seminar we read and critically reflect upon changing theories of power used in anthropology, and examine the roles that explicit and implicit notions of power and politics play in classic and recent ethnographic studies. We ask what difference a sensitivity to inclusive notions of power makes when reconsidering classical anthropological analytical categories such as ‘kinship’ and ‘exchange’.

On Modes and Forms (Prof Matt Candea and Dr Mike Degani)

Anthropologists in recent decades have been rather intensely focused on questions of substance (things, embodiment, materiality, objects, affects, life) and have tended to stress the importance of emergence, messiness and the unexpected in their accounts of social life. Against that background, this module returns to the often neglected yet perennial anthropological problem of order. From planetary boundaries to algorithmic protocols, from bureaucratic procedures to aesthetic styles—to say nothing of statuses, laws, beliefs, and other classic objects of anthropological investigation—patterns, rhythms and regularities are everywhere in social life. We survey recent work on modes and forms to ask how these patterned phenomena enable and constrain possibility for different actors, and how they emerge, evolve, or coexist. Along the way, we will consider the formal properties of anthropological knowledge-making itself, the regularities and creative disruptions of anthropological concepts, methods and heuristics.

Rights and Justice (Prof Harri Englund)

From local modes of disputing to the codification of ‘customary law’ under European colonialism, social anthropology has a rich record of studying justice in its multiple historical, political, and moral instantiations. Studies of human rights, from war zones to the intimacies of gender relations, have more recently placed social anthropology at the centre of major inter-disciplinary debates. Combining old and new readings, these seminars explore justice as a domain of contestation in which arguments based on ‘rights’ represent only one possible form of claim-making.

The Anthropology of Wellbeing (Dr Iza Kavedžija)

This module explores wellbeing not as a static state or individual achievement, but as an ongoing, intersubjective process enacted within diverse social and cultural contexts. While the social sciences have traditionally focused on crises and pathologies, we invite a shift toward the anthropology of the good, structured around the central inquiry of how people strive to live well and flourish, even in adverse circumstances. This four-session inquiry approaches wellbeing through the three complementary conceptual prisms of conviviality, care, and creativity, using ethnographic examples to show how the “good life” plays out within the relations that constitute people. By critically evaluating the assumptions underwritten by policy and economic agenda, we will examine how wellbeing thrives in circulation through affective environments and the skills required to live well with both human and nonhuman others, asking what it truly means to sustain a life of meaning within an interconnected and ever-shifting world.

Museum Anthropology (Dr Mark Elliott and Dr Eve Haddow)

Led by one of the Senior Curators in Anthropology at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (MAA), these seminars engage with the potential and problematics of museums through the collections and activities at MAA.  Sessions focus on artefact analysis, provenance research, community co-production and collaboration, and exhibitions and public engagement.  To encourage thinking through things in a museum context, each participant is asked to choose an artefact from the MAA collections that will be the focus for discussions throughout this module.  

Anthropology in Dark Times (Prof Yael Navaro)

This module will engage with works by anthropologists who have created methods, visions and frameworks for the study of political violence, wartime, genocide and its aftermaths, and anthropocenic extinction. What may be the role of anthropology (and anthropologists) in dark times? What insights might ethnography bring to studies of environments of war, ongoing genocide and natural/political disasters? 

Multispecies and more-than-human anthropology (Dr Liana Chua)

What role do other-than-humans play in social, political, religious and economic life? Can fungi, animals, rocks, toxins and bacteria be seen as social agents – or even as subjects? How do current approaches to multispecies and more-than-human worlds differ from or overlap with earlier ones? In this module, we’ll explore these and other questions that have been thrown up by the recent multispecies and more-than-human turn in anthropology. Running through our seminars will be a central puzzle, namely: what does it mean to do anthropology beyond the human? And, by extension, what methods and frameworks do we need in order to pull this off, and what new politics and possibilities could this give rise to?