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.
Specialist modules 2024-25
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.
Specialist modules for 2024-25 provisionally include:
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 for 2024-25 may include: participant observation, interviews, audiovisual methods, digital ethnography, archives, life histories, extended case methods, anthropology ‘at home’
The Anthropology of Crisis and Disaster (Prof Uradyn Bulag)
The Covid-19 pandemic has driven home the message that crises and disasters are not aberrations, but a fundamental feature of the human condition. Anthropologists have long argued that while crisis represents existential disruptions or threats to human and social lives, it may also provide opportunities for creativity and resilience. In this seminar we will engage anthropological scholarship on crises as events (economic, environmental, epidemic and political disasters) that structure history, and as chronic lived experiences, underpinned by disorder, insecurity, or precarity.
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’.
Museum Anthropology (Dr Mark Elliott and Dr Eve Haddow)
These seminars will be led by Senior Anthropology Curators in the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology (MAA). Drawing on MAA's extensive collections and critical museological practice, the module will focus on pressing issues related to de-colonisation, diversity, inclusion and public engagement. The sessions will provide the opportunity to combine theoretical concerns and practical engagement with the ongoing work of the Museum.
Political Economy (Sian Lazar)
In this seminar we will read classic and recent texts to explore how anthropologists have articulated intimate ethnographic engagement with a critique of globally connected (or repeated) political-economic processes. We will study capitalism(s) and colonialities on the one hand, and their counterforces and present-day alternatives on the other.
Anthropology and Art (Dr Iza Kavedžija)
In this seminar we will consider art making as a process that unfolds in the context of specific art worlds. We begin with an exploration of the collaborative nature of art making, and how this opens up questions of authorship. If an artwork emerges through an embodied relationship to one's materials, in interaction with the ideas of others, how are we best to understand the role of the artist as an 'author'? We then consider art in relation to time, focusing on the specific temporalities of the art project, the art event, and the broader horizon of the artist's life course. Finally, we explore the relationship between art and anthropology. What are the key similarities and differences between the two fields? How does ethnographic work and an anthropological sensibility underpin contemporary art projects, and what kinds of art can we hope to make as anthropologists?
For, Against, and Without Sovereignty (Dr Natalia Buitron)
From the workings of the international order to the struggles of native peoples, from personal autonomy to legitimate rule, everyone seems to be struggling for sovereignty in today's world. But is the will to sovereignty inevitable? Can we imagine social arrangements that work against sovereignty, or even exist wholly without it? These seminars explore anthropological concepts of sovereignty: how can we understand relations of sovereignty? How do they combine violence and care, submission and utopia? Sifting through thought experiments and the ethnographic record, we chart the coordinates of worlds without sovereignty, and ask: is it possible to create such worlds today?
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?
The Anthropology of Surveillance (Dr Vita Peacock)
In the popular imaginary, surveillance can connote a dystopian world of total transparency. This module explores and unravels this image. Broadening the term to include a wide variety of monitorial practices and technologies, it asks whether surveillance is not only a matter of containing or controlling social life, but is also constitutive of it. The four seminars will examine the anthropology of surveillance in the realms of: security and policing; welfare states; the monitoring of workers; and the new information economies. Each seminar will travel between non-digital and digital forms of the phenomenon, exploring what difference, if any, digitalisation makes. It concludes with a deliberation on response. Is privacy still a valuable political concept in a data saturated world?
Students will choose 6 modules: 2 in the first half of Michaelmas term, 2 in the second half of Michaelmas term and 2 in the first half of Lent term.
Timetabling constraints will mean that not all combinations will be possible, and if student numbers are deemed too small, some modules may not run.
