Dr Laura Bear, and Professor Deborah James, OLD 5.08

MSc Social Anthropology, MSc Anthropology and Development, MSc Social Anthropology (Learning and Cognition), and MSc Law, Anthropology and Society, MSc China in Comparative Perspective, MSc Development Studies, MSc Human Rights, MPA Public and Economic Policy/MPA Public Policy and Management,/MPA International Development/MPA European Public and Economic Policy/MPA Public and Social Policy, MSc Regulation and MSc Regulation (Research).

A background in the social sciences, preferably anthropology.

The course addresses, in particular, topics in the anthropology of globalization. It undertakes analysis of the transformation of economic institutions as a result of their incorporation into a wider capitalist market (and of state policies and development initiatives). These themes are examined in relation to relevant theoretical debates and with reference to selected ethnography.

The social and political impact of post-Fordism, flexible work regimes and the knowledge economy; the causes and consequences of transnationalism; local responses to the transition from peasant to proletarian; new social movements among peasant communities; the 'new consumer' and consumer citizenship; critiques of concepts of the informal economy and social capital from the perspective of post-socialist societies; capitalist and state interventions in the environment and local reactions to them; commoditization of bodies in biological citizenship; the spaces of  neo-liberal cities.

Lectures weekly LT, Seminars weekly LT.

Students will do presentations during seminars for which they will receive formative feedback. They will also have an opportunity to write tutorial essays on topics from the course which will be formatively assessed.

L.Basch et al Nations Unbound: (1994); C.Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy: women, work and pink-collar identities in the Carribean (2000); M.Mills, Thai Women and the Global Labour Force: consuming desires, contested selves (1999); M.Kearney, Reconceptualising the Peasantry: anthrpoology in a global perspective (1996); M. Buroway and K.Verdery (Eds) Uncertain Transitions: ethnographies of change in the post-socialist world; J.McGaffey, Congo/Paris: transnational traders on the margins of the law (2000); H.Moore and M. Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: gender, nutrition and agricultural change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990 (1994); J.Collier & A.Ong Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics and Ethics as Anthropological Problems.

There is a two-hour examination (100%) in the ST.