Graduate Studies in Anthropology at Western

Sociocultural
Anthropology (MA & PhD)

At UWO, the Sociocultural graduate stream incorporates the two sub-disciplines of Sociocultural and Linguistic Anthropology. These programs build on faculty strengths in ethnography, the use of historical approaches (e.g., historical anthropology, ethno-history, intellectual history, oral and life history) and studies of power and interactions from both centres and peripheries. By integrating the diverse methodological tools from social, cultural and semiotic anthropology, students are required to address complex issues in systematic and reflexive ways. Contrasting approaches to, and definitions of, power and marginalization in social, cultural and semiotic anthropology are presented in the context of historically-grounded and contextualized contemporary cultures. Diverse faculty research interests crystallize in two core areas of research strength. One area is Environment, Culture and Political Ecology, which takes the social, cultural, and political dimensions of environmental use and ecological change as its point of departure. The range of issues addressed includes the situation of indigenous peoples on resource frontiers, the production and consumption of global commodities, sustainability in rural and urban settings, and the community-nature interface in primate conservation. A second focus is in Borders, Identities and Mobility. This research strand deals with identities and the movement of people (forced and voluntary) in relation to shifting, disappearing and emerging borders/boundaries in the past and present. Our work in this area covers topics including refugees, displacement and identity, labour migration and the history of borderlands and indigenous peoples.

Sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists at Western have conducted fieldwork among diverse groups of peoples throughout the world, including the South Pacific, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, Europe, the USA and Canada. Current research projects include studies of the impact of mine closure on indigenous Papua New Guineans, the relationship between state formation and public heath campaigns in Ecuador, urban agricultural movements in Latin America as these relate to issues of poverty and sustainability, sexual minorities and the aged in Canada, refugees and cultural memory in the Near East and North Africa, language endangerment and revitalization in the Amazon, weather predictions in Brazil and the Arctic, and the history of anthropology.

#Top#