BA (Hons) Anthropology & Visual Practice

Introduction to Visual Practice will introduce you to key areas in the history and practice of image use in Anthropological research and publication. You'll also have hands-on training in a number of professional-level software packages, as well as high-level visual and audio production equipment (cameras, recorders, microphones). The module will be split into 4 x 5 week blocks over the year, and will cover the following topics:

• Photography
• Sound
• Film
• Multimedia

The aim of this module is to acquaint you with contemporary social anthropology, as well as to give you the confidence and the tools to think critically and work collaboratively. The module begins by locating the discipline within the social sciences and humanities before proceeding to an exploration of central themes, methodologies and ethical concerns.

The course is structured around lectures, seminars and workshops. Lectures and seminar discussions will draw on late-20th century and contemporary anthropological texts and debates. The emphasis will be on exploring how anthropology can give us a unique perspective on key contemporary social issues. Workshops will include practice-based activities to encourage the development of your critical awareness, thinking and reading, as well as collaborative work skills. The module will also include career-centered discussions.

As the module progresses you will gain a growing sense of what social anthropology is and hopefully feel more confident to enter discussion concerning the kinds of questions it asks. Reflecting this gradual build-up of confidence and understanding, the portfolio assignment – which will involve a series of short texts and/or visual submissions – will be guided by regular discussions, receiving interim feedback at the end of the Autumn term, before final submission and assessment at the end of the Spring term.

Anthropological Methods is an introduction to practices of ethnographic research. The module examines the relationship between theory and method within anthropology. You will learn about the specific techniques that are used by anthropologists as they conduct their fieldwork.

This module also draws attention to how ethnographic knowledge produced during fieldwork is both relational and contextual. It considers certain historical conjectures and power dynamics that have contributed to the way ethnography is (perhaps at times rather paradoxically) at once defined as a product and perceived as a process.

The module explores the epistemological and ethical foundations of anthropological methods in order to encourage you to think about fieldwork as an encounter and ethnography as the relation between anthropological practice and theory.

This module aims to encourage a critical appreciation of ethnographic film, introducing some of the growing literature on visual anthropology, and raising general issues of representation in anthropology as a whole.  

Each week there will be a short lecture and a film screening, which will be followed by group discussion. 

The module offers you a forum for general discussion of anthropological theory and practice while focusing on the work of particular filmmakers. This module will introduce you to the critical appreciation of ethnographic film, some of the growing literature on visual anthropology, and raise general issues of representation in anthropology as a whole. Although you may refer to any visual material that is relevant to your report, you must refer to at least one ethnographic film, and you should not refer to any film that you have not seen.

More information about this module will be available soon.

The aim of this module is to push you to think about history, theory and ethics in anthropology. This will be explored through the prism of controversy. We will be looking at a number of different controversies in anthropology, how they shaped the discipline and what we can learn from them. While doing this we will be looking at some of the key figures in the history of anthropology, the relationship between anthropology and the public and locating these people and events in an historical perspective. Anthropology is not static – it changes constantly. This module is designed to interrogate some of these changes through one particular driving force – controversies. While controversy may sound enticing or exciting, it should be kept in mind that many of these controversies massively affected the lives of researchers, research participants and others – in some cases resulting in deaths or policy shifts that detrimentally impacted on the lives of informants and those around them.

The module will invite you to explore being human through the relations that make and complicate us. This introduction to anthropological thinking encourages us to think about self, other and social world(s) through the relations that connect and differentiate our species. Our critical conversation on human being follows a path of thinking about social relations across multiple scales & contexts: 

• Personhood 
• Bodies: Race/Gender/(dis)Ability 
• Anthropological Selves/Others/Collaborations 
• Kinship/Relatedness/Friendship 
• Non/other-than human/ Mystical/ Devine (animals, spirits, sorcerers, gods....) 
• Infrastructures/ Objects (artefact, document, attire...) 
• Exchange/Exploitation (gifts, comrades, world systems, assemblages....) 
• Citizen/Nation/Border 
• Present Pasts/ Empire/Hauntings 
• Planet/Futures 

As you progress through the course, your thinking will move outwards from selves and persons; through bodies, kin and others; into infrastructures, world systems and planetary futures.

Advanced Visual Practice will build on technical skills introduced in the first year of the programme and will ask students to investigate how theory relates to their practice. 

You'll explore the relationship between theory and practice in image use in Anthropological research and publication. You'll also have hands-on training in a number of professional-level software packages, as well as high-level visual and audio production equipment (cameras, recorders, microphones).  

The module will be split into 3 x 5 week blocks over the year. The final 5 weeks will be used to develop an integrated project which will form the basis of the final year project (Individual Studies in Practice).

Topics will include:

• Film
• Photography
• Multimedia

The aim of the module is to introduce you to black, indigenous and transnational feminist analyses of the historical and sociopolitical foundations and consequences of predatory capitalism. You'll explore the challenges different communities face in relation to different forms of large-scale resource extraction and climate change, and the actions undertaken by those communities to deal with those challenges.

You'll be introduced to these themes via literature and audio-visual content that offers important ways forward, developing the critical analysis skills necessary to explore practical solutions to these problems.

You'll work towards answering the question 'How can reimagining ecology help us to rethink possible responses to large-scale extraction and climate change and to continue to fight for measures that might slow down climate change?'.

The course offers an in-depth and critical anthropological analysis of western political economy through a Marxian and post-colonial framework. Combining historical contextualization and anthropological comparison, the course develops not only an historical materialist and cultural critique of western capitalism, but also a space of hope and prefiguration of post-capitalist life.

Overview of the module content:

To introduce you to the core concepts and theories relating to economic and political organisations and the problem of accounting for change, both empirically and theoretically.

To familiarise you with a number of empirical contexts in order that you may be able to conceptualise the complex socio-economic processes that are affecting the peripheral areas that have long been the concern of anthropologists.

To explore a number of contemporary problems relating to such issues as the apparent contradiction between local or national autonomy and globalisation that do not fit easily into definitions of the "economic" or "political".

This module is concerned with key ways of thinking that have shaped and continue to shape the discipline of social anthropology. As such, the module is intended to augment what you have learned in the first year and to help consolidate your sense of how important concepts in social anthropology fit together.

The focus of the module is how the discipline’s main 20^th century schools of thought have developed, how they relate to one another and what they have contributed to our understandings of the world.

Our concern is with the different ways in which anthropologists have conceived of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ in their efforts to account for the myriad of ways in which humans live.

We shall explore how these approaches to anthropology compete with, and sometimes contradict, one another and how these dynamics have driven the discipline through the political landscape of the twentieth century to where we are now so that we can, in the last, pause to envisage where we can and should go next.

Thinking through race foregrounds several contemporary debates that bring to the fore why race – a concept which purports essential, biologized difference between humans – continues to get reproduced in policy, media representations, expert knowledge, and everyday encounter across the globe even though it was debunked in the previous century. The module also engages with ethnographic accounts that think through how race, gender, and class are experienced and inhabited in relationship to one another in the contemporary moment.

Our academic departments are developing exciting elective ideas to allow you to broaden your education, either to develop vocationally orientated experiences or to learn more about contemporary society, culture and politics. You’ll be able to choose safe in the knowledge that these modules have been designed for non-subject specialists and to bring students from different disciplines together. For example, you may want to take introductions to areas such as Law, Education, the digital industries, the creative industries,think like a designer or understand the history and politics behind our current affairs.

This module provides a critical introduction to the anthropology of policy and engages with key questions of power, governance, and the role of institutions in social change. The aim of the module is to promote a better understanding of public anthropology in ways that provide learning opportunities that both enhance your academic skills and provide opportunities for personal development by engaging with real-world problems and their possible solutions.

We'll explore a range of issues involving contemporary policy interventions that seek to provide solutions to societal problems, including the rationalities that policies embody, the instruments mobilized for their implementation, and key issues around policy travel and translation, policy discourses and their effects, and the complex ways that people engage with, and sometimes resist, policy processes.   

You'll work in groups to build a policy for institutional change relating to an area of your choice. This could be for example lowering the attainment gap in educational institutions, the challenges of creating a carbon-neutral workplace, grappling with the ethical nuances of generating historical transparency regarding cultural heritage, or building more care-driven spaces.

Each week focuses on a different area of research and delivery practice. Teaching comprises a combination of lectures and workshops (depending on class size) ranging from sessions focused on theory building and critical thinking  (what policy does, what does it reveal about practices of inclusion and absence/exclusion etc), to practical sessions addressing the how-tos of policy research (eg where do you find institutional policies and what are the methodologies for reading them) and to creative methodologies for creating and communicating policy (e.g community action research models).  

This module examines indigenous cosmopolitics (political claims, epistemologies and imaginaries which exceed the terms of ‘politics’ as understood and practiced in the global North) across the globe and their entanglements with and inspirations for diverse movements for global justice, decolonization and transformations in relations between humans and the environment. We'll read contemporary cosmopolitical practice and theory to understand the claims (philosophical, legal, political, cultural) made by diversely positioned indigenous groups, and critically position this in dialogue with the history of Western political thought. The module will chart the movements of cosmopolitical thinking across the global South and examine the modes of political and legal practice which it inspires.  

Cosmopolitical philosophies emerging from indigenous thought and practice directly address issues of social and environmental justice, decolonization, and sustainability, and these will therefore be key topics of debate and discussion. The teaching will be research-led and will draw on expertise within the department, and will utilise interdisciplinary perspectives (particularly those from Media, Sociology, Law and Art) in addressing issues of contemporary concern. 

The Anthropology of Religion module takes as its starting point the fact that religion is everywhere in the modern world, exerts a powerful influence on social life, and motivates social action in a variety of ways. You’ll explore how distinctions between the secular and the religious, and between science and magic or ‘superstition’, have been used to legitimate or devalue different/non-Western practices and indigenous cultures.

Using a wide range of ethnographic studies, the module encourages you to question the implicit hierarchy often assumed between secularism and religion, and to challenge and rethink earlier academic epistemologies. A focus on religion as a mode of social action is also explored in relation to how religious belief and practice may promote forms of social justice and activism - as well as violence and oppression.

The module also looks at the relationship between religion, race, place and identity in the context of diasporic communities. You’ll also examine how social media and digital platforms are facilitating transnational notions of religious belonging and identity. You’ll be introduced to anthropological and interdisciplinary perspectives on religion, the body and sexuality. You’ll also explore themes of embodiment and corporeality via the relationship between religion, ecology, and environmentalism. You’ll particularly focus on how nature-oriented new religious movements have sought to resist instrumentalist neo-liberal and Enlightenment disenchantments of space, place and landscape.

This module introduces you to different anthropological approaches to visual and material culture and gives you the opportunity to conduct a piece of visually oriented anthropological research.

It provides a critical introduction to the many ways anthropologists engage with the visual from their use of visual methodologies and analysis of representations to their ethnographic study of everyday visual forms. Focusing on a wide range of visual media from photography, museum exhibitions and popular representations on TV to dress, body art, architecture and other everyday visual and material forms, the module raises issues about the significance of visibility, the politics of representation, the social life of visual and material forms and the relationship between seeing and other senses.

Lots of students join Goldsmiths because they want to make a difference in society, to bring about positive change and develop skills and experiences which will allow them to access exciting careers. Goldsmiths’ Social Change module will allow you to do work on group projects with students from other departments to bring about change. You’ll be introduced to the UN’s Sustainable Development goals and core project management theories and practices allow you to work across a number of weeks towards a final Festival of Ideas where you’ll report work back to the academic and local community.

In your final year, you'll be required to produce a piece of sustained project work in the form of a dissertation and a practical piece of work, supervised by a member of staff, but not supported by a lecture/seminar teaching format. 

You'll receive relevant technical support in lab-based sessions.

You'll be assessed by a portfolio consisting of 4 outputs, along with the final piece of practical work and written production essay.  

Your portfolio should include a treatment, detailed treatment and two rough cuts of the final practice element, and will be worth 20% of the final grade. The production essay will constitute a further 20% of the final grade and the practical piece will account for 60% of the final grade.