Learning outcomes

Using different teaching methods (lectures, in-class discussion, meetings with guest speakers, videos), the course aims to introduce the students to a critical awareness of the discipline’s objects of study (such as culture, ethnicity, belonging, identity, representations of otherness, practices and knowledge), as well as of the methodological strategies of the ethnographic approach. This will allow students, at the end of the course, to begin to interpret information about the contexts with which they interact through ethnographic sensitivity and to communicate their own readings of such contexts within the workgroup.

Program

Anthropological knowledge is practical knowledge, action-oriented, constantly exposed to comparison with other worldviews. Starting from these premises, the course will be developed in two parts: the analysis of some the discipline’s objects of study will be followed by a comparison with specific situations and experiences of intercultural local contexts in order to foster an understanding of anthropological knowledge as a perspective that can promote and activate practices of intercultural mediation.

Course Readings:
1) Paola Villano e Bruno Riccio, Culture e mediazioni, 2008, il mulino
2) Annamaria Rivera, La guerra dei simboli. Veli postcoloniali e retoriche sull’alterità, 2005, Dedalo.
3) Rosanna Cima, 2005, Abitare le diversità. Pratiche di Mediazione culturale, Carocci, quarto capitolo, pp. 83-109.
4) Sally Morgan, Tjalaminu Mia, Blaze Kwaymullina (a cura), Malditerra, Le Nuove Muse, Torino 2009 (Heartsick for Country, Fremantle Press, 2008).

Examination Methods

Final exam: assignment and oral discussion of an ethnographic case