Integrated Degree in Anthropology (including Foundation Year) - Open Book Pathway

Modern Cultures in Interdisciplinary Focus

Modern Cultures in Interdisciplinary Focus

TBC

Academic Literacies

Academic Literacies

This module aims to give you the skills needed to work effectively in a higher education environment. Lots of the skills you will need are common to all degree subjects, and this course will be appropriate for people progressing to a wide range of programmes. You will learn verbal and written communication skills, research and critical analysis, including online research. You will gain effective study skills, including listening and note taking, record keeping and effective understanding of different citation styles, planning and time management, You will learn about research communities, forms of interaction such as seminars, tutorials, and academic discussion. We will explore London’s academic and cultural resources in a series of visits and learn to make the best use of the Capital as a place for learning.

As part of learning to practice the skills of academic life, we will use social science research examples as tools to understand contemporary Higher Education experience, and as examples for analysis and critical intervention based on our own experiences.

We will support your development of digital skills across a range of platforms, including giving you the opportunity of some introduction to basic coding principals to aid understanding of how new technologies can be harnessed for academic purposes. We will work with other themes from contemporary academic debate, for example “Globalisation” to explore and practice the methodologies and skills learned in the module. The assessment methods are designed to introduce students to a reflective and analytical approach to learning, starting with self reflection in the skills audit, followed by a self-development plan, to build the required academic skills. These might include digital skills, reading techniques, time management, verbal or written expression, academic language, subject knowledge, and methodological approaches.

Facility with research both on line and in the library will be taught and tested, through formal teaching and exercises, as well as through “action research”, in undertaking a piece of guided research and report writing. In this way, the assessment will demonstrate students’ readiness to undertake undergraduate work

Ways into Anthropology

Ways into Anthropology

This module will introduce you to the key theoretical and methodological underpinnings of social anthropology, and to the debates that have been central to the discipline.

You’ll explore the history and theories of the subject such as religion, communication and symbolism through a critical, inclusive and decolonising lens.

You’ll be encouraged to reflect on your own experiences of everyday aspects of culture and society, and how many everyday social practices and institutions shape our sense of collective identity and social status in the modern world. You’ll also examine how the colonial histories of societal practices and institutions continue to operate as sites of disjuncture and exclusion in creating, sustaining and social inequalities by making them appear as a ‘natural’ part of everyday life.

You’ll examine the way public action, social justice movements, and local/indigenous forms of protest and activism have sought to liberate everyday understandings from racialised, prejudicial, and ethnocentric colonial assumptions. You’ll also address issues around the environment and sustainability, specifically in relation to exploring ideas about human relationships with other-than-human beings and things.

Contemporary Issues in Anthropology

Contemporary Issues in Anthropology

This module will introduce you to the role and scope of anthropology in the modern world. Using accessible and contemporary examples of anthropological writing and research, you’ll explore how anthropology facilitates cross-cultural understanding of different ‘ways of seeing’, and the importance of this in an increasingly globalised context.

You’ll learn how twenty-first-century anthropological research addresses how all human societies participate in wide networks of social relationships under a dominant global capitalist economy. You’ll consider the role of anthropological research and examine how anthropologists approach our global world, as reflective and politically engaged researchers.

You’ll explore anthropology in an interdisciplinary way, looking at political, economic and social issues whilst gaining a strong foundation in the ethnographic and theoretical foundations of Anthropology.

This module will be delivered primarily via online and blended learning.