Take a Pre-Departure Course
For Outbound Students (& Returnees)
Attending to Culture (Anthropology 235)
Taught every Spring Quarter by William Murphy (wmurphy@northwestern.edu). Returnees may also consider enrolling in this course to process their past experience abroad, and prepare for their next cross-cultural experience.
This course focuses on the shared experiences of the student going abroad to study or work and the anthropologist going abroad to do fieldwork. Both embark on a journey of discovering and understanding another culture. Both seek to be attentive to what is happening around them in order to make sense of the way of life they encounter. Both are "strangers abroad" facing similar intellectual and personal challenges. The course introduces anthropological concepts and methods as a toolkit for addressing these challenges. The toolkit encourages a particular kind of intellectual attentiveness when living in other cultures.
Participation in another culture also raises questions about what it means to be a global citizen concerned with social justice, economic development, and human rights in national and international contexts. This topic is emphasized especially in the second half of the course, when we consider a contemporary, paradigmatic model of development theory called the capabilities approach as formulated by the Nobel Prize economist Amartya Sen. Questions of human and social development, which anthropologists and students continually confront in their experiences abroad, are intellectually grounded in these readings by Sen. His framework provides students with additional concepts for engaging as thoughtful participants in the debates as well as actions pertaining to human development in the countries where they study or work abroad.
