Workshops

The African Studies Workshop (ASW) is an interdisciplinary group made up of students and faculty researching the peoples of Africa and its diasporas, past and present. One of the workshop’s primary goals is to elucidate Africa’s dynamic relationship to a wider world and to chart the effects of these processes in various spheres of African life. Graduate students and faculty from the Department of Anthropology have long held a central place in the workshop, but active participants in the workshop also come from Art History, English, Film Studies, History, Human Development, and Political Science. In addition to regular presentations by students, faculty, and invited guests, the workshop hosts biannual Red Lion Seminars jointly with Northwestern University’s Program of African Studies.

The Interdisciplinary Archaeology Workshop (IAW) was founded as the primary point of substantive intellectual connection between archaeologists in the divisions of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. The workshop allows graduate students, faculty members, and invited guests to present their work as well as research plans to a community that can provide a deeply grounded and theoretically informed response. Historically, archaeological research has itself been divided among different academic disciplines, with corresponding variations in intellectual traditions and approaches. It has always been the aim of the IAW to bridge these divisions and to foster a healthy, informed dialogue on the aspects of method and theory that cut across the field’s diverse disciplinary locations. The workshop brings together faculty and students from Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, forging an archaeological community that is more than the sum of its parts. In addition, the workshop has succeeded in its ambition to draw on members of other interested departments and committees such as Classics, African Studies, History, East Asian and South Asian Studies, as well as Geographical Studies. All interested participants are encouraged to attend.

Current Ethnography and Social Theory (CEST) is an intellectual forum that invites substantive and continuous conversation between students in anthropology and those located in other disciplines historically concerned with social, economic, and cultural analysis. This workshop centers anthropological theory and methods without narrowing the conversation to those undergoing professional training in sociocultural anthropology. Taking inspiration from moments in which, for example, anthropologists have enriched their work through dialogue with historians, philosophers, economists, sociologists, and a vast range of other disciplinary practitioners CEST provides a space to think critically about social life from diverse geopolitical positions. Sharing works-in-progress from students at varying stages of their education in an interdisciplinary community will foster collaboration, enable students to build scholarly networks, and formulate stronger research projects, contributing to important questions in the social sciences.

The Semiotics: Culture in Context workshop seeks to advance research grounded in a semiotic framework. Presentations will come from a variety of fields including but not limited to linguistics, psychology, sociology, political science, literary theory, and anthropology. By not limiting the topic of research by area, period or discipline, the workshop encourages discussion to center on how to study social and cultural phenomena as embedded in a meaningful context. By building on many seminal studies that have used semiotic approaches, the goal of the workshop is to continue to develop the rigorous analytic framework that provides the method for clearly defining linkages between the object of analysis and its context.

The Workshop on Latin America and the Caribbean is an interdisciplinary forum and intellectual community for graduate students and faculty who are interested in the academic problems and literature pertaining to the region. The workshop hosts regular presentations of works in progress by students, faculty, and invited guests, as well as special events and gatherings. Participants come from a wide range of disciplines from across the social sciences and humanities, enabling an interdisciplinary conversation and exchange around questions of common interest to those whose work focuses on the region. We welcome any and all who share an interest in the history, literature, politics, culture, and social life of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Medicine and Its Objects Workshop (MaIOW) examines medicine in relation to the material and social worlds in which it is enacted. We focus on the multiple objects that constitute medical domains: the objects of inquiry that guide knowledge production, the objects of intervention that direct therapeutic processes, and the material objects that mediate the intersections between theory and practice. MaIOW is a broadly interdisciplinary workshop, bringing together perspectives from Anthropology, Comparative Human Development, History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine, Public Health, Social Work, Sociology, and numerous area studies.

This workshop is designed to keep faculty and graduate students of social science and humanistic disciplines concerned with South Asia in touch with new directions in the field by providing interdisciplinary models of methodological and substantive approaches. The Workshop makes a special point of crossing the boundary between the humanities and social sciences. It collaborates with the South Asia Seminar, one dedicated to graduate student presentations, the other to presentations by in-resident or visiting scholars and faculty. The South Asia Seminar series and the TAPSA Workshop bring together not only scholars from various disciplines, but also make a special point of attracting scholars from South Asia. Their visits are designed to promote continuing exchanges with recent work on the sub-continent and to introduce graduate students to future colleagues in South Asia.

U.S. Locations explores ethnographic research in Canada and the United States within social
scientific fields engaging core cross-disciplinary anthropological problems. In a world of global
interconnections, we provide a forum for anthropologists and other social scientist’s crafting
rigorous approaches to locating America as a cultural and sociological entity within, across, and
outside the geographic boundaries of North America. Critically analyzing the burgeoning
literature on ethnographic practice and theory, and focusing on carefully formulated empirical studies in particular locations, this workshop aims to locate the theoretical position of North
America within the field of anthropology and related disciplines.