URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/S_UBS

Course Objective

Knowledge and understanding: 1. Students gain knowledge and understanding of the most important research themes, concepts, and debates within the field of urban anthropology. 2. Students can recognize how urban development, inequality and insecurity are spatialized, materialized, reproduced, challenged, and represented in cities of the Global North and the Global South. Application: 3. Students can apply key concepts from urban anthropology to an urban case study in Amsterdam or another city in the Netherlands. 4. Students hone their qualitative research skills and become attuned to the ethnographic sensitivities that urban settings require. Making judgements: 5. Students develop a critical attitude towards social, spatial, and material urban dynamics and can formulate their own questions on urban processes. 6. Students are better able to reflect on their own role as researchers operating in an urban setting. Communication: 7. Students can report on their respective research projects in verbal and written form. Learning skills: 8. Students have learned to work in small research teams to carry out a short-term ethnographic research project.

Course Content

Cities are not just static locations; they are also thought-provoking processes. Across the Global North and South, cities shape – and are shaped by – the way people, nature, resources, infrastructures, and ideas flow and settle. Drawing on interdisciplinary and anthropological debates on ‘the urban’, this course delves into the social, spatial, material, and cultural processes that drive and result from patterns of urban development, inequality, and insecurity. These themes are explored through case studies that raise questions on how and why resources and risk are distributed unequally across and within different urban environments. Additionally, we also engage the everyday modes of resistance and negotiation that emerge in response to social and spatial forms of inequality. During the course, students will have the opportunity to conduct their own urban research projects in relation to themes such as housing, gentrification, sustainability, and labour.

Teaching Methods

Lectures and tutorials

Method of Assessment

Written exam and research project in teams.

Literature

To be announced on Canvas.

Target Audience

2nd year students in Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology; Students in the Minor Anthropology or the Minor Development and Global Challenges; also open as an elective course for Exchange Students.

Additional Information

This course fits into several programmes. It is part of the Bachelor Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology; it is the closing of the theme block “Development”, but in time follows directly on two courses from the theme block “World Making” (in particular Identity, Diversity and Inclusion, and Nation and Migration). The themes of these courses –politics, inequality, development, globalization, diversity, identity, migration– all return in Urban Studies. In the same vein, Urban Studies is the closing of the minor Development and Global Challenges and the minor Anthropology. While Urban Studies is integrated in all these programmes, the course can also be taken as an elective course of its own. Note that students are expected to attend three preparatory meetings in November-December (the so-called studielint).

Recommended background knowledge

There are no requirements, but ideally students have completed the courses Political and Economic Anthropology, Development and Globalization, and/or Identity, Diversity and Inclusion.
Academic year1/09/2431/08/25
Course level6.00 EC

Language of Tuition

  • English

Study type

  • Master
  • Bachelor