Course Description This graduate-level methods seminar is an intensive introduction to reading and writing “new ethnographies”—what H. L. Goodall calls an “emerging, alternative style of qualitative writing” that “combines the personal and the professional, … work that may be rendered as a story …, or an account that derives rhetorical force from blurring or blending …

Course Description Theoretical perspectives from Science and Technology Studies have become increasingly influential in the study of health in Africa in recent years. The scholarly turn toward bio-politics and the examination of vernacular science has challenged the relevance of deeply embedded polarities – traditional versus modern, African healing versus biomedicine – that have long inspired …

Course Description If dissidence is broadly defined as a manifest opposition with an established institution, dogma, genre or tradition, it also implies innovation and originality. The legacies of colonialism, the repressive nature of post-independence regimes, and the continuance of patriarchal apparatuses have prompted women to constantly find new means to cope with political, religious, and …

Course Description This course explores the epistemological foundations and critical applications of the concept of melodrama, with particular emphasis on African literature and screen media. In ways that are increasingly amenable to cultural studies analysis, melodrama has attracted a body of theory paying simultaneous and innovative attention to the formal, historical, and political properties and …