| Course Info | Class Number: 2708
The Balch Seminars introduce all first-year students at Bryn Mawr to a critical, probing, thoughtful approach to the world and our roles in it. These challenging seminars are taught by scholar/teachers of distinction within their fields and across academic disciplines. They facilitate the seminars as active discussions among students, not lectures. Through intensive reading and writing, the thought-provoking Balch Seminars challenge students to think about complex, wide-ranging issues from a variety of perspectives.
Current topic description: The diversity of 21st-century U.S. society
makes it difficult to generalize about “American culture.” How do we
construct a sense of ourselves, our people, our home? How do we
understand those who are different from us? And what role do
seemingly impersonal factors—institutional structures, national
politics, and mass-mediated culture—play in these projects of
negotiating difference and belonging? This seminar will explore these
questions through the lens of ethnography, a method based on
long-term, participatory research in which the researcher’s own ideas
and assumptions are often challenged, and in which understanding and
representing the voices of others is of prime importance. We will
focus on three anthropological case studies on different topics and
settings within the contemporary U.S.: girlhood and race relations in
a suburban high school, refugee resettlement in a New England town,
and country music performances by Navajo musicians in the American
southwest, pairing each study with documentary film and journalistic reportage. |
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