Ethnography of New York City -- GUNS: History, Culture, Politics, Change (ANT251)
This course will be the first in a series to address topics of social, political, and intellectual concern in New York City. The topic for this semester will be GUNS: History, Culture, Politics, and Change. This course combines an in depth analysis of scholarly literature, policy documents, and activist platforms on guns and gun violence with methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis, giving students the tools to analyze the place of guns in our communities, city, and nation. The course will be extremely interactive and hands-on, and will run in collaboration with a simultaneous, parallel course at the University of New Mexico.
Attitudes towards guns reflect social and cultural values; appropriate management of gun use requires social and political action. This course will examine the history, culture, and politics of gun ownership and use in New York City, with the aim of generating new perspectives on contemporary “gun culture” and novel policy recommendations for the management of guns in our community. With an ethnographic focus on our community in the Bronx, this course will introduce students to advanced methods in ethnographic research, including study design, data collection, and analysis. Students will integrate their original research with secondary literature—scholarly materials as well as policy papers and reports from the “gray” literature—to develop a robust understanding of gun issues here at home. We will also interface with a complementary class at the University of New Mexico, where students will be undertaking a parallel course on gun cultures in a different part of the United States. Using a digital classroom interface, online discussion groups, and live streaming to coordinate the classes, students will compare their research and results throughout the semester. By setting these two complementary perspectives on gun cultures side by side, students will be able to develop a more robust, comparative perspective on gun cultures in the contemporary United States.
Attitudes towards guns reflect social and cultural values; appropriate management of gun use requires social and political action. This course will examine the history, culture, and politics of gun ownership and use in New York City, with the aim of generating new perspectives on contemporary “gun culture” and novel policy recommendations for the management of guns in our community. With an ethnographic focus on our community in the Bronx, this course will introduce students to advanced methods in ethnographic research, including study design, data collection, and analysis. Students will integrate their original research with secondary literature—scholarly materials as well as policy papers and reports from the “gray” literature—to develop a robust understanding of gun issues here at home. We will also interface with a complementary class at the University of New Mexico, where students will be undertaking a parallel course on gun cultures in a different part of the United States. Using a digital classroom interface, online discussion groups, and live streaming to coordinate the classes, students will compare their research and results throughout the semester. By setting these two complementary perspectives on gun cultures side by side, students will be able to develop a more robust, comparative perspective on gun cultures in the contemporary United States.