ANTH047 PO - Economic Anthropology

When Offered: Offered alternate years; next offered fall 2022
Instructor(s): Staff
Credit: 1

From “diversity management” in the workplace to the “Ministry of McKinsey” that dominates various Gulf monarchies, the discourses, rhetorics, visions, and recommendations of consultants proliferate globally as we careen from one endless crisis to another. This course will explore the histories, aesthetics, affects, and logics that have produced this shadowy, yet cheerful figure of “the consultant”. Critically, the course also explores how the figure of the consultant transforms ideas of knowledge-production, political responsibility, urban forms, imperialism, and ideas of the future. Throughout the course, students will explore forms of expertise, new office cultures, the work of public relations, optimization, and design. While the proximity of the consultant to the anthropologist is of particular interest, students will read widely across different academic disciplines which include critical architecture, art history, literature, histories of capitalism, media and technology studies. The course will also consider how the figure of “the consultant” takes up, but is also taken up by cinema, literature, memes, and contemporary art.

Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
PO Area 2 Requirement;PO Speaking Intensive