Social-Cultural Anthropology
Memorial's Social and Cultural Anthropologists seek to foster an anthropology that is at once skeptical and engaged.
This commitment is reflected in graduate and faculty research and writing projects in applied and advocacy work; action, collaborative and partisan ethnography; cultural criticism, feminist and marxian anthropology.
While faculty research interests are diverse, there is a strong convergence in the unit on problems of power, inequality and social conflict. Faculty and graduate students bring an ethnographic sensibility to a wide range of contemporary problems.
Among others, these include video gambling in Newfoundland , micro-credit in Latin America, the politics of authenticity in Newfoundland tourism, representations of the Viet Nam war, the Northern Ireland peace process, the politics of resource management, bioregulation in Spain, and the politics of infertility in Ireland.
Physically located on the eastern edge of North America, Social and Cultural Anthropology at Memorial has strong intellectual links to European as well as to Canadian and US American scholarship. Indeed, many faculty members have spent time in research institutions in all three regions.
Memorial University has played a pivotal part in developing the anthropology of the North Atlantic. We match our long tradition of excellent local research with a wide range of area specialties in the Americas, the North Atlantic and Western Europe. Other recent hires bring new area specialties – notably, US America and Latin America.
Some of the notable strengths of our graduate programmes are the availability of our faculty and our openness to students who wish to design and carry out unique research projects.
With the support of their faculty mentors, our students have had a high degree of success in winning both internal and external awards, including SSHRC Masters and Doctoral fellowships.
Other resources available to graduate students include our excellent university library and a number of archives and special collections; the Institute for Social and Economic Research; the Digital Research Centre for Qualitative Fieldwork, which houses a wide range of recording and processing equipment, including audio and video recorders and editing equipment; and a visual anthropology unit, which has been active in the department for a decade.
We offer both PhD and MA degrees in Social/Cultural Anthropology. The Archaeology Unit offers separate graduate programmes. There are two options for the MA: thesis and coursework.
The thesis option is normally based on four courses plus a thesis, typically based on fieldwork. This option generally requires two years of full-time study.
The coursework option normally consists of six courses, one of which is a major research paper based on library research. This option is designed for completion in twelve months.
Our PhD program combines the strengths of the North American and British models. As in most North American departments, students are required to pass comprehensive exams and demonstrate reading competence in a second language. However, as in the UK , we see the doctorate primarily as a research degree. Thus, our students are required to take only two courses at the PhD level, allowing many of them to begin fieldwork in the second year of their PhD.
To view profiles of students enrolled in our MA and PhD programs, please visit our Graduate Student Profiles section.
