About

This blog features digital stories produced in the anthropology course Global Bodies. Digital stories are narratives relating meaningful life experiences through short multi-media videos. They have the potential to expose hidden histories and render them visible. In a broader context, digital stories may be drawn on for advocacy purposes to transform public conversation, opinion, and policymaking.

Focus on the Global Body

The human body is rich as a site of meaning and materiality. Culture inscribes itself on the body in terms of what is considered normal. Standards are imposed, internalized and resisted. The Global Bodies course (ANTH 494IE) lays a foundation on which students then develop digital stories that explore issues surrounding the body across diverse contexts.

Digital Story Themes

The digital stories cover themes of connectivity, family and health, race and well-being, reproductive care, and sense of self. Through selection and development of their own projects, students cultivate a sense of global citizenship.

Themes build creatively on course topics such as issues of personhood, identity and subjectivity as they articulate with nationality, race, class, sex, gender, inequality and social justice. The course examines global bodies in three main stages over the life course, including birth, life, and death, with relevant case studies from each stage (e.g., organ trafficking and transplanting, breastfeeding, reproductive politics, drug trials, and undocumented bodies). We draw inspiration from medical anthropology as well as other related fields.

Integrative Experience

The course fulfills the UMASS Amherst Integrative Experience requirement for the Department of Anthropology. Global Bodies, designed by Professor Elizabeth L. Krause, embraces an integrative and holistic approach to content matter, building upon the four subfields of anthropology (sociocultural, linguistic, archaeology, and biological). These subfields complement the major areas of a General Education curriculum, including the biological sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

The final digital story assignment requires students to apply and integrate skills, perspectives and methods learned in General Education courses in several ways: 1) through grounding in the body and biological processes; 2) through attention to voice and visual representation thus drawing from literature and arts; and 3) through incorporation of context and cultural interpretation, drawing on historical studies as well as social and behavioral sciences. The cross-cultural emphasis of the course enriches understanding of social and cultural diversity.