• Syllabus for Intro to Anthropology: ANTH1101

    Intro to Anthropology (ANTH 1101-006) UNC Charlotte, Spring 2018 Mon/Wed (11:00-12:15pm) in CHHS 380   Instructor: Adam Johnson Office Hours: T/TR 11:00-12:00pm ajohn344@uncc.edu by appointment in Hickory 42B       This syllabus contains policies and expectations I have established for this course.  Please read the entire syllabus carefully and refer to it regularly throughout

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  • Syllabus for Science Studies Course: LBST 2213

    Science Studies (LBST 2213-015) UNC Charlotte, Spring 2018 Tues/Thurs (2:00-3:15pm) in Kennedy 236   Instructor: Adam Johnson Office Hours: T/TR 11:00-12:00pm ajohn344@uncc.edu by appointment in Hickory 42B       This syllabus contains policies and expectations I have established for this course.  Please read the entire syllabus carefully and refer to it regularly throughout the

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  • Book Review: Krippendorf’s Tribe

    Krippendorf’s Tribe (1985), by Frank Parkin (1931-2011), explores the life of a British anthropologist and his experience with raising his family and a contrived research project. Parkin is a sociologist and has published nonfiction on Karl Marx (Middle Class Radicalism 1968, Class Inequality and Political Order 1971, Marxism and Class Theory 1979), Max Weber (Max

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  • Abstract for “Geno-colonisation: How science executes structural violence”

    Social institutions such as healthcare and education have been examined through a lens of structural violence— the systematic ways by which social institutions place certain members at a disadvantage thus causing various types of harm. However, science has escaped such scrutiny. In a post-colonial world, new forms of colonisation have taken the place of traditional

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  • Book Review: The Natural Superiority of Women

    The Natural Superiority of Women (5th Edition), by the biological and sociocultural anthropologist Ashley Montagu, serves as an important examination of the relationship between men and women in early feminist anthropology. The book covers various topics across its chapters, including the contribution of genes, biology, and culture to defending the author’s thesis: women are naturally

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  • Purity and Danger Revisited: Dirt and Racism

    Mary Douglas defines ‘dirt’ as “matter out of place.[1] In revisiting her work in the context of my current research and the protests of professional athletes, it made me consider this definition, its implications, and the lengths to which we go as a society to “reorder” the world and cleanse. “Dirt offends against order. Eliminating

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  • Book Review: Is Science Racist?

    Is Science Racist: Debating Race, by Jonathan Marks- Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was released in the midst of a societal reexamination of the pervasiveness of and value ascribed to race in America. As a new generation is being reacquainted with racial disparities that have existed in perpetuum in the

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  • Profiles in Scientific Racism: Francis Galton

    When one thinks of scientific racism, the first thing that may come to mind is eugenics- “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.”1 One may then immediately think of the atrocities carried out by the Nazi regime

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  • Chronicles in Primate Studies: pt. 1

    This blog is going to be a multi-part series going through some of my experiences during my last field season and possibly my final primate study. This study took place from June 3-July 29, 2016 and resulted in my Master’s thesis. I was there (alone) to study the effects of ecology on female social relationships

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  • Book Review- The Creative Spark

      The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional (2017), the latest book by Dr. Agustín Fuentes, explores the creative nature of humans through time. Fuentes, professor and chair of the anthropology department at the University of Notre Dame, is a pioneer in ethnoprimatology, the study of human-nonhuman primate interaction, and more recently has explored

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