Relying on anthropological approaches, this course provides the student with an understanding of the complexities of ethnic, racial, sexual, gender, and cultural identities. This course focuses on specific theoretical issues that emerge from work in previous SSC courses. The topics and disciplinary focus will vary and cover a range of problems including historical contexts, authorship and the ethnographic record, postmodernism and the social sciences, post-coloniality, native anthropology, activism and the social sciences, interdisciplinarity and the social sciences, and social science and multiculturalism. Students begin by reading primary source theoretical perspectives on this developmental stage and the methodological approaches used to investigate it. Each student then chooses a topic about adolescence and chooses readings to assign to the seminar about that topic, leads the class discussion of that topic, and writes a term paper on it.
Students plan the project in consultation with their advisors.