High School Workshop: Anthropology & Sociology

Join Carleton University’s Department of Sociology & Anthropology for an interactive mini-lecture. You can choose any of the offerings below pending availability.

Anthropology Offerings:

Music and Culture with Dr. Carolyn Ramzy
Students will learn about the field of ethnomusicology, a related discipline to anthropology that studies music as culture. How does our favourite music help make us who we are? How does it shape the ways we listen to the world and the people in it? This lecture takes the power of popular music seriously, asking questions about how the likes of Rihanna, Taylor Swift, and Beyoncé shape our views on gender, globalization, and inequality in a world that often tunes into star power to shape our tastes, our political views, and even our actions.   

An Anthropology of Psychology with Dr. Bernhard Leistle
Since the discipline’s beginnings, some cultural anthropologists have made use of psychological methods and have been influenced by psychological theories, esp. Freud’s psychoanalysis. But there is also a tradition in anthropology of critiquing psychology as too “universalist” and underestimating the ways and depths in which our mental and emotional life is shaped by the cultural and social contexts we live in. In my lecture, I will present examples for this critique and talk about its justifications and limitations. Finally, I will argue that psychological anthropology has important things to say for our current understanding of mental health and illness.  

Development’s Culture with Dr. Blair Rutherford
Students will learn about how anthropology plays different roles in respect to international development initiatives in an interactive lecture. Some anthropologists bring their expertise to examine “the culture” of those being targeted by development, while others examine some of the cultural assumptions of those involved in development that influence their initiatives.  In so doing, students learn how anthropology offers an important lens to the changing world in which we live.

Sociology Offerings:

Technology and Everyday Life: Thinking sociologically with technology with Dr. Carlos Novas
Technology is part of our everyday lives and yet we often take for granted the role of technology in shaping our relationships to one another and the societies in which we live. This lecture discusses a range of technologies from mobile phones to AI to think about topics such as social change, globalization, the changing nature of work, inequality, and surveillance. 

Understanding the homelessness and housing crisis in Canada and its effects on young people with Dr. Jacqueline Kennelly
Young people born from the 1990s on in Canada are, as a cohort, significantly poorer than their parents, have less access to affordable postsecondary education, and are much less likely to own their own home. They have also grown up in an era of rampant visible and invisible homelessness, a phenomenon that led Ottawa to become the first city in Canada to declare a housing and homelessness emergency in 2020. How did we get here? And how does the housing and homelessness crisis in Canada disproportionately affect young people in general, and poor, Indigenous, and racialized young people in particular? This lecture will provide an accessible overview of Canadian affordable housing policy since World War Two and the emergence of mass homelessness, explaining where the crisis began, and offering hopeful solutions to lead the country out and into a future with abundant and affordable housing for all.

Anarchism and Anti-authoritarianism with Dr. Alexis Shotwell
Do humans need to live in fixed hierarchies in order to thrive and not destroy one another and the world? Is it possible to build a world in which we are all free? How would we take care of each other and our world in such a society? Is beauty necessary to a good life, and does everyone deserve luxury? This lecture offers a window into how anarchists and anti-authoritarians have answered these questions, with a particular focus on anarchist practices of direct democracy, mutual aid, and self-governance.

Sample schedule for your students:
10:00 to 11:30 a.m. (ET) – Anthropology/Sociology Workshop & Discussion
11:45 to 12:45 a.m. (ET) – Lunch in Teraanga Commons Dining Hall
1:00 to 2:30 p.m. (ET) – General Campus Tour

Available upon request – to book:
Please contact outreach@carleton.ca.