240038 SE BM7 Observing Society - Anthropologies of Social Reproduction (2025W)

Aims: The course will teach students how to research society via focused observations of everyday practice. This competency is essential for researching global capitalism, the organisation of inequality and difference, and the interplay between care, labour, and finance, and fosters critical thinking beyond academic research. Students will learn and apply an encompassing framework for understanding how “society” is constantly maintained, transformed, and reconstituted: social reproduction.

Themes: The course focuses on three major fields that exemplify main features of social reproduction in Europe: care, labour, and finance. The first, care, zooms in on the manifold practices of taking on responsibility, caring for others, and maintaining people, environment, and social and cultural structures. The second, labour, revolves around living in a capitalist market economy that requires salaried labour for most people, leading to various ways to organise class and biography to become a certain kind of labourer. The third, finance, asks about money as a storage of wealth, a mode of investing in kinds of futures, and a focal point of inequality. Students will learn contemporary perspectives on either of these themes, and how they are entangled in everyday life in capitalist societies.

Methods: Research papers, text discussions, reflection essays. Students can choose from either of the three themes and develop small research projects. The course aims to understand significant themes of European society, but most importantly, to develop the skill to choose fieldsites that help us researchers see society in small fragments and analyse it reflexively and with an engaged stance. To develop these observational and analytical skills, the course will include a range of interactive exercises in which we observe, take notes, analyse, write, and present in class to learn essential skills of an anthropological practice.