Please note: this course description is not fully up-to-date for the academic year 2023-2024. Updates will be published shortly.
Admission Requirements
This course is open to:
Students enrolled for the bachelor’s programme CADS
Students enrolled for the minor CADS
Premaster’s students who have completed the admission procedure for the CADS master’s programme and who have been formally admitted to the course as part of a premaster’s programme.
Exchange students admitted for this specific course during their application procedure
Please see the registration procedure below.
N.B. Completing this course is required to register for the third-year course Selected Bibliography and Bachelor Thesis.
Language of Instruction
Lectures are given in English.
Exams (assignments) can be written in Dutch or English.
Course Description
This course aims to introduce students to the anthropology and sociology of diversity. The starting point must obviously be how anthropology has studied differences between human beings over the past two centuries, and the extent to which the humanist principle of equality has determined policies designed to manage such differences. This course therefore directs attention primarily to race, culture, nation, class, gender, and sexuality, although similar lessons can be applied to religion, ethnicity, age and disability. The anthropology of diversity begins with the observation that race, class and gender are, in the first instance, socio-cultural classifications, and that such categories connect power and diversity because they give shape to the infrastructures that make up societies – the division of labour and wealth between different classes of citizens and between social spheres such as government, the public, the economy, and the household.
The first part of the course (weeks 15 to 17) deals with the nature of social classification, and continues to discuss how classifications of difference between humans have been treated since the early nineteenth century as descriptions of biological differences. In the course of the twentieth century, such nature-based descriptions have been criticized, not least because of the introduction of the anthropological concept of culture – although the conception of both race and gender as socio-historical constructions did not become orthodox until the 1980s.
The second part of the course (weeks 18 to 20) will then address the question of the social construction of human differences through the study of gender and sexuality, addressing how they relate to class and race, and why we need the notion of intersectionality to do so.
Finally, the third part of the course (weeks 21 and 22) builds on the preceding insights in order to deal with how intersections of the classification of race, gender and class connect in constructing and intervening in power inequalities. We address the questions of how the notion of “diversity” was constructed, whether and how its promotion requires interventions such as creating equal employment opportunities or affirmative action, the need for ‘decolonization’. The course considers the possibilities and limitations of personal agency in the face of racist culture.
Course Objectives
This course teaches students that the anthropology of diversity begins with the particular classifications and categorizations of human differences used within specific societies, and that those categories can be studied not only as descriptions and definitions of those differences, but also as time-bound social and historical constructions and as interventions in social relations that institutionalize inequalities – and that each aspect might give those classifications different meanings.
Students develop tools to analyse and explain how people classify race and gender, how they use such classifications to construct and intervene in hierarchical social discrimination, and how similar analyses of social causes and effects can be applied to classifications of religion and ethnicity.
Students acquire intellectual familiarity with the genealogical and reflexive methods of ethnography used to study and understand the present-day concept of diversity– that is, the expertise that uncovers the socio-historical process expressed by local uses of “diversity” and that observes how it intervenes in situations in which the researcher participates.
Schedule
This course will consist of two meetings per week. Timetables will be published on the website.
Mode of Instruction
Total 10 ECTS = 280 study hours (sbu):
Lectures 12×3 = 36 hours * 1,5 = 54 sbu
Mandatory workgroups 3x2 = 6 sbu
Written assignments (ca. 4,000 words) = 54 sbu
Additional study of literature (approximately 1,200 pages in total) = 166 sbu
Assessment Method
Students will submit two types of assignment:
1. Short summaries of the literature they have been instructed to read that week; summaries will be assessed as either “pass” of “fail”. Summaries assessed as “fail” may be re-submitted once. All summaries must achieve a “pass” assessment before the end of the course.
2. A written assignment based on essay-questions about the content of the course determines students’ final grades. The completed assignment must be handed in in June, on a date to be announced at the start of the course. The lecturers will hand out questions to allow all students to work on the final assignment while the course is in progress. To pass the course, answers to the questions in the assignment must be assessed at an average grade of 6,0 or above. Only assignments given a grade of 5,5 or lower may be re-submitted.
Only the final grade will be registered in uSis.
Registration in My Studymap
Registration for the lectures in My Studymap is mandatory for all students. Registration closes 5 days before the start of the course. Carefully read all information about the procedures and deadlines for registering for courses and exams.
Division and enrolment in the mandatory tutorials will be done by the SSC.
Confirming your exams
Students need not register for the examination via My Studymap, because this course does not include a single final examination.
Brightspace
Brightspace is the digital learning environment of Leiden University. Brightspace gives access to course announcements and electronic study material. Assignments will also be submitted in Brightspace. Announcements about and changes to courses are given via Brightspace. Students are advised to check Brightspace daily to keep informed about rooms, schedules, deadlines, and all details regarding assignments. Lecturers assume that all students read information posted on Brightspace.
- How to login
The homepage for Brightspace is: Brightspace
Please log in with your ULCN-account and personal password. On the left you will see an overview of My Courses.
For access to courses in Brightspace students must be registered for those courses in My Studymap.
Course Literature
The reading list will be available on Brightspace before the start of the course.