Temple’s sociocultural and linguistic anthropologists share a commitment to the study of globalization and transnationalism as key phenomena shaping the contemporary world, and to critically analyzing and theorizing these phenomena through ethnographic investigation of contemporary social, cultural, political, economic, and communicative processes.  This shared commitment serves as a strongly integrative yet flexible programmatic framework for the theoretically and methodologically varied approaches that we take in our individual programs of research, and in our teaching and mentoring.  Our common goal is to better understand the unprecedented fluidity and dynamism that characterize contemporary sociocultural and communicative processes; the historical contingency of the cultural categories involved in these processes, and the means by which these categories are shaped and represented by institutions of power; and the ways in which people engage with, manipulate, contest, and reshape these categories (particularly categories of identity) in the course of their everyday lives.  

Theoretical and methodological developments of recent decades have transformed anthropology by situating local ethnographic projects within larger systems of power, and by focusing attention on the complex relationships between local communities and larger-scale structures within which these communities are embedded.  Meanwhile anthropological fieldwork has become increasingly multi-sited; increasingly multi-dimensional, with respect to the variety of methods and data used; and increasingly technological, making innovative use of both traditional and new media.  In keeping with these developments, we stress the value of theoretically informed ethnographic research that integrates local, regional, national, and international levels of analysis.  Ethnographic perspectives and methods, when deployed within a historically informed hierarchy of local to global levels of analysis, yield a powerful and uniquely discipline-specific approach to the complex global landscape produced by the circulation of capital, labor, and information.  We find it especially significant that such an approach makes it possible to investigate empirically the ways in which power, policy, and other abstract concepts are manifested in people’s everyday lives, and how they respond.   

We are constructing a new curriculum that takes into account the ways in which emerging power relations are restructuring political and cultural borders and social fields of action and communication. This involves understanding the anthropological and broad social theoretical literatures on 

a)      global inequality and hierarchy;
b)      nation-states, nationalism, democracy and citizenship;
c)      the global circulation of capital, labor, information and culture;
d)      the formation of transnational and diasporic communities;
e)      the increasing importance and contradictory roles of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) within local, national and international states.

In keeping with one of the central missions of contemporary sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, we move from these structuring processes to the production and communication of cultural meaning and identities. 

At Temple we offer a unique configuration of three strongly complementary areas pertaining to the sociocultural dynamics of globalization in which we are already established leaders.  These three areas are described below.  

Politics of cultural identity and difference

In this relatively broad area of inquiry, we focus on the ways in which new identities, constructions of difference, inclusion and exclusion are being produced by population movements and new community formation; communication flows, both those which are mass mediated and those facilitated through new media; and those taking form within emerging hierarchies of political and market power.

All of our current faculty contribute to this area of specialization.  Present faculty expertise includes: nation-building, class, and ethnic/national identities (Goode and White); race and racial hierarchies (Goode); gender and sexuality (White and O’Brien); language politics, language-based hierarchies and inequalities, and discourse analysis (Akinnaso, Garrett); and religion (Jhala).

Political economy of representation and communicative practice

As a focal area in our research and teaching, the political economy of representation and communicative practice deals with communication, very broadly conceived to include both linguistic and non-linguistic (particularly visual) modalities ranging from everyday conversation to the production and international circulation of elite art objects.  Our scope is thus the full range of human expressive behavior and the institutions and technologies that mediate and regulate it.  Our ethnographic approach emphasizes that these practices and institutions must be understood as situated within historically shaped systems of power and value, from local to global levels of analysis; and that communicative practices are themselves a crucial means through which power is constituted, exercised, resisted, and contested. 

Present faculty expertise includes: visual communication (Jhala); art and aesthetics (O’Brien, Jhala); ethnographic film (Jhala); political economy of language (Akinnaso, Garrett); literacy and education (Akinnaso); language contact (Garrett); language socialization and cultural reproduction (Garrett). 

Social movements and critical policy analysis 

We recognize the privileged role that state policies (and their associated discourses and practices) play in shaping everyday lived experience.  We look ethnographically at the disjuncture between politics and policies as they are implemented from the top down, and the indigenous knowledge and cultural constructions of the various peoples who are subject to them.  At the same time, we examine the agency of locally situated actors as they respond to state and market power and to social exclusion and discrimination through the politics of cultural identity and other forms of collective action, such as  social justice, labor, anti-racist, feminist, environmental, language, religious, and other movements 

Present faculty expertise includes: critiques of social welfare policy, urban community development, multiculturalism (Goode); critical medical anthropology, health care, medical pluralism (White); gender and power, especially in relation to literacy (O’Brien); education, literacy, language policy and planning, language rights (Akinnaso); education, socialization, language-based movements (Garrett).   

The three areas of specialization described above are closely intertwined, each reinforcing the others.  These three areas are grounded firmly in, and continue to build upon, our faculty’s demonstrated strengths and solid reputations in research and teaching.  It is therefore crucially important to note that these three areas do not (and cannot) function as separate, bounded domains.  On the contrary, our past practice as well as our plans for the future are based on strong integration of these areas.  For the past several years, we have been producing students whose dissertations reflect this integration.  Indeed, our most successful doctoral students have been those who have drawn most extensively on all three of these areas in their coursework and other training, in their field research, and in their dissertations.  As recent and ongoing research by both our faculty and students demonstrates, representations of identity and difference that are constructed through narratives, linguistic styles, and visual images, circulated in mass media and new media, and communicated through personal social networks play crucial roles in the politics of cultural identity and in the construction of (and resistance to) state policies.  Constructing our research and training agendas around the theories, ethnographic literatures, and methodologies of these three areas positions us as a distinctive program in the study of globalization, with the potential for breaking new ground. 

Specialized Research Training

Training in research related to the Sociocultural Dynamics of Globalization involves three modalities, ethnographic (see below), visual and linguistic.  The department has facilities for training students to do data collection and analysis in all three.  Students are encouraged to engage in projects which work across the boundaries of these methodologies.

Ethnography

Ethnographic training at Temple emphasizes the study of the politics of cultural identity, transnational community formations, social movements, and critical policy analysis. These topical areas are studied within a framework that emphasizes the formative and constraining influences of the national state and global and national market and the emerging social space of international “civil society” or NGOs. 

Training in the contemporary uses of ethnography in studying mult-level, multi-sited research problems is undertaken through fieldwork experience which takes advantage of the local setting but frames problems in terms of global issues and often incorporates ethnographic experience elsewhere. Over the past two decades, five large team projects: The Philadelphia Food Project, The Supermarket Project, The Changing Relations Project and the Poverty and Civic Participation Project, and the Death and Rebirth of North Philadelphia  in the department as well as  collaborative work with projects in Urban Studies, American Studies and Urban Education have offered opportunities for experience for both graduate students and undergraduates.

Urban Anthropology Laboratory/Archive

The laboratory contains three main bodies of material. It serves as a location for materials (maps and links and facilitating information for the use of the Urban Archives, the Social Science Data Library, the Neighborhood Information System and the Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project) as aids to  fieldwork. It also houses the archives of the five projects listed above which includes publications, dissertations and the data files. These archives provide the trajectories of neighborhood policies in the city and contain information about over fifty Philadelphia community based organizations and city programs as a source for further research. A web page is now under construction providing the highlights of these findings. The lab serves as a repository for research instruments which  have been used in various projects and is frequently used for team research meetings and by graduate students for interviewing research subjects.

Anthropology undergraduates doing fieldwork as part of a summer course on Community Organizing have an orientation with Rev. Mary Laney of St. Gabriel's Episcopal Church in Olney.