This core module guides students through key concepts and theories, with particular attention on how global changes from the late twentieth century to the present day can be best understood, explained and studied. Using case studies from different countries, it focuses on the actuality of our globalized lives, utilizing local narratives to understand how 'globalization' is experienced on the ground. The specific aims are: a) to uncover global forces and connections; b) to highlight and analyse the divisions/inequalities and challenges within our global society. The module is organized around themes and adopts a case study approach to foreground the significance of social science research for the 'real world'. Topics have been carefully chosen in order to familiarize students with a range of theoretical concepts such as class, gender, race, power, labour and capital and demonstrate to students how they are applied to 'real-life' situations.

Ethnographic Research Methods takes research methods as philosophically and practically exciting techniques and attitudes that allow us to know and understand the world better. To know anthropological research methodology is better to understand the self, which is to better understand anthropological research methodology. The material addresses the history and foundations of anthropological knowledge, and describes some of the key concepts in anthropological methodology by using 'ethnographic writing' as a guide. The module encourages self-reflexivity, ethical conduct, and an anticipatory awareness of research practice and design. We explore ideas such as participant observation, the field, fieldwork, fieldnotes, interviewing and the ways in which scales of knowledge (local and global) can be brought into conversation through well-thought through methodology. Our aim is to encourage excellent, thoughtful and ethical research, through exploring key epistemological debates (how we know things), the nature of qualitative research data, and the conditions of its production. The module includes practical sessions (e.g., on interview technique) and short fieldwork assignments to generate critical awareness among students of their own 'research personality' and the assumptions they bring to questions as researchers.

Food and eating are fundamental to human life and health and play profound roles in the construction of social bodies, from families and kinship groups to religious groups and states. Further, food mediates our relationships with non-human beings and surroundings. In this module, we emphasise that our reliance on food for nutritional sustenance is inseparable from food's social, cultural and ecological dimensions. As such, the transformation of food habits and food systems are a central part of human experiences and world histories. We explore cultural diversities and historical change in food production and distribution, eating, cooking and sharing, recycling and wasting, and the classifying, celebrating and prohibiting of food and drink. In the first four weeks we explore classic anthropological approaches to food classification, sharing and provisioning and the relationship between diet and adaptation, highlighting the relevance of these classic topics for contemporary debates and contexts. In the following six weeks, we trace the emergence of the global food system and its implications for dietary health, nutritional inequalities, food safety and environment. Through this module, students will acquire a critical understanding of anthropological perspectives on food, diets and the global food system.

Scholars of Diaspora have argued that Diaspora has enabled the conceptualisation of communities beyond reified and essentialist ethnic or racial configurations. Central notions associated with Diaspora are those of imagination, consciousness, subjectivity, recognition. As James Clifford long ago noted, diaspora functions as a utopic/dystopic vision to think of political subjectivities and communities not as epiphenomena of nation-states but as springboard for de-territorialised formations. Yet, many diasporic communities are still trapped in (albeit ever transforming) colonial forms of power and material dispossession, not only of their identity and culture, but also of their land and resources. Against this background the course offers an exploration of the formation of diasporas and their cultural politics. It looks at how diasporic subjectivities are formed through gendered aesthetic practices and performances, which can take on and signify religious, cultural, political meanings, which are in turn constantly negotiated, hybridised and re-fashioned across bodies, times and spaces. It also focuses on how the liberal state deals with difference and diasporic identities. In particular, the course examines the ways in which secularism and multiculturalism have "managed" embodied identities and subjectivities that are visible in the public sphere as well as attempts to contain, manage, suppress and domesticate 'difference'. In the second part, the course focuses on diasporas as cultures of resistance and the dissolution of boundaries effected in everyday diasporic practices, from pop-culture to music, literature and food.

Students will engage with the central theoretical and ethical debates relating to anthropologies of climate change, and consider how these have developed in relation to key social movements and moments from the 1960s onwards. Questions of temporality, political economy, development, justice, the concept of harm, emotion, activism and feminist ecologies of care are explored in the context of the anthropocene, with students encouraged to consider how they might approach crafting their own anthropologies of climate change. Whilst attention is given to historical antecedents and the development of climate as an object of concern, both within and outside the academy, the course looks at contemporary developments and encourages students to think about how they might engage with and shape emergent anthropologies of the anthropocene. In this, the intersection between anthropology and activism is explored, as we ask not only how we can write anthropologies of a warming planet, but also how anthropologies of the anthropocene can help us collectively navigate uncertain planetary futures.