CURRENT AREAS OF INTEREST

The Body

Many faculty and students in Human Sciences teach courses, pursue projects, and participate in reading groups focused on theories and histories of the body. These projects are concerned with identifying the ways in which bodies are understood and materialized in diverse cultural and historical contexts. Embodiment in this sense is not simply a biological or physiological given, but is instead connected to, and emergent from, systems of representation; cross-cultural contact; participation in imagined communities; histories of genocide, displacement, diaspora, and resistance; unequal distributions of power; and always-contested conceptualizations of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ability. Human sciences faculty and students have particularly concerned themselves with studies of body images, bodies in time, queer bodies, disability, bodies in performance, medieval and Renaissance bodies, colonized (and postcolonial) bodies, gendered bodies, the body in theory, literary and popular media representations of the body, medicalized bodies, violence and the body, activist bodies, and posthuman bodies.

Ethnography

Ethnography, or writing about culture, is a cross-cutting enterprise in Human Sciences, engaging students and faculty in theoretical reflection across the disciplines that participate in the program, and beyond them into fields of discourse analysis, cultural studies, organizational studies including politics and business, and media. Our varied interests in culture are grounded in questions of language, translation, and interpretation. The program also trains certain of our students in ethnographic field methods through anthropological fieldwork.

Gender Studies

Gender studies is an area of special interest for both faculty and students in our program. We consider issues of gender to be central to both theory and practice in the Human Sciences and we operate with a broad understanding of gender studies that is not confined to questions regarding femininity and masculinity respectively. In accordance with the spirit of interdisciplinarity that marks the Human Sciences program, we believe that gender can not be addressed as an isolated aspect of experience but can only be understood in its intersections with sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, language, and culture. Students in the program have the opportunity to work with a large number of faculty who specialize in gender studies, queer theory, and critical race theory. The Human Sciences also has a formal relationship with the GW Women's Studies program, the first M.A. program in Women's Studies in the United States. Entering students have the opportunity to specialize in Women's Studies and to earn an M.A. in Women's Studies and/or a graduate teaching certificate in Women's Studies on the way to a Human Sciences Ph.D.

Psychoanalysis

Explored for ages through mythology, literature, art, and philosophy, the unconscious mind has long generated fascination, speculation and description. In 1886 the unconscious attained scientific recognition when Sigmund Freud argued before the Austrian Society of Physicians that in certain hysterical cases the area of the body suffering from paralysis could not be explained in relation to the actual distribution of nerves in the body. The space of the body subjected to paralysis was not determined by anatomy, but by the mind's unconscious representation. In the following hundred years, attempts to explain the unconscious mind's relation to the body, to language, to the self, and to the social world have generated a diverse and dynamic field of study. As both a clinical practice and a discourse with far reaching cultural effects, psychoanalysis has formulated an interrelated set of concepts--repression, defense, resistance, trauma, fixation, regression, sublimation, projection, transference--that continue to stimulate discussion and research. Appearing increasingly in discourses of law, political science, anthropology, communication, post-colonial theory, feminist theory, postmodern theory, and others, these concepts draw scholars to examine wide ranging cultural, artistic, historical, personal, and political phenomena. Working individually, in study groups, in classes, and in co-operation with the Washington Psychoanalytic Society, Human Sciences faculty and students study traditional psychoanalytic texts and discuss contemporary psychoanalytic theory, practice, and research.

Cross-Cultural Study

Cross-cultural study is a deeply ingrained commitment and interest of faculty and students in Human Sciences. Broadly defined, it engages us in comparative inquiry not only across the larger linguistic, literary, and geographical domains, but across divides, such as in studies of regionality, boundaries, displacements, migrations, diasporas, rural and urban populations, oral and literate and electronic media, and the effects of globalization. And it also extends to the study of the historical foundations, changes, and interactions of cultures over time. Human Sciences courses give varied but close attention to theory and method in comparative cross-cultural work, ranging from disciplined-defined topics to interdisciplinary courses on such subjects as time, trauma, and national mythologies. Cross-cultural study also intertwines with inquiry in the Program's other four areas of interest in the body, ethnography, gender, and psychoanalysis. Human Sciences faculty bring to their comparative interests their own primary expertise in such specific areas of the world as Africa, Europe, Korea, Latin America and the Americas, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. The program also trains certain students not only in ethnographic field methods but through anthropological fieldwork.