Ph.D. in Anthropology

The Anthropology of Public Life

The Anthropology Ph.D. program at GW provides rigorous training and fosters collaborative relationships among students and faculty. The relatively small program size (cohorts are generally about three students) encourages close relationships across the program. We promote a vibrant intellectual community, supported through a faculty-student reading group, regular colloquia, and an annual symposium. In addition to a strong grounding in the foundational traditions of the discipline, including exposure to the different sub-fields that have defined anthropology in the United States, students pursue advanced training in small seminars and independent study courses.

The Ph.D. program seeks to admit students with scholarly interests in “public life.” Students in the program pursue a range of theoretically-engaged ethnographic research questions under this rubric, generally clustered around three areas:

1) The social world of public policy, both in centers of power, often located only blocks from GW, and in the diverse range of places where these policies are formulated, contested and put into practice

2) The complex work of governance at global, national, and local scales; the discourse and practice of scientific, bureaucratic, and religious authority

3) The constitutive and contested role of materiality and material culture in the various dimensions of social life; how things are made, consumed and circulate through time and space.

We invite applications to the PhD program that explore these questions in a variety of places and through many different topics. In the 2019-2020 application cycle, we especially encourage applicants working in the areas of digital ethnography and disability:

Digital Ethnography

We take up the digital as a fundamental aspect of contemporary life. By examining this communicative code in its social and cultural contexts of use, we seek to understand how it constitutes, transforms and disrupts the representational and material features of present day experience. Digital ethnography examines sociocultural relations not only in terms of Internet-based sociality and economy, but also concerning how the “online” upsets and collaborates with more traditional, “offline” categories such as kinship, labor, gender, power, mobility, and inequality. To learn more about digital ethnography in GW’s Anthropology department, contact: Joel Kuipers <[email protected]> or Alex Dent <[email protected]>

Disability

The anthropology of disability draws on a social model of disability to study how societies create and classify impairments. In this view, society and not the individual is responsible for disability, as when a person who uses a wheelchair is disabled only when the environment has no ramps or elevators.  Cross-cultural studies of disability have been crucial in illustrating that what one community sees as deviant, another may see as expected, or at least socially appropriate; that disability reverberates through multiple levels of society (such as kinship, politics, religion, and aesthetics); and that categories of health, sickness, and impairment affect the way power is exercised by a range of institutions, including local and federal government, the medical and psychological professions, and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  To learn more about the study of disability in GW’s anthropology department contact: Richard Grinker [email protected].

We do not provide training in applied anthropology, though we anticipate that program graduates will put their theoretical and methodological skills to use in a diversity of professional settings.

Students will benefit greatly from GW's long-standing partnership with the Smithsonian Institution and access to Washington, DC's archival collections and policy-making institutions. Students may also avail themselves of the department’s strengths in a variety of approaches to the discipline of anthropology.

All students admitted into the program receive a fellowship that provides tuition, stipend, and teaching assistant salary. Students are expected to apply for external funding to support dissertation research and writing. At least one student may be partially supported through funding from the GW Institute for Ethnographic Research while working as an assistant editor for the journal Anthropological Quarterly.