How do people formulate ideas of what is natural and what is cultural? How do desires and values get made? How do ideas of difference—particularly in terms of race, gender, sex, class, language, and culture—become frames for collective identity, debate, and power? What are the ways that humans organize for political action and express shared beliefs and values?

Our students use these and other questions central to the discipline as a basis for designing and conducting their own qualitative field-based and archival research projects.