Anthropology, like its object of study, is complicated and fascinating.
Anthropologists want to know everything about our species, from its earliest origins to its complex present, and use every tool and question we can think of to understand our embodied, social nature.
The students, faculty, and staff of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame stand in solidarity with the local, national, and global movements against systemic racism and state and police violence against Black communities in the United States. As anthropologists, it is our responsibility to actively dismantle false ideas about race within and outside of academia, and to remove systemic barriers that exclude Black people in our field and dehumanize them in our work.…
Firing a portable X-ray fluorescence scanner at 2,000-year-old artifacts last summer, Claire Stanecki discovered the value of hands-on education. A 2020 graduate who majored in anthropology and Spanish, Stanecki’s Arts and Letters education has been defined by exploring nontraditional forms of learning — from conducting research at a museum to studying the benefits of bilingual education in a local school. “The ability to learn about something and actually go interact with it is so incredibly mind-blowing,” she said.
