This OER (open educational resource) is to act as an ongoing resource for those full and part-time faculty teaching Brooklyn College’s Anthropology Course, ANTH 3135 — The US Urban Experience: Anthropological Perspectives. This is a living document, which came out of discussions among instructors teaching this course and will continue to grow as we continue to meet each semester to discuss the course. 

The first section of this resource page has some core or threshold concepts that we would like students to take from this class. The following sections offer a variety of classroom exercises and resources (visual and audio) that pair well with some of the core concepts. We hope it is helpful to you and that you use it as a resource, but we also hope you add to it as you field test pedagogical techniques and approaches in your classrooms.

Threshold Concepts for 3135

1. Students should know that categories are socially constructed and be able to critically assess divides such as: urban v. rural, center v. periphery, modern v. traditional, race v ethnicity. 
2. Students should have a basic understanding of how physical space and social relationships are constitutive. Space is socially constructed
3. Students should know that urbanization is an ongoing process and have a grasp of historical processes such as industrialization, deindustrialization, redlining, segregation, suburbanization and modernization and neoliberalism.
4. Students should have a basic understanding of the methods and aims of ethnographic writing.
5. Students should be able to grasp how Gentrification is a process that is geographical, discursive, historical, political and economic.
6. Students should be able to take Intersectional approaches to understanding how oppression works on multiple levels at once depending on your position in society.

Rights Info

Unless otherwise noted, this Open Educational Resource (OER) was curated by Professor Meghan Ference for Brooklyn College in 2020 and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. [Detailed license and acknowledgement]