Cultural and Social Anthropology

DACS students receive the intellectual, material and documentary support they need to fully concentrate on their work and meet the challenge to produce a high quality academic contribution. The program encourages intellectual exchanges among students and between students and senior researchers in both formal and informal settings. We push students to develop their leadership qualities and cut the edges of contemporary anthropological debates. We offer them the opportunity to join our ongoing research projects and familiarize with the challenges of national and international research. We teach to follow research themes across disciplinary fields and question ethnography in light of current issues of broader concern: citizenship, economy, environment, gender, labor, migration, politics, health, education. The acquired competences are valuable in a variety of professional settings in addition to academic research.

THE SCIENTIFIC ENVIRONMENT

The base of DACS living exchange of thoughts and ideas is a democratic and intellectually varied scientific environment made of senior and junior scholars, post-doctoral researchers and visiting fellows from abroad. In addition to anthropologists, faculty includes specialists of history, philosophy, geography, literary studies, and pedagogy. The anthropologists who participate in the program are specialists of different regions of the world (Europe, the Middle-East, Africa, Asia, South America, Oceania). They are interested in epistemology, politics, history, economy, gender, kinship, heritage, art, labor and dispossession. Four members of the committee are based abroad: Alessandro Monsutti (Institute of Advanced Studies of Geneva), Irene Maffi (UNIL-Losanna), Georg Klute (Bayreuth University), Thomas Fillitz (University of Vienna).

DACS offers structured teaching to its students. A seminar is held twice monthly where alternatively, senior and junior scholars present their work or set the main terms of disciplinary and transdisciplinary debates (research ethics, methodologies, critical tools). There is also a specific training in academic skills (scientific styles of writing, project writing, structuring conferences, and participation in international symposiums). The students are regularly invited to present and discuss the steps of their research, and summer schools are scheduled to provide them with the opportunity to confront with external peers under senior researchers’ supervision. DACS students partecipate also in the courses and seminars organized by the Doctoral School of Milan-Bicocca on ethics, research management, career planning.

SUPERVISION

After consultation with the doctoral student and an evaluation of the research project, the coordinator of the doctoral program assigns him/her a supervisor. The supervisor helps the student to refine and expand the research project, and monitors the development of the research in the three years of the program. The community of supervisors exchanges ideas on the progress of each student in the conviction that supervision is collective intellectual project based on the sharing of competences, ideas and experiences. There is the possibility of changing supervisor once in the course of the program.

All the educational activities offered are available on e-learning platform: https://elearning.unimib.it/course/index.php?categoryid=7222