Mres/Phd Anthropology Handbook 2019 Dates for Your Diary 2019/20
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
WELCOME TO THE Department of Anthropology MRes/PhD Anthropology Handbook 2019 Dates for your diary 2019/20 LSE Welcome Events 2019 – All MRes students Date Time What Where From Monday, Main Welcome Week for new students Across campus 23rd September www.lse.ac.uk/yourFirstWeeks/ Monday, 3 – 4.30pm School welcome presentation for new MRes students Peacock Theatre 23rd September Thursday, 3 – 3.30pm Registration for new MRes students* Hong Kong Theatre , CLM5 26th September www.lse.ac.uk/programmeRegistration Friday, 11am – 1pm Departmental orientation for all new MRes students The Old Anthropology Library, OLD 6.05 27th September * Upon successful upgrade at the end of your first year, you will be required to register, in person, as a PhD student at the PhD Academy. In subsequent years, registration will be done automatically by the School on receipt of your annual progress report form showing adequate progress. You should therefore ensure that this is completed by the deadline in late June each year. Students who have not submitted the form will not be able to re-register for the following session. MRes key dates Date Term / week Term dates and MRes coursework submission deadlines Monday, 30th September MT week 1 Michaelmas Term (MT) teaching starts MRes students to submit a brief outline of their research project Monday, 28th October MT week 5 AN471 1,000-word report deadline Monday, 4th November MT week 6 MT Reading Week starts Monday, 25th November MT week 9 AN471 1,000-word report deadline Friday, 13th December MT week 11 Michaelmas Term ends AN471 3,000-word essay deadline Monday, 20th January LT week 1 Lent Term (LT) teaching starts Deadline for 1st draft of Research Proposal Monday, 24th February LT week 6 LT Reading Week starts Monday, 23rd March LT week 10 Deadline for 2nd draft of Research Proposal Friday, 3rd April LT week 11 Lent Term ends Monday, 4th May ST week 1 Summer Term (ST) starts AN472 2,500-word essay deadline Due date for ‘extra’ course assessment essays Monday, 1st June ST week 5 Due date for Research Proposals Friday, 19th June ST week 7 Summer Term ends Friday, 21st August Due date for late submission of Research Proposal Contents About Your Department 4 Student Services Centre 27 Our background 4 Key academic staff 5 Student Representation 28 Office hours 5 Quality Assurance 28 Departmental Office 5 Representation 5 LSE Services to Support You With Your Staff-student liaison committees 5 Studies and in Your Career 29 Communication within the Department 6 Opportunities for PhD students 7 Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) 31 Allocation of studentships and teaching posts 8 Your Wellbeing and Health 32 Workstation for research students 8 Exams and Assessments 33 About the MRes/PhD programme 9 Supervision 9 Plagiarism 34 Overview of the programme and main requirements 9 Classification of your MRes degree 15 Results and Classification 34 Rough timeline of the programme 16 Fees and Finance 35 Yearly progress review 16 ‘Third year’ progress review TO BE COMPLETED16 LAST Codes and Charters 36 Maximum period of registration and extensions 17 PhD thesis presentation and examination entry 18 Systems and Online Resources 37 Editorial help with your thesis 18 Assessment offences and plagiarism 18 Course Selection and Timetables 38 Good research practices 19 The LSE Academic Code 40 Ill health 20 Registration 20 Campus Map inside back cover Key Information 25 Term Dates and LSE Closures – Academic Year 2019/20 25 Registration 25 Your LSE Card 25 Inclusion Plans 25 Student Status Documentation 25 Interruption 26 Programme Transfer 26 Change of Mode of Study 26 Withdrawal 26 Regulations 26 studenthub.lse.ac.uk/welcome 2 Welcome to the LSE, and the Department of Anthropology This handbook is provided by the Department of Anthropology and is intended to give you some useful information about our research programme, but obviously it is far from exhaustive. A great deal of up-to-date material about LSE support services, registration, timetabling, and library facilities is available on the general LSE web pages, so you would benefit from reading these. One crucial element of this guidance is the School’s Ethics Code, which is available via the LSE’s Ethics pages at lse.ac.uk/ethics. Note that the Ethics Code pertains to all members of the School community. If this is your first time as an LSE student and you need more general guidance, please be sure to take a look at the School’s “Your First Weeks” web pages at lse.ac.uk/yourfirstweeks. Please do familiarise yourself with the on-line resources and forms. For example, you will – eventually! – need to know how to enter your PhD dissertation for examination. There is a very useful step-by-step guide to this on the School’s website (more specifically, on the PhD Academy web pages at lse.ac.uk/PhDAcademy), and the PhD Academy itself provides a dedicated space and services hub for PhD students. The Department of Anthropology web pages (lse.ac.uk/anthropology) provide information about members of staff, our Monographs series, special events, etc. You will also find a complete list of PhD projects supervised in the Department over the years – beginning in the 1920s-30s with Raymond Firth, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Hortence Powdermaker and Fei Xiaotong. Please bear in mind that the information given in this handbook about course requirements and assessments is intended for guidance only. You should always confirm requirements by checking the definitive versions of the rules in official School publications (normally the Calendar lse.ac.uk/calendar) and if necessary checking with the PhD Academy (on the 4th floor of the Lionel Robbins Building), with your supervisors, or with the Departmental Manager or a member of her team. As you’ll learn, ours is a relatively small department, and we maintain an informal, friendly and supportive atmosphere for our students. If you do encounter problems – academic, financial, or emotional – we hope that you’ll let us know at once. You can do this by telling your supervisors (with whom you’ll have regular meetings throughout the year), by setting up an appointment with the Doctoral Programme Director or Doctoral Programme Tutor, or by approaching any member of departmental staff, including our very capable administrators. If for any reason you would prefer to speak to someone outside the Department, you can instead contact the PhD Academy. Professor Laura Bear Head of Department LSE Department of Anthropology 3 About your Department Our background (ii) Commitment, conviction and doubt explores the forms taken by commitment – whether to received cosmologies, ontologies, Anthropology has been taught at the LSE since 1904. Following the and religious faiths and/or to modernity, secularism, or non-religion. arrival of Malinowski in 1910, the School became one of the leading Charles Stafford’s work in China views the current interest in ‘ethics’ centres for the development of modern social anthropology, and from alternative perspectives; Mathijs Pelkmans (on Post-Soviet many of the key figures in this evolving tradition – including Raymond countries), Harry Walker (on Amazonia) and Michael Scott (on Firth, Edward Evans-Pritchard, Hortense Powdermaker, Fei Xiaotong, Melanesia) have investigated and theorised affective states such Edmund Leach, Lucy Mair, Jomo Kenyatta, Isaac Schapera, Maurice as happiness, wonder, irony and doubt. Fenella Cannell’s research Freedman, Jean La Fontaine, Maurice Bloch, Alfred Gell, Jonathan on Mormonism in the US raises comparative questions about Parry, Chris Fuller, Stephan Feuchtwang, Olivia Harris, John and Jean Christianity as well as exploring its relationship to social theory. Comaroff, and others – were at the LSE as students or teachers. (iii) Mind, learning and cognition centres on processes of childhood To this day, we retain a strong commitment to the radical empiricism learning (in the work of Catherine Allerton, Rita Astuti and Charles of anthropological research of the kind championed by Malinowski, Stafford); the self and conceptions of free will; affect and altered Firth, and Powdermaker. We have also long critically considered states of consciousness (as with Nicholas Long’s research on issues of decolonisation, colonial encounters, race, indigeneity hypnotherapy, trance), moral judgement, and human cooperation. We and the politics of fieldwork. Such debates are intrinsic to the past, engage critically with psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary present and future of the discipline. We also acknowledge that as theory. We examine (as with Harry Walker’s ERC-funded project on we teach, critique and suggest alternatives, we are simultaneously justice in Amazonia which analyses concepts of equality, fairness, implicated in the structures of power within the university responsibility, and entitlement in comparative perspective) how and beyond. evolved predispositions of the human mind (e.g., towards mutualism, the sense of fairness, the perception of one’s agency) are shaped by Embedded in the ethnographic tradition, and with research outputs specific historical and cultural circumstances. Our expertise dovetails based primarily on long-term participant observation fieldwork, our with recent developments in the Department of Psychological and interests are very diverse. We conduct fieldwork in many different Behavioural Science. places (including India, Bangladesh, mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Caucasus, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa, Madagascar, (iv) Generative vitality provides new perspectives on kinship, gender Amazonia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Melanesia, Germany, the and generative or productive processes, and forms of redistribution. UK, the USA); and our projects address a wide range of concerns Alongside Fenella Cannell’s work on vital relations, this includes ritual – including politics, inequality, development, disability, childhood, practices (as with Laura Bear’s work on intimate economies in the UK religion and non-religion, and cognition. There are, however, several and India), conceptions about the generation – and the end – of life, cutting-edge themes around which our departmental research the nature of parental responsibility and of childhood.