Course

HUM-379: Anthropology of the urban

Summary

Cet enseignement aborde les approches conceptuelles de l'anthropologie urbaine, ainsi que les méthodes et les expériences de terrain. En 2025-2026, il participe au projet 'A Future for Whose Past?' consacré aux patrimoines matériels et immatériels des communautés minorisées, initié par l'ETHZ.

Lectures

Instructor

Florence Graezer Bideau

Senior Lecturer and Senior Scientist at the College of Humanities and at the School of Architecture, EPFLVisiting Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino PhD in History and Civilization (EHESS, Paris) Director of the Minor in Area and Cultural Studies (MACS) between 2012 and 2016Member of the Research group Heritage, culture and the cityAssociated researcher at the China Room Research Group and South China-Torino Collaboration Lab, Politecnico di Torino Associate member of the Laboratoire d’anthropologie culturelle et sociale (LACS), UNIL Member of the EDAR committee (Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the City) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environment Engineering in EPFL Florence Graezer Bideau trained as an anthropologist and a sinologist, and received her PhD in History and Civilization in 2005. Before joining the Centre for Area and Cultural Studies (CACS) at EPFL in 2010, she was a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Lausanne, where she taught courses in cultural theory and fieldwork methodology. She is Senior Lecturer and Senior Scientist at the College of Humanities where she teaches area studies, anthropology of China, critical heritage studies and urban studies. She has been acting as Director of the Minor in Area and Cultural Studies between 2012 and 2016 and she is currently a member of the EDAR committee (Doctoral Program Architecture and Sciences of the City) at the School of Architecture, Civil and Environment Engineering in EPFL. Since 2015, Florence has also been Visiting Professor at the Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Her fields of expertise include anthropology of China, urban sociology, modes of sociability and governmentality. Florence’s research is on the relation between culture and power (making of cultural policy in China; emergence of maker movement (makerspaces) and politics of innovation in China), heritage issues (process of heritagization and multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore; implementation of the UNESCO Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage in Switzerland; historic urban landscape in heritage policy of Beijing, Rome and Mexico City), and the making of the city (informal resistances toward the violence of urbanism in Caracas, Chennai and Guangzhou; uses of public spaces in Chinese new towns).

Official source

Moodle Page

http://go.epfl.ch/HUM-379

Graph Chat

Chat with Graph Search

Ask any question about EPFL courses, lectures, exercises, research, news, etc. or try the example questions below.

DISCLAIMER: The Graph Chatbot is not programmed to provide explicit or categorical answers to your questions. Rather, it transforms your questions into API requests that are distributed across the various IT services officially administered by EPFL. Its purpose is solely to collect and recommend relevant references to content that you can explore to help you answer your questions.