Time: bi-weekly Tuesday 4:00-8:00 PM (Berlin time) Place: virtual classroom of Freie Universitaet Berlin on Edunation Island Preliminary in-house-meeting: Thursday 11 April 2013, 00:00 PM, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Landoltweg 9-11, Room 014 (Seminar room) close

In this online course students will use their own avatar to explore several virtual cultures. One aim of the course is to learn how to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in a virtual world. With the use of visual anthropological and classical ethnographic methods we will produce short virtual in-world-films and photography projects on topics such as the representation of indigenous media in virtual worlds, (de-)construction of gender and sexuality, social activism online, construction and perception of online space, place and virtual landscapes. Furthermore we will discuss latest literature on Cyberanthropology and Virtual Culture Research. The conditions of participation for this course are to have one's own avatar in Second Life and a computer which supports and can run Second Life. close

Introductive Literature: - Boellstorff, Tom: "Coming of Age in Second Life. An Anthropologist explores the Virtually Human". Princeton University Press 2008; - Boellstorff, Tom, Bonnie Nardi, Cecilia Pearce, T. L. Taylor: "Ethnography and Virtual Worlds. Handbook of methods", Princeton University Press 2012; - Heather, A. Horst and Daniel Miller (eds.): "Digital Anthropology", London: Berg Publishers 2012; - Frömming, Urte Undine (ed.): Virtual Environments and Cultures. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2013 close