I'm Dr. Micha Glantz. I'm chair of the
anthropology department at Colorado State University
and it's our department
that houses both our online and on-campus major.
Anthropology is about us
as a species, it gets at every piece of
who we are right? Our biology, our culture
the way we think, the way we speak and
what it means, how we relate to one
another, what we make the tools we use...
So we really are looking at humans through
an evolutionary lens, in the past and the
present, to understand the structures of
our economic and social and cultural world.
One of the great things about the
online program is it can draw on some of
the research our professors on campus
are doing. I think a great example is the
research that Dr. Kate Brown is
conducting.
She just published a book called Standing in the Need, which
follows this family after they were
drastically impacted by Katrina and the
trauma of losing the communities that
they were living among, was a dramatic
consequence of that disaster that was long-lived.
So what Dr. Brown was able to
understand was that this idea of comfort
is not a luxury.Comfort through food and
family and community, is what keeps us
well as humans. We deliver that kind of
content through our online classes.
We get students to think practically about
how cultural anthropology can improve
the human condition. One of the things
that makes us unique is that online
students get access to the research of
their professors and use it in meaningful ways.
We emphasize active engagement, not only
through discussion, but actually through
specific activities that we get students
involved in. But if I had to distill really
the critical quality, I think our
students leave our major with, it's this
idea of being flexible and adaptable
to your circumstances and I hope and I
think it's true that they take that
understanding of what
means to be adaptable out into the world
with them as individuals.
