Hello. My name is Tanya
Argounova-Low. I'm Senior Lecturer
and Head of Department of
Anthropology.
The Department of Anthropology was
established in 2003.
So we are a relatively new
department.
The department was established by
Professor Tim Ingold
and we since developed.
We now have 13
members of staff who
pursue different interests,
research interests and
our main themes are
the North, landscape
and environment, human-animal
relationships.
We do religion and belief.
We do museum and material
cultures.
And so our interests
are very broad and we can
suit quite a lot of research
interests from our students.
So we offer
a few master's programs.
One of them that I would like to
talk about today
is called MRes in Social
Anthropology.
MRes stands for Master's of Research
in Social Anthropology, and
it implies that
the students who are taking
this program will be engaged
in research, despite
the fact that it's being taught as
well, there are courses that they
attend throughout the
training, which lasts 11 months,
they do their own
projects under the supervision
of staff members.
So they are free to choose
a topic of the research
that they would like to
devote their attention to,
and working together with
members of staff
under their supervision,
working together with peers and the
groups, they can
develop something that starts
from a tiny idea
to a full blown
research project.
By the end of 11
months. And they can be really
very proud of it.
Some of our students
did research on
the environmentm
landscape.
Quite a few students worked
on the northern environment,
specifically among
Sami in Iceland.
Some students worked in Siberia.
Students do research
on human-animal relationships
as well.
We started recently
having quite a lot of people who do
material studies
and using
the advantage of the museum
being close
to us.
They engage with that as well.
We also have students
who do quite
a lot, actually, surprisingly
for well, maybe not surprisingly,
students who do research on
migration and
asylum seekers.
Some of our
students afterwards,
after they finish their
MRes program, go to work
in the areas of this
research they've done.
So some of them work in charities
and
in international organisations.
Some of them run their own
charities.
Two students who have done our
program work now
with asylum seekers in
Lesbos, in Greece.
One of them works in Spain.
So the program,
despite the fact that it's
oriented on research,
helps students to gain
very important
skills that then take
them to work in
an important are a of their choice,
such as charities and international
organisations, for instance.
Yes. So I'm Helen Balfour and
I'm an MRes student in Social
Anthropology here at the University
of Aberdeen.
So my research interests is in
museums and material culture
and my supervisors are Alison
Brown and David Anderson, they're
both interested in those topics
as well. So it's really useful
having their input in my
dissertation project, which I'll be
starting soon.
As part of this program I've been
able to do
STAR anthropological training.
So that stands for the Scottish
Training in Anthropological Research
and we just got back from that
today. So it's been a really
interesting week.
We went to the Burn in Glenesk
and we met up with other
fieldwork, pre-fieldwork students
who are both on MRes programs
and Ph.D. programs from
Edinburgh and Andrews.
So that was really nice because we
were able to meet with other
people who are at the same
point of research as us
as we were just about to start our
fieldwork in the next few weeks.
The reason why I chose this program
was because as part of my
undergraduate degree, I was studying
a lot of the theory concerning
social anthropology, and the
MRes gave me the opportunity to look
at more the research and
how to prepare to go into the field
and how to apply the methods and how
to also explore the diversity
of different kinds of methods.
So as part of the program,
we learned about the core skills
and methods that we will use in the
field and as part of our research,
which includes, for example, how to
work with the interviewees, how to
conduct an interview, how to do
participant observation.
And we also look at
the ethics that we may
use in the field.
So the topic that I am focusing in
my research is how to do
anthropology a bit more inclusively,
and also how to use other
methods and
more multi-sensory methods
not only in the academia,
but also in public spaces, and
how to make public public spaces
more inclusive using anthropological
research.
So after my graduation and after I'm
done with the course, I would like
to look into the ways I
can apply my research interests.
So, for example, in a museum
or art galleries or maybe community
groups that might work
with different abled bodies and
different abled individuals.
The program is organised
in three terms,
so for the first two terms,
the students are taught
to main core
skills.
Their work was literature as well.
They do quite a lot of theoretical
investigation of the
project and
the core skills methods
that are taught are being
field research, participant
observation and
ethnography.
How to do ethnography,
how to speak to the
interviewees, what sort
of ethical issues the research
might
bring, and what sort
of ethical research students need to
be aware of.
So for
the third term, when they start
doing their own research, they are
fully prepared in terms
of literature, in
terms of being informed,
in terms of research skills
that they have.
So by the end of
the two terms, they in
go into doing their
own project fully prepared.