Over the past year, Eric Lindland has guided his students in creating websites as part of their anthropology coursework. Using Weebly, an easy-to-use platform, these Notre Dame students have shown off their learning online.

In Lindland’s Fall 2009 class, Cultural Difference and Social Change, students who had returned from a significant international experience over the summer came together to process what they had learned. The websites proved central in that process, and also let students show what they had done and what it meant to other students and their families and friends.

Each student designed and built a website devoted to sharing stories, photos, links, and other features of their international experience. Each website also represents each student’s perspective on the privileges and challenges of doing intercultural work, and about the strategies of cooperation and service between Western and non-Western peoples that can improve qualities of life for all involved.

Explore these websites to learn more about the practical, on-the-ground aspects of living and working abroad as a student, and about the larger structural factors that condition the lives of those who share their food, shelter, culture, and hopes with those who choose to become intercultural sojourners.

Brianna Muller’s site Paz, Amor y Justicia covers her work at Familias de Esperanza in Guatemala. Shannon Coyne created Opportunity and Inequality about her time in the village of Putubiw in central Ghana, and drew in comparative experiences in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Lindland’s class Ritual, Sport and Play also created their own websites. Each site “explored some example or facet of these three interrelated genres of human behavior.” The in-depth exploration, which included original research and analysis by the student, ranged from Little League to Party Culture to Soccer and even Yoga.

A great example here is Justin Perez and his site Masculinities at Play: Pickup Basketball at Notre Dame.

In Introduction to Anthropology, the student websites “sought to address a question of anthropological interest that is conducive to both biological and sociocultural inquiry, and present a range of informed responses to that question from the perspective of anthropologists and other theorists of human behavior.”

Topics included Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Travel (not Columbus!), Malaria: Perpetuating the Cycle of Poverty, We Make Faces (on facial expressions cross-culturally), and many more.

Link to student websites for Cultural Difference and Social Change

Link to student websites for Ritual, Sport and Play

Link to student websites for Introduction to Anthropology