The course project plan for 2025 is not yet available. See the course overviews for 2023 and 2024 below as examples of how the course has operated before.
Course Overview for 2024:
In 2024, students had the opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills they have gained in their anthropological science major to the task of collaboratively contributing to a scholarly research project. This year’s project focused on Christchurch as an urban landscape in the period from 1850-1920. Students worked in groups and individually to investigate chosen themes that could include demography and epidemiology, urban development, social change, migration, industry, and architecture of the period. The 2024 cohort decided that their project output would be an edited book, with each student contributing a research paper as a chapter.
Course Overview for 2023:
In this capstone course in 2023, students had the opportunity to apply the knowledge and skills they have gained in their anthropological science major to the task of collaboratively contributing to a scholarly research project. This year’s project focused on evidence of “finger fluting”. Reference: Sharpe K. and Van Gelder L. (2006) The Study of Finger Flutings. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 16:3, 281–95.
Students worked in groups and individually to:
1) Identify core principles underpinning the issues to be investigated;
2) Conduct background research to explore the basis of those principles and their application, as well as the strengths and limitations of existing research on this semester’s topic regarding evidence for and implications of who produce the form of cave-art referred to as “finger fluting”;
3) In light of the evidence from step two, develop hypotheses and ways to test them;
4) Define operational variables and gather data cooperatively;
5) Analyse these data using techniques learned, and write up sections of a scientific manuscript;
6) Develop effective ways of translating the scientific information acquired for academic and non-academic audiences;
6a) Draft sections of a scientific manuscript (Introduction, Participants and Methods, Results, Discussion);
6b) Design a communications resource on their selected sub-topic for other students and the public (e.g. a PowerPoint presentation, infographic, short video or animation that effectively summarises their research).