What can studying cities and urban life reveal about how power operates, how people forge belonging, and how collective futures are planned and imagined? This course will provide students with an overview of urban anthropology: its lineages, traditions, debates, and interventions. Students will develop conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools to examine and analyze urban space through lenses of citizenship, governance, and infrastructure and in dialogue with social movements (and the political subjectivities that undergird them), cultural formations, social relations, historical contexts, and political economy. We will investigate these themes and questions by thinking through the relationship of difference (race, class, gender, citizenship, sexuality, and ability) to the ways that urban space is conceptualized, understood, experienced, produced, and policed. Readings will draw on anthropology and related disciplines, focusing on ethnographies situated in global and local contexts that explore dimensions of everyday life pertaining to housing and gentrification; policing and surveillance; labor and work; education and transportation. Together, we will explore what ethnographic insights reveal about configurations of power, about what/who is understood as “a problem,” and also about contemporary and historical visions for a just city. As students gain a foundation in key concepts and theories of Urban Anthropology, they will have the opportunity to engage and apply their learning through a scaffolded, structured, ethnographic project of their choosing.