Sense and Sensuality in Mexico City
Program Quick Facts
- Location: Mexico City, Mexico
- Faculty Leaders: Lochlann Jain
- Arrival Date: August 31, 2025
- Departure Date: September 15, 2025
- Program Cost: $750
- Academic Prerequisites: Spanish language skills will be helpful.
- Activity Level: Light/Moderate: Activities may include city walking tours, easy/short hikes, museum and other site visits, and an occasional physical activity such as snorkeling, hiking, or kayaking.
- Center for Disease Control and Prevention: Health Information for Travelers to Mexico
- US State Department Country Information: Mexico
- Visa Information: Consulate General of Mexico
- Application Deadline: Monday, January 27, 2025 at 11:59 am PT
General Description
This arts ethnography intensive trains students in methods of gathering, exploring, analyzing, and presenting ethnographic data based in creative arts. Sketching, photography, and improvisation methods will be used by students in their observation, engagement, documentation, integration, and presentation of their findings on aspects of culture in Mexico City. In this course, students will extensively engage with Mexico City’s material culture and history, and in tandem with hands-on arts training and development, will develop an independent or small group project culminating in a final presentation. The course combines critical and practical learning through activities such as seminars and site visits, as well as interactive workshops in creative writing, sketching, photography, and improvisation.
Learning Goals
- Learn creative methods for ethnographically exploring and experiencing a new culture.
- Produce original creative projects through multiple iterations and evolving ideas
- Engage in artistic collaboration and the creative reinterpretation of art made by others
- Appreciate how experimentation, failure, and revision play a valuable role in the creation of successful and innovative works
- Explore how to address social issues through art-making
Living and Travel Conditions
Students will live two to a room in the Condessa neighborhood of Mexico City.
Faculty
As a professor at Stanford for the last 22 years, Lochlann Jain has been engaged in a creative anthropology that aims to understand illness, injury and death as limit cases of life that provide unique vantage points from which to unpack crucial but often subterranean cultural currents. Jain has been fascinated by the ways that different disciplines, particularly medicine and law but also including fiction, art, history, and science, organize systems of legibility, rendering forms of violence visible and invisible in different ways at different moments. Jain has studied this question through culturally shifting understandings of disease and injury from cancer, HIV, and blood-borne illnesses to cigarettes and car design.
Grading Basis
Letter Grade