The four-quarter Honors Program in Anthropology is designed to allow undergraduates to pursue field research and write an honors thesis on a topic of their choice under the guidance of Department of Anthropology faculty member.<br>Anthropology is the comparative study of past and present human societies and cultures. The Department of Anthropology at UCI is at the forefront of addressing issues in contemporary theory and ethnographic methods within the discipline. The Department has a strong interdisciplinary bent, with research and teaching interests in economic anthropology, political and legal anthropology, the anthropology of finance, social history and social change, the anthropology of science, technology and medicine, identity and ethnicity, gender and feminist studies, urban anthropology, modernity and development, religion, visual anthropology, and the arts and expressive culture.<br><br>The Department also has a strong emphasis on the study of contemporary issues, especially those concerned with emergent, fluid, and complex global phenomena such as international flows of goods, peoples, images, and ideas, the relationship between global processes and local practices, immigration, citizenship, and refugees, population politics, violence and political conflict, ethnicity and nationalism, gender and family, food, health, and technological innovation, law, development and economic transformation, urban studies, and environmental issues. Geographic regions of expertise include China, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, East Africa, Latino communities of the United States, and diasporic and transnational communities in the United States and abroad.