The Department of Anthropology offers a master's degree in applied anthropology. While our main goal is to prepare students for employment outside academia, they will also be well qualified for transfer to a doctoral program. Students will be prepared to apply anthropological knowledge in private and public sectors, foundations, and businesses in local, regional, and international areas. The central goal of UNT's Master in Applied Anthropology program is to provide graduates with the knowledge they will need to undertake informed and thoughtful action, whether as street-level practitioners, administrators, agency-based researchers, or program evaluators.
Program Options
Students can obtain the master’s degree in one of two ways:
Degree Options
Areas of Interest
While students are not required to choose a specific track in the graduate program, the department offers several areas of interest. Please view our faculty directory for more information about individual faculty members.
Business, Technology, and Design Anthropology
Christina Wasson, and Susan Squires specialize in this area. It includes the areas of organizational analysis and change, teams, user-centered design, marketing, communication in the workplace, human-computer interaction, consumer behavior, diversity and globalization. We work with both the private sector and the not-for-profit sector. The Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex offers opportunities for partnerships with a wide variety of organizations.
Crossing Borders: Migration, Religion, Identities
Alicia Re Cruz, Doug Henry, Pankaj Jain, Adam Dunstan, Andrew Nelson, and Mariela Nuñez-Janes represent this area. Topics covered include the situations of migrants and refugees, religions and cultures of immigrant groups, and experiences of migrants to the United States. In this field, students have local access to the people and issues typical of a border state like Texas.
Medical Anthropology
Beverly Davenport, Lisa Henry, and Doug Henry specialize in this area. Topics include public health, healthcare delivery, indigenous medicine, and the health issues of ethnic minorities, migrants, and/or refugees. Students have access to the affiliated UNT Health Science Center at Fort Worth. In addition, the DFW area provides innumerable opportunities for students interested in the health issues of ethnic minorities, migrants, and/or refugees from all over the world.
Anthropology of Education
Mariela Nuñez-Janes and Alicia Re Cruz represent this area. It focuses on understanding various aspects related to the educational process. It explores the connection between culture and education in a variety of contexts paying particular attention to concerns related to teaching and learning. Both faculty members focus on the challenges of bilingual education.
Environmental and Ecological Anthropology
Pankaj Jain and Adam Dunstan represent this area which includes community-based conservation of natural and cultural resources, cultural landscapes/seascapes, indigenous peoples and protected areas, spiritual ecology, traditional ecological knowledge, human ecology, sustainable development, ethnoecology, political ecology, environmental justice, world views concerning the environment, and globalization and environmental policy.
In addition, we require students to engage with a field other than anthropology. This is typically a field that matches their anthropological focus, such as:
Urban Anthropology
Andrew Nelson, Mariela Nuñez-Janes, and Jamie Johnson represent this area. Urban anthropology studies social phenomena in cities with an emphasis on the relationship between spatial, cultural, and political-economic structures and the everyday life of people. It has applications in the arenas of policy, planning, social and health services, education, labor and migration, technology, business, ecology and community relations.
Students take 2-3 electives in this field, and one of their committee members, who must come from outside of anthropology, typically represents this field as well. The reason we emphasize a second discipline is that the various institutions in which applied anthropologists work all have their own forms of knowledge. Students will be better prepared for jobs if they have prior exposure to those traditions.