Pre-Diploma Seminar General Ethnology, Urban, Modern and Traditional Lifeways

When a student registers to the third year, he or she selects pre-diploma seminar. In its frame he or she will work under the guidance of selected mentor with whom he or she will at the end defend the diploma work. In the first semester the student prepares the disposition of the diploma thesis, while in the second semester he or she presents it, discusses about it and, if necessary, supplements it within the pre-diploma seminar.
Pre-diploma seminar is organized as straightforward multi-directed exchange of knowledge and information between its participants and leaders (discussions about the material students read, searching for the sources and literature, methodological instructions, skills of oral presentation of knowledge).
The seminar relates to the following established fields in the study program of ethnology and cultural anthropology: theories of culture, ways of life and identities, urban anthropology.
In the seminar students follow contemporary trends in the global and Slovene scientific and popular literature and discuss the concurrent activities taking place in Slovenia and elsewhere. They are not related solely to theories, research methodology or to the professional developments, its contemporary achievements and ethnographic examples, since they often touch broader social and political life as well as widely understood cultural events taking place at home and abroad. The seminar is offering a place for the transfer of concurrent research achievements and insights regarding various social phenomena taking place in the Slovenian as well as foreign urban and rural environments (eg. traditional and complementary medicine, in the fields of anthropology of gender and sexuality, ethics, narrative folklore). It also seeks to place them in the wider social, cultural and political context. The seminar enables insights into the past and contemporary beliefs and practices, the analysis of various models of for example economic organization at home and around the world, and at the same time it encourages for example cooperation in the rural development and the applied research. It also deals with ethnographic portraits of the individuals, both dominant and influential symbolic figures as well as ordinary people, who as protagonists of a certain way of life, historical process, specific space etc. appear in ethnographic records.

Slavec Gradišnik Ingrid: Etnologija na Slovenskem. Med čermi narodopisja in antropologije. Ljubljana: ISN ZRC SAZU, 2000.

Each year separately those who lead the seminar prepare the list of literature - individually for each student and according to his or her chosen topic of the diploma work.