Related Guides
Film Databases
- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume III: Indigenous Voices This link opens in a new window Contains documentaries, feature films and shorts made by and for indigenous people and communities. Topics are simultaneously local and global, with particular emphasis on the human effects of climate change, sustainability, indigenous and local ways of interpreting history, cultural change, and traditional knowledge and storytelling.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume IV: Festivals and Archives This link opens in a new window Contains award-winning titles from contemporary ethnographic film festivals. The collection also includes field recordings and edited films by students and faculty from universities and institutions around the world, including Berkeley Media and Manchester's Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Royal Anthropological Institute Teaching Edition This link opens in a new window Contains a curriculum-aligned collection of videos and segments curated to support the teaching of introductory anthropology courses. Each video and segment within this collection are accompanied by a teaching guide providing background information, lesson plans, and classroom exercises and activities.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
Featured Films
- Our Animal Motherhood (Academic Video Online) Maternal instinct is a universal phenomenon, responsible in many ways for the incredible success of human beings as a species. But contrary to the myth, maternal love is neither automatic nor guaranteed. Natural selection means many pressures influence a mother’s attitude and the choices she makes when confronted with the arrival of a new baby.
- Red Moon : Menstruation, Culture & the Politics of Gender (streaming, Kanopy) Red Moon confronts one the world's oldest and most pervasive taboo subjects. With humor and refreshing candor, the documentary provides a fascinating, often ironic, take on the absurd and frequently dangerous cultural stigmas and superstitions surrounding women's menstruation. As educational as it is liberating, the film functions as both a myth-busting overview of the realties of menstruation, and a piercing cultural analysis of the ways in which struggles over meaning and power have played out through history on the terrain of women's bodies.
- Hormonally Yours (streaming, Academic Video Online) Men and women have markedly different hormonal make-ups. This episode looks at the chemical divide between the genders.
- Attraction (streaming, Academic Video Online) Can science predict sexual attraction? In a ground-breaking experiment, a team of scientists orchestrate a unique speed date with a hundred singletons to test their theories - with unexpected results. The scientists analyse our speed-daters bodies, faces, and psychological and social profiles to find out what the key predictors of sexual chemistry really are.
- Love (streaming, Academic Video Online) Half of all new marriages end in divorce but scientists say they've found the secret of long lasting love. They claim they've identified how love works and can even tell which marriages will make it. If so, can they save couples whose relationships are on the brink of collapse?
- The Science of Sexual Attraction (streaming, Academic Video Online) This documentary discusses how sexual attractiveness is perceived by both the male and female point of view.
- Brainsex (streaming, Academic Video Online) IMen and women are just the same. Just as caring, just as promiscuous, just as good at a three point turn. Aren't they? The results of a new BBC sex survey of 500,000 people from around the globe - the largest ever carried out - provide very revealing answers. And five men and five women are put through a unique battery of experiments to uncover the real differences between the sexes.
- The Dickumentary (streaming, Academic Video Online) The story of the penis from its biological evolution in prehistoric fish, to today. Cultures have worshipped it, circumcised it & sought ways to make it larger. Traveling across 14 countries, this is an entertaining, comprehensive tour de phallus.
- A Caterpillar Moon (streaming, Academic Video Online) In the rainforest of Central Africa live the Aka pygmies, a tribe of traditional hunter-gatherers virtually untouched by the modern world. They are an engaging tribe where there are no rules, everyone is equal and everything is shared - including their meagre feast of caterpillars with the film crew.
Podcasts
- Lisa Mosconi: What Does Biological Sex Look Like In The Brain? (TED Radio Hour) The human body is not a patchwork of separate systems. It's intricately connected, says neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi. She explains the relationship between our brains, hormones and reproductive organs.
- Nature, Nurture, And Our Evolving Debates About Gender (Hidden Brain, NPR) This week, we delve into debates over gender and the role of nature and nurture. Plus, we'll look at how society is pushing us beyond the traditional boundaries of those debates as we talk with Jamie Shupe, the first person in the United States to be officially recognized as neither male nor female, but gender-neutral.
- Male, Female: An Excerpt with Dr. David Geary (Sausage of Science) In this episode, Dr. David Geary, Curator’s Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, reads Chapter One, “Evolution of Fatherhood” from his book, “Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences”.
- Karissa Sanbonmatsu: What Can Epigenetics Tell Us About Sex And Gender? (TED Radio Hour) We're used to thinking of DNA as a rigid blueprint. Karissa Sanbonmatsu researches how our environment affects the way DNA expresses itself—especially when it comes to sex and gender.
- Emily Quinn: Male Or Female Is The Wrong Question—How Can We Rethink Biological Sex? (TED Radio Hour) Artist Emily Quinn is intersex. She's one of over 150 million people in the world who don't fit neatly into the categories of male or female. She explains how biological sex exists on a spectrum.
- Molly Webster: Is Our Definition Of "Sex Chromosomes" Too Narrow? (TED Radio Hour) Over a century ago, one part of our DNA got labelled the "sex chromosomes." Science journalist Molly Webster explains the consequences of that oversimplification.
