Paper short abstract:

Working off the experience of decolonising student movements, this paper argues that to produce anthropologists who are able to enact decolonial practice and knowledge production in the field we need to bring the sensitivity and complexity of our methodologies from the field into the classroom.

Paper long abstract:

Working off their experience in the decolonising student movements at their respective universities, the authors of this paper argue that for many anthropologists, especially those researching race, racism and neo-colonial power, the field has rendered itself more critical, transformative and pedagogical than the 'classroom' - pointing to anthropology's shortcomings in addressing these issues and leaving many practitioners ill-equipped or unprepared for this encounter. In recognising that research, praxis and pedagogy are never insular, this paper seeks to explore the ways in which classroom practice produces and enframes 'the anthropologist', critiquing the underlying assumption of homogeneity within the monoculturally performed (Icaza and Vasquez), white (Todd, Shanklin) classroom often imbued with epistemologies of ignorance (Sullivan and Tuana). In critiquing the (re)production of knowledge producers in the classroom we question why we do not bring the same sensitivity and complexity of methodologies to the classroom as we do to the field. We suggest that by rooting ourselves in our own positionality and complicity (Ahmed), 'taking our students seriously' and recognising that we all enter the classroom with divergent 'hinterlands' (Candea) we allow the classroom to generate a wider complexity of anthropological knowledge. At the same time we put into practice precisely the types of knowledges which would assist the anthropologist to be present in the field in more decolonial ways, knowledges that need not only to be learned cognitively but need to be enacted and practiced in order to become known, thereby creating anthropologists who are better equipped to enact a decolonial framework.