Short Abstract

The current and growing role of cities and urban life around the world moves students and researchers to analyse and understand them. In this roundtable, participants discuss their experiences, projects, methodologies or expectations when teaching urban anthropology at university level.

Long Abstract

Urban anthropology is a growing area of study in our discipline. Many of us carry out research on and teach about it. The current and growing role of cities and urban life around the world moves students and researchers to analyse and understand them anew. Novel challenges due to climate change, migration, mobility, political, infrastructural or economic fragility, condense innovation to understand socio-technical relationships, sociality and politics. While urban studies are necessarily multidisciplinary, our discipline has unique contributions with its methods, theorisations, and forms of engagement. As an area of study that is often linked to practical solutions or policies to deal with rapidly developing challenges, knowledge in urban anthropology can be an avenue for the employability of anthropology students.

In this roundtable, participants discuss their experiences, projects or expectations when teaching urban anthropology at university level. By examining the breadth of pedagogical practices, we aim to collectively reflect on the sub-discipline’s role in forming anthropologists. We seek to address the following questions:

- Is urban anthropology, its histories and methodologies, an area that moves anthropology students?

- Can the teaching of urban anthropology show students our discipline’s own innovations and evolution?

- Why is urban anthropology not considered among one of the main subdisciplines, like those focusing on economic, environmental or political issues?

- In what ways can we integrate innovative urban ethnographic methods (e.g. transect, mapping, sketching, or go-along) in our teaching?

- Are there particular contributions in German speaking scholarship in the area that deserve more attention?