Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Jakob Krause-Jensen
(Aarhus University)
Ioannis Manos (University of Macedonia)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussant:
-
Ulf Hannerz
(Stockholm University)
- Formats:
- Panels Network affiliated
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
To be relevant to the contemporary world, anthropologist arguably have not only to reflect on their research methodologies (e.g., Marcus 1998) and adjust their analytical concepts to current conditions (e.g., Collier & Ong 2005; Pink & Salazar 2017), but also to rethink their teaching strategies.
Long Abstract:
As mentioned in the theme, the first EASA conference was held in a spirit of optimism and hope after the end of the cold war. But as the theme also reminds us, the world has changed and new challenges have emerged. Teaching is one of the key areas where these developments register and where the discipline of anthropology is reproduced. We contend, however, that educational practices have not been offered the scholarly attention they deserve. If sociocultural anthropology is to be a useful and relevant to the contemporary world, it arguably has to adapt not only its research methodologies to an altered global situation (e.g., Marcus 1998) and adjust its analytical concepts to current sociopolitical conditions (e.g., Collier and Ong 2005; Pink and Salazar 2017), but also need to rethink its educational strategies: How do we as educators respond to the changes above? How do we engage our students in the society that surrounds them? How do we cherish 'the view from afar' in our teaching when most of our students do fieldwork 'at home'? The idea of this panel on teaching and learning anthropology is to explore, compare, and discuss different forms of anthropological engagement in education and also to reflect on the way that anthropological education has changed over the past 30 years in different parts of Europe. We invite papers that investigate how teachers of anthropology across Europe (and beyond) have tried to engage their students and make anthropology relevant to the contemporary world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how anthropological knowledge can be transferred into teacher education in order to generate fresh didactic approaches and practices as a response to challenges Europe faces such as diversification, (forced) migration, socio-economic imbalances and exclusionary politics.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents the preliminary results of the Erasmus+ Project "Translating Socio-Cultural Anthropology into Education" (2018-2020). TRANSCA acknowledges the new and ongoing societal challenges contemporary Europe deals with (diversification, immigration, refugee movements, socio-economic imbalances and exclusionary politics) and addresses the issue of social inclusion as a major priority.
Sociocultural anthropology offers a variety of holistic theoretical, methodological and pedagogical approaches that can provide teachers and education experts with tools for promoting awareness of (in)equality along various axes of social difference (i.e. origin, language, sexual identity, gender, social class). Teachers and education experts, on the other side, are essential, yet often disregarded, partners in translating anthropological knowledge. Their pedagogical practice is the prime node for communicating insights on socio-cultural diversity, cohesion and transformation, worldviews, the anthropocene, gender, inequality and other pressing contemporary issues anthropologists explore.
By integrating insights, methods, approaches and concepts from sociοcultural anthropological knowledge into teacher education, TRANSCA intends to build up innovative approaches to inclusive education and enhance the quality of teacher education. The paper will show how an international team of anthropologists (Austria, Denmark, Greece & Croatia) have developed a both historically/regionally grounded and adaptable set of contents, concepts, curricula and tools relevant for teacher's education and practice in contemporary Europe and beyond.
Paper short abstract:
In his book 'Anthropology and/as Education' Tim Ingold defends anthropology as a particular kind of education aligned with the ideas of John Dewey. Through three examples of ethnographic teaching practices, I will explore the possibilities of realizing Ingold's ambitions in contemporary teaching.
Paper long abstract:
In their inaugural volume of the Teaching Anthropology journal, David Mills and Dimitrina Spencer wrote: 'For teaching to be an act of hope, pedagogy has to be more than one-sided cultural transmission and reproduction' (Mills and Spencer 2011). Six years later, in his recent book 'Anthropology and/as Education',Tim Ingold develops a similar point. Supported by philosopher and pragmatist John Dewey he argues that education in general and anthropology in particular is not to be understood as 'transmission of knowledge' from one generation to the next, but rather should be seen as a process of developing a particular sensibility or 'attention', as he calls it. Ingold's book is inspiring. It is beautifully argued and refreshing in its scope and theoretical ambition. Nevertheless, it contains few examples of particular courses or educational practices to lend support to his aims and claims.
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I intend to substantiate Ingold's argument by providing three contemporary examples of teaching from Denmark that built on students' fieldwork experiences. Second, and contrary to Ingold, I want to argue that these examples — and Ingold's book— implicitly puts ethnography rather than anthropology at centre stage, even if all examples happen to be developed within the discipline of anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores stories of ethnographic encounter that become classroom narratives used for learning and understanding. Specifically, I discuss successful student-teacher dialogic interactions build around narratives utilized to make issues, often esoteric, tangible to a diverse student body
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores stories of ethnographic encounter that have become classroom narratives used for learning and understanding. Specifically, I discuss successful student-teacher dialogic interactions build around narratives utilized to make issues, often esoteric, tangible to a diverse student body. I argue that anthropology and real life connect powerfully in the classroom, where our best stories give life to ideas and make them stick for an increasingly diverse audience. Through their emotional resonance these moments of retellings establish a bond across which information can be shared, making complex knowledge of different realities accessible to undergraduates, laymen, and academics alike. These stories we tell in the classroom are the stuff of anthropology. They are meant to explain and yet they do much more. They invite an audience in. They create a bond, a connection through which to share information. They are performative experiments designed to entice an ambivalent crowd into hearing and absorbing things we think are important and amount to a possible set of ways to view the world. These stories we tell are, in short, an untapped body of knowledge that deserve a wider audience.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines a novel approach to teaching and learning anthropology. It elaborates on the example of university-industry cooperation in which students of anthropology worked on a real-life case study, gaining industry-relevant skills as well as ability to communicate across disciplines.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines an innovative approach to teaching and learning anthropology, developed within an EU Erasmus+ project PEOPLE. Learning Cycles address the mismatch between skills gained by students and the ones expected by employers in industry. It elaborates on the example of university-industry cooperation established in Slovenia, in which students of anthropology and other related disciplines worked on a real-life case study, gaining industry-relevant skills as well as ability to communicate across disciplines. The authors examine and evaluate the problem-based teaching and learning processes, in which the students, supervised by academic and industry mentors, experimented with their existing anthropological knowledge, skills and methods. By taking the learning process outside of the classroom into a research field site and industry environment of an automation and manufacturing IT company, the students gained experiences in positioning themselves as anthropologists within a research & development team, communicating their research processes and findings, and understanding the relevance and potential of their knowledge and skills in a non-academic, practical settings.
Paper short abstract:
The paper discusses the history and contemporary transformations in ethnological / anthropological education in Russia that occurred in the last 30 years, paying special attention to the questions: Who teaches, whom and for what career are they preparing students?
Paper long abstract:
Three departments of ethnography / ethnology throughout Russia (in Moscow, Leningrad and Omsk) at the time of the collapse of the USSR gave an idea of the whole palette of local ethnological education. In the 2019/20 academic year, the number of departments of ethnology, anthropology, ethnology and anthropology or anthropology and ethnology, undergraduate and graduate programs in ethnology in the framework of history or independent programs "anthropology and ethnology" is estimated at dozens. Has anything changed in the education system? Who teaches, whom and for what career are they preparing now at the corresponding departments and programs in Russia? Based on his long experience in working at one of the leading departments of ethnology in Russia, at Moscow State University, the author offers his assessments and thoughts about the directions of the ongoing transformations.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is an ethnography of a particular taught course titled "Hearing Images, Seeing Sounds". This paper argues how anthropology is always an act of interlocution between one's lived everyday and a conceptual terrain which can help understand how we live the everyday.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an ethnography of a course I conducted in my university where the challenge was to convey and work with anthropological concepts to mostly non-humanities, engineering and science students from diverse backgrounds. Pedagogical constraints of teaching anthropology within a university may not allow for a "field" to be constructed while doing a course, however is there a way for students to "do" anthropology by turning the familiar into a field? Keeping this impetus in mind, this course titled "Hearing Images, Seeing Sounds" worked within the spatial physical location of the university itself to pedagogically translate the possibility of nurturing an "anthropological eye" to interrogate the terrain of the familiar. The ethnographic elucidation of this paper is essentially work produced in this class where images were created from within the university, influenced by a theoretical question asked by students, and then complementing these images with sounds also collected or produced from the university. Thinking through students work in this course entailed a distinct way of writing the world.
This paper presents the possibility of thinking whether an anthropological mode of inquiry is in a way an act of interlocution between a concept and a context and if so can one then argue that what anthropology essentially allows for is the possibility of inscribing the world we inhabit and how that inscription creates a continuous process of interlocution between one's lived world and the frame we use to think through this lived everyday.
Paper short abstract:
This paper analises two Ethnographic cases against the backgrounds of Indigenous Renaissance phenomena and Brazilian democratization of universities. It argues that alternative Anthropological teaching strategies are essential to fully achieve the reflexive and political potential of the discipline.
Paper long abstract:
Based on two ethnographic cases, this paper debates the importance of alternative Anthropological teaching strategies, as a tool to achieve the full reflexive and political potential of the discipline. The first ethnographic case is based on one of the author's experience as a professor of Anthropology at the State University of Mato Grosso, in Nova Xavantina, a small town of Central Brazil. The second happened ten years before that, when the other author was a Brazilian Exchange Student of Anthropology at the University of Bologna in Italy. In dialogue with scholars who critically reflect about Anthropology´s Colonial routs, we argue that the traditional method of teaching the discipline, anchored on the duality between the "We and Them", has not yet been overcome in practice. Although these routs have already been repeatedly and strongly criticized, they still guide the mainstream teaching practice of Anthropology. In the paper, the theoretical, methodological and political threats posed by these Colonial routs will be analyzed against the following backgrounds. Firstly, the Brazilian democratization of universities, a process that took place in the last twenty years and allowed the inclusion of people of different races, colors, ethnicities, classes, and/or world experiences, which have been historically marginalized. Another important background is the recent phenomena of "Indigenous Renaissance", which points out the enhancement of Original Populations' centrality as political actors in global debates. Both these backgrounds make it urgent to investigate and debate new ways of critically teaching, producing, consuming and evaluating anthropolical knowledge as Political Action.
Paper short abstract:
How to guide students to anthropology when Brazil is governed by political forces that discredit it? We reflect on this through experiences in a program that prepares teachers for the Brazilian high school, where we teach focusing at what Segato defines as an ethical impulse of anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
Few countries combine socioeconomic inequalities and cultural differences as intensively as Brazil. At the same time that it houses more than 200 Amerindian ethnicities, different rural communities, descendants of enslaved, and a profusion of urban identities, its population is cleaved by an immense disparity in material conditions and opportunities for decent life. Recently, this duality was further aggravated by the growth of social support of far-right forces that culminated in its victory in the 2018 presidential elections. How to teach anthropology in this context? If Brazilian history, society and culture alone are already a major challenge to anthropology, the rise of far-right forces tensions the situation to paroxysm. How to guide students to the anthropological perspective at a time when the country is governed by political forces that discredit it? We reflect ethnographically on these questions through experiences in a postgraduate program that prepares teachers for the Brazilian high school, where we teach focusing at what Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato defines as an ethical impulse of anthropology. She suggests that, by recognizing the demands of different communities, the anthropologist can generate an expansion of human rights through an ethical awareness of social and cultural differences. For Segato, anthropology can serve as a sort of ethics teacher for legal regulations. We conclude by arguing that teaching anthropology should embrace this ethical criticism as one of its tasks. This practice can be performed using the anthropological knowledge and methods not only to present "the view from afar", but also to deepen citizenship.
Paper short abstract:
The awareness of colonial attitudes in Western scientific practice involves the education of researchers in academic institutions. The paper emphasise the use of pedagogical tools in the classroom to train self-reflexivity during the research process.
Paper long abstract:
The awareness of colonial attitudes in Western scientific practice involves the education of researchers in academic institutions. How are we preparing the young anthropologists to go for short period research that do not allow them to have time for personal envolvement to develop social relations from self observation while in the fieldwork? It is necessary to deconstruct the cultural rootedness of the western colonizing mentality. Although this deconstruction abounds, disseminated by various studies, researchers do not recognize this attitude in them during the research as a social practice. Intellectual information is not equal to self-recognition. It is necessary to go beyond the theory and create pedagogical tools that induce in the social scientist an uprooting induced by the cultural shock and thus is forced to see the world in an de-centred way. The paper suggests tools and technics to use with students as a preparation to understand the "field" to be researched, a "dive" into the world they want to understand. An extended time dialoguing with the people we want to understand and take their words seriously.