Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses who decolonisation is for within the context of teaching and learning visual anthropology. We think with Tina Campt's (2017) call to listen to images as a horizon for reclaiming decolonisation as something more than rhetorical in our research and teaching endeavours.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses who decolonisation is for within the context of teaching and learning visual anthropology. In the early 1990s Wilton Martinez (1992) asked "who constructs anthropological knowledge?" in the context of sharing canonical ethnographic films and photographs to undergraduate anthropology students. His critique was straightforward; by unreflexively (and even, in some cases critically) showing images and films produced and rendered during early 20th century efforts to 'salvage' culture devastated by colonial and imperial genocide and expropriation, anthropologists' reaffirmed students understandings of the racial hierarchies we have all inherited as a legacy of these shared histories. The images, Martinez argued, couldn't help but reproduce these troubling ideas of hierarchical difference even when it was accompanied with a critical framing. In effect, the student produced anthropological knowledge through their readings of these images, moving and still, that reaffirmed current conditions of coloniality. Drawing from our experiences teaching the subdiscipline of visual anthropology in US and UK Anthropology Departments, we coin the term 'pedagogies of listening' to refer to a series of teaching and research strategies aimed at re-imagining anthropology's visual archive through sonic displacements, figure-background reversals and redactions. We think with Tina Campt's (2017) call to listen to images as a horizon for reclaiming decolonisation as something more than rhetorical in the way we approach how, as Yarimar Bonilla (2017) suggests, we might unsettle coloniality in our teaching and research endeavours.