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.