Paper short abstract:

Drawing on community-based research and scholarly/activist engagements, this collaborative paper reflects on teaching experiences from an anthropological course in Denmark, where we aimed to challenge and dismantle Othering and harmful research practices and establish a norm-critical classroom.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on a teaching collaboration in Applied Anthropology with a class of predominantly white, middle class cisgender students. The class was organized as a collaboration with a local NGO, and the students were given the task to study issues of discrimination and exclusion within youth, leisure activities.

Prior to the course, the students had very limited theoretical and methodological knowledge of racialization, cis- and heteronormativity, intersectionality, (de)coloniality and marginalization. Therefore, we experienced that many students gravitated towards potential field sites where they assumed to find racial and gendered 'others'. This gave us the opportunity to examine, and therefore challenge, what students of Anthropology in Denmark are often taught in terms of 'the other', positionality, accountability in research and particularly dynamics of insider/outsider and researcher/researched.

In the paper, we reflect on how we established a norm-critical classroom, how we made the students investigate their own positionalities and research interests, how to incorporate tools of stepping up/down and calling in/out in academic teaching, as well as how we dealt with discomfort in the classroom.

Our paper also includes reflections on being black and trans, respectively, as teachers of Anthropology and thus also being marginalized in our workplace as well as in the classroom. We hope this paper will contribute to a collective discussion on how we can use norm-critical and anti-colonial tools to better European standards of Anthropological education, while navigating the deeply colonial, cis- and heteronormative fabric of what is considered canon.