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- Convenors:
-
Rachel Cantave
(Skidmore College)
Riddhi Bhandari (O.P. Jindal Global University)
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- Discussant:
-
Rachel Cantave
(Skidmore College)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Friday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
This proposed panel aims to bring together anthropologists to initiate a critical dialogue around what we refer to as the “pedagogy of care".
Long Abstract:
Conversations on innovative pedagogy are often organized and enforced by university administrators as selling points focused on the experiences of students. Unfortunately, they often exclude faculty and their concerns. In response to this post-COVID trend, increasing precarity in academic work, and in the spirit of “doing and undoing”, this panel will initiate a conversation on developing a holistic approach to pedagogical innovation that moves beyond skill-building and solutionizing to approaching it as a political project, that includes both stakeholders: students and faculty. Papers in this panel may address questions such as: What is considered innovative pedagogy in Anthropology as currently conceptualized and practiced? What ethical and political concerns in current promotions of innovative pedagogy are there? What could a holistic “pedagogy of care” look like? Papers in this panel may also consider “pedagogies of care” through a particular framework such as black feminist, postcolonial, queer or other ways of “doing and undoing” anthropology, pedagogically speaking.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 26 July, 2024, -Ashwin Varghese (O.P. Jindal Global University) Sriti Ganguly (O.P. Jindal Global University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws from the authors' experiences of teaching sociology and anthropology in academic institutions in India, to reflect on and draw out strategies for developing a 'holistic pedagogy of care' as a balancing act between 'care' and 'discomfort'.
Paper long abstract:
Cultivating the sociological imagination (placing biography in conversation with social history) has been at the heart of pedagogical practices in social anthropology in various universities in India. With the advent of neoliberalism and the emergence of the highly atomized individual, cultivating the link between individual and society is increasingly becoming challenging. Sociologists and anthropologists in academia understand this challenge as a crisis in pedagogy. This paper reflects on this crisis as it manifests in academic institutions in India, and draws from the authors’ own experiences of teaching sociology and social anthropology in academic institutions in India. In response to these challenges, we reflect on what possibilities and predicaments this crisis unfolds. Pedagogy in social sciences has fundamentally included encountering ‘uncomfortable’ truths. The post-pandemic context has brought to the fore the importance of cultivating a pedagogy of care. We reflect on the current crisis in pedagogy that emerges from the vacillation between ‘care’ and ‘discomfort’, and reflect upon how we may develop a holistic ‘pedagogy of care’ without altering the discipline’s fundamentally critical approach that forces individuals to encounter inequality, marginality, oppression, privilege, and domination? We draw from our experiences to note strategies of developing this holistic pedagogy of care as a balancing act of care and discomfort.
Riddhi Bhandari (O.P. Jindal Global University)
Paper short abstract:
I reflect on questions of “care” in doing and teaching ethnography within the framework of “innovative pedagogy”. Drawing from my experiences as ethnographer and faculty, and from global south scholars who have critically examined ethnographic practices to propose ways to practice ethnographic care.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on questions of “care” vis-à-vis doing and teaching ethnography. Ethnography has received a boost in recent years as many universities and social sciences departments have embraced the framework of “innovative pedagogy” and means of learning that are more interactive, experiential, and focused on skill-development. Within this framework, ethnography as a principal method of anthropological research and data collection, is prized both as an interactive and experiential way of knowing and learning concepts and communities, and a valuable skill set of qualitative research, data collection and writing that is useful for future employment, both in and outside academia. Consequently, short-term ethnographic projects are increasingly being integrated in course curricula and students are encouraged to undertake fieldwork as part of their underrate training. It is important to consider this rising popularity and commonplace practice of ethnography alongside questions of ethics, practice, and training that are further entangled with dynamics of power, relationality, reciprocity, and knowledge production.
I will reflect on some of these questions in this proposed paper. In doing so, I will draw from my experiences as both an ethnographer and a faculty who teaches undergraduate anthropology courses, and from global south scholars who have critically examined their ethnographic practices and offered alternate roadmaps for “how to do” mindful ethnography. I conclude with deliberating on what “ethnographic care” could look like.
Magna Mohapatra (UW Madison)
Paper short abstract:
The paper frames a conception of care by analysing feminist phenomenological and decolonial pedagogies and their interweaving with ethics of care scholarship. I expand on how to care- "Willful Care"- through relationality (Walsh and Mignolo 2018) of different ways of seeing, doing and being.
Paper long abstract:
The paper frames a conception of care by analysing feminist phenomenological and decolonial pedagogies and their interweaving with ethics of care scholarship. I expand on how to care- "Willful Care"- through relationality (Walsh and Mignolo 2018) of different ways of seeing, doing and being. In looking at the concepts and praxis of decoloniality (Quijano, Mignolo, Walsh, Lugones, Velez and Tuana, etc), feminism (Ahmed, hooks, Arendt, Hall, Bracke, de la Bellacasa, Martinez, to name a few) and ethics of care (Tronto, Bourgault, Laugier, Robinson, Steyl, etc), I attempt to analyze the epistemes through relationality/vincularidad (Walsh and Mignolo 2018). In doing so, I claim that the praxis of these conceptions are interconnected to one another and to realize one is to "be-with" the other. This form of relationality brings me to “Willful Care” as a way of "Mitsein" or Being-with (Heidegger 1971) and imagining a collective pluriversal solidarity across borders and identities. The decolonial feminist framework of care ethics brings into our everyday Being the conscious act of listening intently, being vulnerable, attending to (intersectional) differences, authentic meaningful communication, ethical hermeneutics and willful resistance through care as a form of praxis. In times of growing inequality, poverty, genocides, hunger, violence (both structural and personal), racism, sexism, anti-semitism and Islamophobia and the many other forms of discrimination based on identity politics, "Willful Care" is a form of decolonial-feminist pedagogy that puts together a survival care kit (borrowing from Sara Ahmed 2017) in these times of ongoing crises and chaos.
Andrea Wright (Harvard University)
Paper short abstract:
Structured around a series of first-hand narratives and drawn from four-years of experience teaching an engaged feminist anthropology course, this paper will provide an opportunity to discuss how to mobilize feminist pedagogical approaches to create caring class communities as spaces of resistance.
Paper long abstract:
Working under the assumption that adopting a feminist pedagogy of care illuminates the ways in which an institution’s cosmetic appeals to diversity obfuscate epistemic violence and labor extraction, this session will provide an opportunity to discuss how we can mobilize feminist pedagogical approaches and create caring class communities as spaces of resistance. Structured around a series of first-hand narratives and drawn from four-years of experience teaching an engaged feminist anthropology course titled, Care in Critical Times this conversation will open a space to dialogue about concrete strategies for teaching and learning with care. By centering instructor intentionality and radical acts of classroom care, this dialogue will highlight pedagogical and community-building approaches for countering vacuous institutional affects of generosity and welcome.
Topics addressed include:
1. What can a pedagogy of care look and feel like in a classroom space in a neoliberal university?
2. What strategies can instructors employ to create a care-full classroom community?
3. How might instructors develop a course that challenges the boundaries of the classroom and university as a learning space and facilitates direct community connections and involvement by students?
4. How can we reimagine the classroom as a site of institutional changemaking?
Alison Macdonald (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
Feminist approaches to care as ‘situated’ centre relationality to highlight micropolitical connection in the classroom. Combining a ‘pedagogy of mattering’ (Gravett et al. 2022) with ethnographic research in a democratic school, I argue affective multisensory practice and play can be applied to HE.
Paper long abstract:
Within post-covid, neoliberal, competitive and individualising HE systems, many of us search for innovative methods to challenge the transactional, competitive, and hierarchical model predominant in HE and facilitate the conditions for a more caring and relational model. Feminist approaches in particular centre care as ‘situated’, rather than external from, relationality (Haraway, 1988). In contexts of teaching and learning this reorients us to the micropolitical practices of connection and power between students and staff in the classroom (hooks, 1998). Drawing on my ethnographic research with adults and young people in a radical democratic school in England, I argue that caring approaches to education can emerge through a ‘pedagogy of mattering’. This approach aims to place “the human in relation, attending to the entangled materialities that constitute these relations and the matters that arise therefrom, offers a fundamental recasting of being, knowing and doing in HE and research” (Gravett, Taylor & Fairchild, 2022: 2). Exploring this approach in combination with insights from my research within democratic schools, I draw attention to two dimensions of ‘mattering’ that could be applied to HE education: affective multisensory practice and methods of play. Thinking with my experiences of teaching and learning Anthropology in HE, I suggest these unconventional methods invite a different way of relating for students and staff, creating dynamics that can reduce hierarchy and lead to community building.