Paper Short Abstract:

Anthroday MI-TO – a three-day program of public events meant to strengthen the work of anthropologists with institutions, third sector, and enterprises – shows innovative ways of communicating anthropology, through and beyond academia, to create collaborations with territories and professionals.

Paper Abstract:

In this paper, we will reflect on innovative ways of communicating anthropology to engage a broad, non-academic, audience, by presenting the case of World Anthropology Day | Public Anthropology in Milan and Turin (AnthroDay MI-TO), which our team has organized since 2019 under Milano-Bicocca University’s coordination and in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. Anthroday MI-TO is a three-day program of more than 80 public events meant to make visible and recognizable the daily work of anthropologists in dialogue with institutions, third sector, and enterprises. Resonating with the potential of multiple social realities, it relies on formats that emphasize active and experiential engagement, such as workshops, ethnographic-walks and exhibitions, showing what anthropologists know and do “at large”. The goal is twofold: to give public visibility to a little-known discipline like anthropology, by displaying effective collaborative experiences widely implemented in the two cities; and to enable the emergence of new collaborations with professionals from other fields, embedded in the territories, through and beyond academia. AnthroDay MI-TO is an incubator of new projects, arising from synergies between anthropological knowledge and diversified professional know-how, between research and public engagement of the discipline, designed to meet a growing “demand for anthropology” through hybrid and applied tools and languages capable of forming an inclusive and dynamic anthropological “community of practice” (Lave, Wenger 1991). In our presentation, we will first describe AnthroDay MI-TO’s experience; we will then focus on exemplary activities, highlighting strengths and weaknesses of a way of communicating anthropology that entails experience and practice.