- Convenors:
-
Lorenzo Cañás Bottos
(Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
Ioannis Manos (University of Macedonia)
Jakob Krause-Jensen (Aarhus University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel examines how the teaching of anthropology is being shaped by political polarisation, institutional change, and current global pressures. We invite theoretically and ethnographically grounded contributions on pedagogical tensions, transformations, and possibilities across diverse settings.
Long Abstract
This panel explores how current forces of political, economic, and cultural polarisation are transforming the teaching and learning of anthropology, both within and beyond the classroom. We approach anthropology as a field of contested knowledge production — often complicit in the structures it claims to critique, yet capable of fostering alternative imaginaries in its pedagogical approaches.
We welcome theoretically and ethnographically grounded papers that examine how polarising dynamics are reshaping the means, content, and contexts in which anthropology is taught, enacted, and contested. Global movements like #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and decolonisation campaigns call not only for curricular reform but also for a rethinking of the canon, pedagogical authority, and disciplinary values. Technological changes — from COVID-era remote teaching to AI-assisted teaching, learning and assessment — pose further pedagogical challenges to how anthropology is passed on. All these within increasing institutional pressures via reduced budgets, stricter visa policies, escalating tuition costs, and the broader instrumentalization of higher education. We also welcome reflections on multimodal and extra universitary teaching practices — podcasts, social media — and how these engage and challenge polarised publics.
We invite paper proposals that view teaching as a space of negotiation, transformation, and resistance, as well as a context for reimagining anthropology’s futures in an increasingly polarized world as well as contributions that examine:
-How ideological conflict influences what can be taught, who participates, and how classroom dynamics develop
-How efforts to decolonise or diversify the canon are taken up, resisted, or reconfigured across institutions and regions.
-How educators respond to curriculum reform, censorship, surveillance, technological developments, or resource cuts
-How teaching occurs in alternative spaces — online, public, activist — and how these challenge traditional pedagogical roles
-How teachers and learners experience the emotional, ethical, and intellectual strain of teaching in divided settings.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines the pedagogical and ethical stakes of writing 2,000-word public anthropology texts for an online platform and using them in teaching. Drawing on this experience, it positions public anthropology as an impactful aesthetic and ethical intervention in a polarized public sphere.
Paper long abstract
In this presentation, I reflect on my experience of writing essays for an online public anthropology platform (Antropedia/Sfertul Academic) and of using these texts pedagogically, alongside contributions by other authors. Founded by two anthropologists, this Romanian platform was conceived as an intervention aimed at extending anthropology beyond academic audiences and sustaining the discipline in a context of institutional vulnerability. I understood my participation as an exercise in accessibility. However, once these texts entered the classroom, the significance of form became central. The 2,000-word format functions as a closed epistemic space: students often engage exclusively with these texts, without supplementary readings or broader theoretical debates. In this context, conceptual abstraction do not merely challenge readers; it delimits what can be known and learned. The task, thus, becomes one of rendering arguments both rigorous and compelling within strict formal constraints. I deliberately suspended pedagogical authority by asking students to articulate why certain texts resonated more effectively than others. Drawing on these criteria, I curated a corpus from the platform that offer narrative coherence and conceptual precision. As in recent years social and political polarization has intensified in Romania, my understanding of the platform’s potential has further evolved. I now mobilise it as a means of positioning anthropology as a critical interlocutor in a fragmented public sphere. By foregrounding relationality, difference, and shared social worlds, these texts enable students to analyse polarization not only as an object of critique, but as a condition demanding impactful ethical and publicly engaged responses.
Paper short abstract
Based on teaching experiences in Brazilian public universities, this paper examines how anthropology is taught amid moral disagreement and political polarisation, arguing that pedagogical authority today operates less through consensus than through negotiated engagement with conflict.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the teaching of anthropology in contexts marked by political polarisation and moral disagreement, drawing on ethnographic reflections from undergraduate classrooms in Brazilian public universities. Rather than approaching teaching as a process aimed at building consensus around shared values or theoretical positions, the paper analyses pedagogy as a fragile and situated practice shaped by conflict, institutional authority relations, and competing moral expectations.
Engaging debates on canon formation, pedagogical authority, and critical debates on teaching, the paper explores how students’ demands for recognition, inclusion, and explicit moral and political positioning intersect — and often collide — with anthropology’s commitment to analytical distance, comparison, and epistemic openness. Moments of tension around race, inequality, and political positioning are treated not as pedagogical failures but as ethnographically productive sites where disciplinary values are contested and reformulated.
The paper argues that teaching anthropology today requires navigating a double bind: responding to increasing calls for diversification and ethical engagement while resisting the reduction of teaching to normative alignment or prescriptive conformity. In this sense, the classroom becomes an institutional space where disagreement is not resolved but managed, translated, and rendered pedagogically meaningful.
By treating teaching not as a site of consensus-building but as a situated practice of negotiation under conditions of disagreement, the paper contributes to current debates on how anthropology is taught, contested, and sustained in polarised institutional settings. It offers a grounded account of teaching as a form of disciplinary reproduction under strain, highlighting both its vulnerabilities and its continued analytical promise.
Paper short abstract
What does it mean for an anthropologist to become a public intellectual? What can be gained, and what can be lost in the process? Is it possible to reconcile the stance of a distanced researcher with that of an engaged citizen?
Paper long abstract
A discipline that has studied cultural diversity for more than 150 years is not the first choice of the media when they seek experts to comment on key issues concerning people and society. Journalists tend to turn to us mainly during the holiday season, asking for commentary on “old” or “strange” symbols and practices. Beyond that, media explanations of the world are usually provided by representatives of disciplines positioned higher in the academic hierarchy, such as law, political science, or sociology. What, then, is wrong with us? How can we make our discipline more attractive, engaging, and socially relevant?
My presentation will draw on personal experiences related to attempts to introduce anthropological knowledge into public debate in Poland. I will focus on two case studies: a popular, illustrated trilogy for young readers and the podcast Antropop, available on major streaming platforms. Their presence in the public sphere reveals a series of paradoxes: on the one hand, positive reviews; on the other, requests to avoid discussing gender issues during author meetings. On one side, emails expressing gratitude for addressing topics excluded from public debate; on the other, accusations of functioning as a political tool of a left-wing agenda.
What, consequently, does it mean for an anthropologist to become a public intellectual? What can be gained, and what can be lost in the process? Is it possible to reconcile the stance of a distanced researcher with that of an engaged citizen?
Paper short abstract
In response to the academic use of AI tools, this paper explores the new challenges and possibilities that arise within anthropological teaching and research.
Paper long abstract
In response to the growing academic use of AI, institutions have introduced guidelines to help students and educators navigate this new landscape. However, many of these guidelines overlook disciplinary differences in how knowledge is created and taught. This paper examines an anthropology-informed approach to AI use.
Using anthropological teaching and research as a baseline, I explore the limits and possibilities associated with academic AI use. This involves examining how anthropological knowledge is created in both education and research. For instance, the role and meaning of ‘writing’ in anthropology differ significantly from other fields. Therefore, AI-based writing tools introduce unique disciplinary challenges and opportunities.
With the introduction of AI, it is essential that we understand and can convey the processes involved in the creation of anthropological knowledge – and how these processes may be affected by the use AI.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines an experimental approach to teaching urban anthropology in Serbia, where students learn from acute urban problems such as displacement, disasters, migration, and pandemics, treating unfolding crises as shared fieldwork contexts and pedagogical resources.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how acute urban problems enter anthropological pedagogy under conditions of social uncertainty and global polycrisis. Based on teaching experiences at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, University of Belgrade, it discusses an experimental approach in which students are actively involved as partners in the conceptualization and implementation of field-based learning in urban anthropology.
Between 2012 and 2025, several courses were structured around unfolding urban situations in Serbian cities, including the forced relocation of Roma communities linked to large infrastructure projects, catastrophic floods in which community-based self-help played a crucial role, citizens’ responses to the Balkan migration route, and students’ and their families’ experiences of COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccination campaigns. Rather than treating these issues as distant case studies, the courses engaged with them as shared and ongoing realities that directly shaped students’ everyday lives and moral concerns.
The paper reflects, first, on the methodological and ethical dimensions of curricular experimentation that foregrounds collaboration, reflexivity, and learning in and from the field. Second, it situates these pedagogical practices within broader transformations affecting higher education, including changing institutional expectations, resource constraints, and increasing demands for social relevance. The paper argues that teaching urban anthropology in times of polycrisis opens possibilities for rethinking pedagogy as a situated and responsive practice, one that enables students to critically engage with pressing urban issues while reconsidering anthropology’s role in addressing contemporary societal challenges.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines a fieldwork-based teaching method in the Ethnographic Laboratory at the University of Warsaw, focusing on students’ sensitivity and ethical reflexivity. It shows how encounters in polarized contexts foster imagination, tolerance, and reflection on identity while posing challenges.
Paper long abstract
The paper presents a distinctive educational method implemented in the undergraduate programme in Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Warsaw. As part of the two-year Ethnographic Laboratory course, students gain practical experience in ethnographic fieldwork. This approach to teaching anthropology is particularly effective in times of strong social polarization, as direct engagement with diverse discourses, practices, and ways of experiencing the world fosters the development of an anthropological imagination, broadens personal horizons, and strengthens negotiation skills and tolerant attitudes.
The presentation analyses students’ experiences, focusing on the sensitivity of young researchers, understood as a specific form of emotional vulnerability combined with ethical reflexivity accompanying encounters with social and cultural otherness. The analysis is based on teaching observations and students’ semester papers documenting their fieldwork experiences. Field research is conceptualized as a liminal experience, comparable to a rite of passage, that engages students in an intensive, holistic way. Particular attention is paid to the anxieties associated with first interviews, stress resulting from contact with unfamiliar individuals, and feelings of inadequacy or rejection.
Conducting interviews was emotionally demanding, especially for students with strongly developed worldview-based identities inspired by feminist and progressive discourses. Encounters with respondents’ views, frequently racist, nationalist, or sexist, were experienced as stressful and unsettling.
The paper concludes that the more clearly defined a student’s identity is, the more emotionally challenging fieldwork becomes. In this situation, fieldwork is exceptionally significant and productive. Sensitivity thus emerges as both a challenge and a constitutive value of the research process.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the use of speculative fiction in anthropology teaching as a response to polarisation. Treated as a parallel site of cultural knowledge, fiction enables students to practice ethnographic analysis, reflexivity, and interpretation in a safer, affectively engaging pedagogical space.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the use of fiction as a strategy for teaching anthropology in an increasingly polarised world. Drawing on three years of teaching experience in an undergraduate course, we explore how speculative fiction can be used to train ethnographic thinking while navigating ideological conflict and emotionally charged topics.
Rather than treating fiction as supplementary material, the course approaches it as a parallel site of cultural knowledge production, where meanings, power relations, and social imaginaries are constructed and contested. Unlike “finished” ethnographies, in which analytical moves are already explicit, fictional narratives require students to identify patterns, formulate interpretations, and argue from the material themselves. Fiction does not replace ethnography, but functions as a preparatory training ground for ethnographic reasoning before students encounter ethically and politically loaded issues in their own fieldwork.
Fictional narratives allow engagement with such issues in a pedagogically safer environment than confrontation with polarising ethnographic experiences. This relative distance can serve as a pedagogical buffer, enabling experimentation with interpretation, reflexivity, and critique while maintaining moral and political engagement. The approach also mobilises the affective dimensions of learning, often resulting in higher levels of student participation and interpretive investment.
The paper reflects on classroom dynamics and moments of friction, particularly around authorship, representation, and legitimacy, and addresses the limits of fiction-based pedagogy, including tensions between authorial intent and anthropological interpretation, and challenges in situating fictional texts within broader cultural and structural patterns. It argues for an experimental, reflexive, and student-agency-based approach to anthropology education in a divided world.