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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.