Send message to Author

Paper 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.