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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.