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- Convenors:
-
Chenyu Wang
(Hamilton College)
Diane Hoffman (University of Virginia)
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Short Abstract:
This panel explores new developments in the anthropological study of learning that can contribute to understanding processes of learning occurring throughout the lifespan and in a variety of contexts beyond formal schooling.
Long Abstract:
Learning has long been a focus for the anthropology of education, though in recent years new approaches and theorizations have begun to expand both our appreciation of the nature of fundamental processes and the implications of these new approaches for questions of social and environmental justice. This panel considers how questions of culture, embodiment, sensorial knowledge, epistemology, attention, and multimodality are currently shaping the study of learning, with a goal of expanding our perspectives on human learning throughout the lifespan and in relationship with the more-than-human world.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 26 June, 2024, -Giovanna Bacchiddu (Pontificia Universidad Catolica, Chile)
Paper short abstract:
This paper shows how children in the rural and indigenous island Apiao learn immersed in the environment all the necessary local knowledge for daily activities. This is contrasted with formal schooling where children learn a different kind of knowledge, somehow disconnected from their living space
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses ethnographic material showing how children in the small, rural and indigenous island Apiao (Chiloé, Chile) learn crucial skills in total immersion and syntony with the local environment. From an early age they get used to the green land, the beach, the seaside and all the creatures that inhabit it, and interact with them all. Observing their parents or other adults, they imitate their actions and are eager to be assigned tasks and given responsibilities. The environment and its beings (animals, plants, etc) are the background landscape to all their actions, whether they are playing or undertaking some chores.
All children attend the rural school where they learn curricula which are unified nationwide, having little to do with local knowledge; indigenous cultural heritage is only tangentially discussed and mostly ignored. These two different types of knowledge are compared and contrasted, through ethnographic data that highlight children's different bodily and relational attitudes while at home, in the fields/beach or at school.
How can we understand and reconcile such extreme sides of learning? Is is possible to imagine formal schools that integrate traditional knowledge? And would they satisfy all parties involved?
Tricia Niesz (Kent State University)
Paper short abstract:
Understandings of learning in social movement learning (SML) research share much with those in the anthropology of learning, but these traditions have yet to intersect. Here I make the case for an anthropology of SML with illustration from ethnographic research on a US pro-public education movement.
Paper long abstract:
Renewed interest in the anthropology of learning over the last several years has led theorists into new areas of inquiry (multimodality, posthumanism, etc.). An area that has remained untouched, however, is social movement learning. The term “social movement learning” was coined around the same time as the “anthropology of learning,” but the two inquiry traditions have remained disconnected. This is notable because they share much in common: an understanding of learning as social, an interest in informal and nonformal education, a refusal to ignore power and politics, and emphases on identity and change, among others. Still, my read of social movement learning scholarship suggests that anthropological perspectives could deepen and enrich this work.
In this paper, I first attempt to make the case for an anthropology of social movement learning and, second, illustrate its value through an application to my ethnographic research on a pro-public education movement in the Midwest U.S. In the first half of the paper, I outline the rationale for and elements of an anthropology of social movement learning. Specifically, I identify what an anthropological perspective could add to (as well as what anthropologists could learn from) scholarship on social movement learning. In the second half of the paper, I draw from my recent ethnographic study to discuss the value of an anthropology of social movement learning. Specifically, I explore learning among social movement actors advocating to preserve public education in a U.S. state hit particularly hard by neoliberal attacks on public education.
Chenyu Wang (Hamilton College)
Paper short abstract:
A small elite liberal arts college in the northeastern United States provides a context for the proliferation of youth activism. This paper focuses on how higher educational institutions transmute, and therefore depoliticize impulses to action into individualized and depoliticized affect.
Paper long abstract:
A small elite liberal arts college in the northeastern United States provides a context for the proliferation of youth activism. However, the increasing popularity of youth activism in elite PWIs is inherently paradoxical: elite activist-identifying students are structurally located in institutions that entrench the very inequalities these students purport to ameliorate. Taking this paradox seriously, this paper asks: just what is achieved through such practices of change, and how are such practices shaped by the critical, justice-oriented education that proliferates PWIs? Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with racially marked students, I examine two moments of student-led activism: a campaign regarding student-directed resources and a teach-in aiming to confront marginalization on a PWI campus. In doing so, this paper unpacks how justice-oriented education in PWIs ironically encourages students to envision and practice justice through a neoliberal form of agency. Students in elite PWIs therefore become further entangled in the contradictions of their positionalities.
Abismrita Chakravarty
Paper long abstract:
Craft apprenticeships are complex webs where identities, histories, learning, and livelihoods get intertwined. This paper will draw from the ethnographic findings from fieldwork done among handloom weaving communities based in India to explore how communities transfer their knowledge and skills and generate a sense of agency. Handloom weaving is learnt within the domestic setting and passed on from one generation to the next through an informal embodied apprenticeship. Through a multi-sited ethnography of handloom weavers in Kamrup in Assam, Maheshwar in Madhya Pradesh and Kota in Rajasthan, and Gujarat, I examine how women-weavers engage variedly with their own traditional knowledge and with recent design and skill intervention programmes. The transmission of traditional knowledge and acquisition of new skills have had an impact on the relationship to work which, traditionally is a customary activity intimately tied to their social cultural identities of gender, caste, and religion. Technology and digital platforms have played a part in bringing forth new products and identities of the artisans. I locate the sites of resistance, tension, and negotiations with ideas of authenticity, tradition, modernity, and skill. The paper will discuss how artisans continue to learn and practice their craft with other auxiliary skills, innovate, negotiate, resist, and perform their identities challenging contemporary discourses on development and education.