Paper short abstract:

What is the pragmatic role of anthropology in the opening of education to the world stage? This panel investigates the ethical and evolutionary role of emerging languages, techniques and technologies, as a means of opening the educative role and vocation of anthropology in addressing world issues.

Paper long abstract:

The recent (re)turn to Kant's conception of a "pragmatic anthropology" opened the potential for imagining and working towards a better world. In Kant's world vision, the teleological educative role of anthropology should be aimed towards creating better world citizens, free-thinking agents guided by communicability and reason in the quest for "world cognition" ["Welterkenntuisse"]. In this context, anthropology has an active role in the formation of a new "world society", referring to the historical and technological developments and international mechanisms that enhance a collective ethos of a unified world out-there emerging out of "the totality of social relationships linking the inhabitants of earth" (Keith Hart 2003, OAC group; Levinson & Pollock 2011, Ingold 2017, Wies & Haldane 2022). Emerging teaching online platforms and social technologies of representation and networking pave the way for opening new fields in education, transgressing the physical and political limits of time and space. This technological opening if the 'third' ethnographic space (Fischer 2018) presents Anthropology with new sets of opportunities, as well as challenges regarding the educational role of anthropology at all levels of the curriculum. This panel hosts three papers focusing on the role of teaching technologies of representation and networking as a means of paving the way towards opening new 'fields' in anthropology and/as education within the emergence of an open and diverse world educative system. It focuses on the evolution (challenges and impact) of English language on the world stage (Hart), the practical impact of a teachers’ training online program for refugee education in Greece (Apostolidou, Askouni, Androusou), and the ethical impact of religious education beyond the institution in a postnatural world society (Paganopoulos).

Paper short abstract:

The case study of a teachers’ training program for refugee education in Greece offers insights into anthropology’s potential to cultivate critical digital citizenship through reflective, open and collaborative online pedagogies.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on the intercultural and intersectional orientation of a teachers’ training program (Teachers Capacity Building on Integration of Refugee and Migrant Children in Greece, implemented by the University of Athens, funded by UNICEF), the paper attempts to articulate a critique on the proliferating discourse around “digital skills” and offer a broad understanding of how online education may cultivate digital citizenship for a more open and diverse education and cohabitation.

Entangling pedagogy, anthropology and sociology, we attempt to reframe the recent concept of digital habitus in the field of affective and collaborative digital education, which strives for conditions of imagining and working towards a better world. Drawing on Bourdieu’s seminal work on the habitus as an intangible, embodied and permeating dimension of socialization, we argue that synchronous and asynchronous online training develops not only a set of practical skills but a whole array of perceptions, attitudes and behaviors around education and sociality in general. Grounded on the analysis of the participants’ reflective testimonies and online observation, the findings confirm that digital learning environments which encourage reflexivity, creativity, and intercultural understanding lead to a shift in positionality that enhances our critical understanding of contemporary cultural practices and of our habitual involvement with digital technologies. The approach of digital education as a relational process which perpetually transforms the habitus of the participants helps us better grasp and address the digital divide, and bridge the teachers’ habitus with the habitus of (refugee) students, thus promoting the creation of emancipatory learning spaces and digital sociality.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the educative role of the conception and uses of Time as it emerges out of the temporalities of the Athonian ‘landscape’ and 'taskscape’ in formulating the ‘self’ in relation to others, the natural environment, and the ‘world’ out-there.

Paper long abstract:

Since the turn of the millennium, the educational role and vocation of the monastic institutions of Mount Athos go through rapid changes. New hardware and software technologies of reproduction, the explosion of social media, and emerging technologies of communication and networking, revived the role monastics play in making and engaging with the emergence of a new world society, in respect to the Anthropogenic natural environment and this moment of material History. This paper looks at how the uses of emerging technologies contribute to the evolution of the character of monastic education and the changing role monastics play towards socio-materiality of the Athonian ‘landscape’ and ‘taskscape’, focusing on inter-performative and interpersonal aspects in the cultivation of a ‘self’ via reinvented techniques and technologies of the body. The paper aims to highlight the revived educational role played by monastic institutions and challenges following their expanding vocation beyond the geographical limits and traditional prohibitions associated with the place, whilst offering alternative and healthy ways of sustainable living, emerging from and formulating the Athonian timescape in direct association with the ‘world’ out-there. The paper will reflect upon the relevance of the educational role of monasteries as eigenstructures of world society and politics between anthropocentric (anthropological) and Christocentric (monastic) approaches to the Anthropocene.