Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores my role as an educational anthropologist, fostering anthropological engagement through experiential learning and public outreach. It overviews a student-initiated project that promotes anthropological knowledge and participatory action, extending anthropology beyond academia.

Paper long abstract:

This study delineates my role as an educational anthropologist, promoting anthropological engagement through experiential learning and public outreach. It highlights the growing focus on experiential learning for students and academia’s social responsibility for public engagement. In this context, anthropology emerges as an optimal medium to achieve both goals while simultaneously bolstering the global initiative of anthropologists to broaden the discipline's influence beyond academic boundaries to engage broader audiences. This is particularly significant in regions like Hong Kong, where the discipline of anthropology is relatively underrepresented.

This manuscript outlines a project that introduces anthropological methodologies to non-anthropology undergraduates in Hong Kong. Simultaneously, it engages them in a combination of experiential learning and public outreach to address the educational challenges confronting ethnic minority students. The project is structured into five stages: 1) training in anthropological methodology; 2) field research to identify the needs of ethnic minority students; 3) formulating support measures; 4) implementing these measures; and 5) evaluating the process. In the concluding stage, participating undergraduates are specifically tasked with creating a sustainable collaboration plan, incorporating input from ethnic minority students, to facilitate mutual learning.

This student-initiated project, leveraging anthropological methods, aims to enhance the learning experience of all involved parties. Drawing insights from this project's experiences, this paper explores the prospects and challenges related to establishing anthropological engagement as a normative practice for non-anthropology students participating in experiential learning and public outreach. The emphasis lies on the dissemination of anthropological knowledge and the promotion of participatory action within the public sphere.

Send message to Authors

Paper short abstract:

Launched in 2023, “Anthropology of Death” is an interdisciplinary course emphasizing transformative learning. Inspired by Ingold’s work, our paper explores the course as an “doing undergoing” experiment, offering alternatives to teaching about pressing issues related to death.

Paper long abstract:

In 2023 we launched a new undergraduate course “Anthropology of Death,” welcoming students from different disciplinary backgrounds. During the 10-week course, students engage in various debates on end-of-life, transformation, (im)mortality, and afterlives, including issues of climate change-related loss, the death of the “other,” and the impact of past and future pandemics.

Building on Tim Ingold’s Anthropology and/as Education (2018) and scholars inspiring him and us (particularly John Dewey and Jan Masschelein), we do not aspire to simply instill authorized knowledge in the minds of our students. Instead, we invite them, in terms of e-ducere, to attend to all beings and things in the world, allowing us (students and educators) to really expose ourselves to current societal and planetary challenges. Central to this is the notion that both anthropology and education, as experiential practices of participant observation, are ways of learning from and studying with others, resulting in a potential transformation for and of all participants involved.

In our paper we discuss how the course as an experiment of “doing undergoing” offers an alternative to learning and teaching about death and related pressing issues (e.g., ecological grief and mass extinction, marginalized death, and digitalization), which challenge academics at the intersection of anthropology and education. In so doing, we stress the inevitability of open-ended engagement and collaboration, arguing that our classrooms and curricula can only be truly transformative if they really expose us to the world and are inclusive for everyone involved.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

The articulation between teaching, research and extension under an interdisciplinary umbrella between Anthropology and Psychomotricity, while valuing the knowledge of communities and professional groups contributes to legitimize forms of intervention in an increasingly complex and changing world

Paper long abstract:

In the first Bachelor's Degree in Psychomotricity created in Argentina in 2000 at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Anthropology was from the beginning a compulsory subject, aimed at enriching the view of future professionals with regard to the understanding of cultural diversity and social inequalities. Through teaching and the development of interdisciplinary research projects on the training of psychomotricians in community projects, and the development of university extension projects, I have identified the contribution to the better understanding of relations and interventions in psychomotricity. Specifically, among a university extension project carried out by anthropologists and psychometricians -professors and students-, we have approached to situations of extreme vulnerability of babies, accompanying foster care families who take charge of their care and upbringing. The research on the extension project has made it possible to dynamize the teaching of Anthropology, introducing the approach to care relationships in contexts of violence and extreme poverty, focusing on the power of cultural relations to strengthen care ties while addresing the role of professionals in those contexts. The articulation between teaching, research and extension under an interdisciplinary umbrella enriches the practical and theoretical training of psychometricians. Psychomotricity developed in contexts of poverty, with the contribution of anthropology, resignifies its professional praxis, previously focused on individual and clinical care of families from wealthier backgrounds. Anthropology, with its ability to value the knowledge of each community and group - including professional groups - contributes to legitimize forms of professional intervention in an increasingly complex and changing world.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Conducting anthropological doctoral research within an Education Faculty brings ample rewards and challenges. This paper describes a PhD researcher's experiences trying to work with and against such (inter)disciplinary methods, processes, and protocols.

Paper long abstract:

I examine the anthropology-education nexus as a PhD researcher on ‘well-being’ at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. I argue that an anthropological approach to researching well-being in schools allows us to move beyond the individualising and universalising tendencies in the current psychological and economic well-being scholarship. Yet, such knowledge-making processes are misaligned with current protocols and processes of a PhD program in Education.

For my doctoral study, I conducted 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Tibetan refugee school in India. The study aims to portray how three generations of Tibetans-in-exile within a residential school pursue well-being, in interactions with place, history, and conflict. However, several factors have complicated my research and writing about well-being within an Education department – the positivistic and universalised assumptions underpinning PhD thesis formats, risk assessments and ethics review protocols; notions of quality and rigour; the discrepancy between expectations of a linearly unfolding research story within a thesis and the multidirectional nature of fieldwork experience etc., Having to wrestle individually with such issues – negotiating (inter)disciplinary protocols, forging professional identities, and finding communities to learn from and belong – can create ‘lone ethnographers’ out of PhD researchers and drain their research quality. I situate these struggles within long-standing mutual indifference between Anthropology and Education, only exacerbated under the current educational climate prioritising accountability, standardisation, and efficiency. I argue that both disciplines need to step up and meet mid-way. I discuss how, until then, doctoral researchers can work with and against such (inter)disciplinary conventions.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

Combining Anthropology and Student Voice can help us overcome the often too-dark adult self-referentiality of research in Education. The commitment to listen and include non-adult perspectives yields the power to make us rethink school dynamics in ways that leave more room for hope and possibility.

Paper long abstract:

Despite anthropologists’ efforts to avoid self-referentiality, when it comes to studying education a certain self-referentiality is often swept under the rug: that of the adult investigating and interpreting young people’s experience.

As an Anthropologist and a PhD student in a School of Education, I argue that the transdisciplinary encounter between Anthropology and Inclusive Research in Education, specifically Student Voice, can open unprecedented possibilities for tackling this uncomfortable truth.

Through examples from my MAs fieldwork among Italian high-school students from three different curricula to understand their relationship with the schooling institution, I will show how this approach can help conceive a new and less “dark” vocabulary of school dynamics as we reimagine well-established theories by including non-adult perspectives. Here, trans-disciplinarity means combining the ethnographic methodologies of Anthropology with the genuine commitment to engage with younger people of Student Voice: a true epistemological shift to not overlap adult-created conflict and resistance interpretative frameworks and make way for more hope-filled theories.

The effort of encountering students by participating in their lives yields the power to make us realise how some of the well-established understanding of school dynamics do not collide with students’ perspectives on the same matter, picturing a too-dark picture of their actions: sometimes resistance and conflict efforts are simply not there.

Not least, the comparative and reflexive push of Anthropology can favour the triangulations of students’ voices with the researchers’ observations and teachers’ perspectives, allowing researchers to see the strains and contentions that fuel the dark conflictual picture of school dynamics.

Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the broader context of language loss and explores the transformative potential of technology in education, shedding light on its implications for the future of education anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the intersection of education anthropology, technology, and language education in the rapidly changing technological and educational context of our world. I will draw on my research on the use of artificial intelligence for teaching and learning Nepal Bhasa, one of the minoritized languages in Nepal. With the rapid development of artificial intelligence-based language technology, this new technological space is increasingly presented as a promising avenue for new futures in global education systems, and its implications for educational aspirations as well as language development aspirations of minoritized language communities. These developments need to be understood within the context where more than half of the languages spoken today are predicted to die by the next century. The "death" of a language is generally considered the point at which "nobody speaks it anymore"; in other words, language loss can be viewed as this ongoing disembodiment, and for any language to have life, it must be spoken by its speakers. When no new speakers are taught or no new speakers learn these languages, it is considered to be dying. The paper explores the ontological conceptualization of education and implications for education anthropology that emerge when AI is integrated into education. By approaching AI as a potential life-giving source, the paper contributes to the understanding of embodiment and disembodiment in education, offering a glimpse into the imagination of a new educational future and its implications for education anthropology.