Short Abstract:

Although learning and education are essential to being human, they have often been taken-for-granted or side-lined in anthropological inquiries. However, last year’s ASA2022 Anthropology Educates conference, coupled with this year’s RAI conference on Anthropology and Education, provides an ideal opportunity to reconsider the questions not only of how best to deliver an education in the discipline of anthropology, but also of how the discipline is itself fundamentally educational in its ways of working and in its ethical and transformational commitments.

Long Abstract:

This plenary panel, organised by the ASA2022 editorial collective, will build on reflections from the Anthropology Educates conference and its forthcoming monograph, which explores the practices, pathways and institutional contexts of anthropological learning and education, the possibilities of knowing and being they open up, and the transformations, both personal and social, they can potentially bring about. We also seek to recognise and interrogate the many ways in which anthropological education continues to perpetuate exclusion and privilege, and to reproduce domination and hegemonic forms of knowledge. We do this through five scaled-down versions of ASA2022’s ‘studios’ which span the themes of anthropology as education, decolonising the academy, student-academic collaborations, anthropology across disciplines, and anthropology and the university. Across all five themes, the studios explore the limitations and possibilities of anthropological education while providing vivid accounts of the regenerative practices of anthropological education and learning that are already happening across diverse settings and in small spaces carved out within the interstices of neoliberal institutions. Combining insights from these studios with emergent themes from the RAI conference, we aim to put learning and education at the heart of our discipline.

The plenary will be in the form of a round table, with contributors from each studio sharing their insights and opportunities for audience question and answer and discussion.