Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on examples from a critical ethnographic/educational project at an Irish University and brings educational and anthropological scholarship together. It inquires into the transformative potential of informality as part of a pedagogic responses to an overheating cultural climate.

Paper long abstract:

Staging an encounter between educational and anthropological theory and practice, this paper approaches pedagogy as a deep political cultural process that is integral to democracy. I will introduce examples from a collaborative ethographic reserach project, which was conducted together with an anthropology educator in an Irish university over six months in 2021/22. This professor experimented with introducing a new successful cross-departmental module (The "Anti-Racism"-module) to the university curriculum as part of a response to a heightened historic moment (shortly after Black Lives Matter protests, rise of right wing governmentality, and in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic) where academic freedom, publicness and public education are finding themselves amidst precarious planetary transformations (e.g. Flaherty 2020; Braidotti 2013). This paper explores her professional experience and learning as an educational anthropologist/educator who is also a reflexive practitioner, inspired by Rothberg's (2019) theory of implicated subjectivity. Drawing on vignettes from fieldnotes as well as on excerpts from reflexive conversations and interviews, this paper illustrates the "double-ness of education" (Todd 2018) by inquiring into the transformative pedagogic potential of cultivating informality within formal educational spaces shaped by neoliberal agendas and pressures (Biesta 2020). I hope to raise questions about possibilities for combining anthropological and critical educational practice with the aim of generating relationalities that support public anthropological, public pedagogical and democratic principles.