Paper short abstract:

Participants reflect on the co-curation of a performative autoethnography event and discuss how research-based-learning as a dialogic and reciprocal didactic format facilitates critical pedagogy in the academic context.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution explores the potentials and challenges of a university seminar that invited students to engage with the method of performative autoethnography and questions concerning communicating social anthropological insights to an audience. Research-based learning, as a dialogic form of teaching-learning-research, with its context-specific orientation toward understanding, aims for students and educators to collectively reflect on their field experiences and brings into focus reciprocal learning. Students were actively involved in knowledge production and experimented with the roles of learners, researchers, educators, and knowledge disseminators.

From an ethnopsychological perspective, it is necessary for us to learn to distinguish between the self and the other in order to not merely project subjective perceptions and assumptions. Like every individual, we experience the world through our bodies (Leib) and are inevitably part of what we observe. The autoethnographic approach and the experience and application of the ethnographic method on one's own socio-cultural context and embodiment are particularly suitable for engaging with postcolonial critique and the issue of 'othering' in social anthropology. The approaches of performative (auto)ethnography challenge and expand conventional forms of (textual) ethnographic representations (of 'the other'). Theater isn't solely a tool for conveying anthropological insights to an interested public; theater-making itself can be understood as an ethnographic method for analyzing and exploring human existence and embodiments. Participants and the instructor of the course reflect together on the co-curation of the event they staged at the end of the semester and the transformative experiences of the researchers and the audience.