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.