Paper short abstract:

Drawing on my experiences and experiments teaching anthropology, I suggest that the process towards regenerative anthropology must provoke and confront some of the taken-for-granted frames and ideologies which dominate education, at least in the specific context of my teaching in Singapore.

Paper long abstract:

Few would disagree that the classroom is a productive site to do some of the work of animating the regenerative potential of anthropology. While this is not in doubt, I draw on my experiences and experiments over the past decade teaching a cluster of university courses through an anthropological lens to suggest that the process must provoke and confront some of the taken-for-granted frames and ideologies which dominate education, at least in the specific context of my teaching in Singapore. As an example, the infrastructural and discursive resources for STEM education have produced a hierarchy of knowledge and ways of knowing – most notably, a positivistic bend. What is observed is to be described and analyzed - objectively. Anthropology, on the other hand, allows for radically different ways of knowing; where we could also be witnesses or change agents. By diversifying our interlocutors, including the marginal and those ordinarily overlooked, taking them seriously, anthropology explores alternatives and reveals the contingency of our ways – a productive stance for producing alternatives. In this paper, I will consider how the forementioned dominant ideologies played out in the context of my experiments in a course on race and ethnicity as well as how anthropological approaches were employed creatively, allowing students to generate, sometimes collaboratively, and reaching out to a broader audience.