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- Convenors:
-
Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh
(University of Exeter)
Antony Pattathu (University of Tübingen)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
How can we reflect on the emotionality of the classroom as part of an "ethics of epistemic justice" (Shilliam 2018)? How can we avoid the silencing of non-white voices (Camufingo 2018)? We invite educators and students to take their classrooms as ethnographic fields of difficult emotions.
Long Abstract:
Pushing the horizon of anthropology in Europe means to acknowledge arbitrary borders and violence that has been enacted for the sake of wealth accumulation within European nations. Anthropology and its institutional structures still need to push the horizon further, acknowledging "European others" as an integral part of the process of decolonising European Anthropology. As Ambalavaner Sivanandan stated, and movements of political blackness in the UK claimed in the 1980s, "we are here because you were there". In this panel we invite educators and students to take their classrooms as the field and reflect ethnographically on their positionality within this educational space considering the ongoing work of decolonising anthropology (O'Sullivan 2019). We invite contributors to consider what they imagine a decolonised Europe could look like and how the classroom could be a tool in this project including learning with students and the broad, experiential knowledge of "European others" (El-Tayeb 2011). How can embracing the emotionality of the classroom be a way to push for an "ethics of epistemic justice" (Shilliam 2018)? How can we avoid silencing non-white voices (Camufingo 2018)? How can what we do, say, not say, turn off some students and engage others? What is the experience of students when they are in the classroom? How do we handle the difficult conversations that students want to have, but academic staff often avoid? Inspired by Black feminist thought and Franz Fanon's linking of individual experience to structural phenomena, this panel welcomes the everyday, psychological and ephemeral moments of classroom interactions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (New York University) Isaac Marrero-Guillamon (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses who decolonisation is for within the context of teaching and learning visual anthropology. We think with Tina Campt's (2017) call to listen to images as a horizon for reclaiming decolonisation as something more than rhetorical in our research and teaching endeavours.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses who decolonisation is for within the context of teaching and learning visual anthropology. In the early 1990s Wilton Martinez (1992) asked "who constructs anthropological knowledge?" in the context of sharing canonical ethnographic films and photographs to undergraduate anthropology students. His critique was straightforward; by unreflexively (and even, in some cases critically) showing images and films produced and rendered during early 20th century efforts to 'salvage' culture devastated by colonial and imperial genocide and expropriation, anthropologists' reaffirmed students understandings of the racial hierarchies we have all inherited as a legacy of these shared histories. The images, Martinez argued, couldn't help but reproduce these troubling ideas of hierarchical difference even when it was accompanied with a critical framing. In effect, the student produced anthropological knowledge through their readings of these images, moving and still, that reaffirmed current conditions of coloniality. Drawing from our experiences teaching the subdiscipline of visual anthropology in US and UK Anthropology Departments, we coin the term 'pedagogies of listening' to refer to a series of teaching and research strategies aimed at re-imagining anthropology's visual archive through sonic displacements, figure-background reversals and redactions. We think with Tina Campt's (2017) call to listen to images as a horizon for reclaiming decolonisation as something more than rhetorical in the way we approach how, as Yarimar Bonilla (2017) suggests, we might unsettle coloniality in our teaching and research endeavours.
Elena Burgos Martinez (Leiden University)
Paper short abstract:
Where do decolonising processes start and end? What are their limitations? This paper is situated in the decolonising exercises of an environmental and linguistic anthropologist teaching at two different multidisciplinary departments of Leiden University's Faculty of Humanities.
Paper long abstract:
Decolonising processes are often embedded in the historical continuity of higher education institutions, where they often whiten and perish in the process of becoming. This is especially relevant in the academe of countries with a historical past as colonisers. It is often assumed that the epicenter of an effective decolonising process rests in the inclusion of more contemporary and diverse works written by more diverse backgrounds. At the same time, the hegemony of Eurocentric ontologies and implicit biases of today's higher education institutions and study programmes are left unacknowledged. How can we help critically and collectively deconstruct our programme's own conceptual and epistemological boundaries? In this talk, I will focus on the concepts of 'diversity' and 'epistemic discrimination', both experienced as a superficial, decorative and temporary features of learning and teaching environs.
This talk departs from the need to (re) conceptualise 'diversity" and 'inclusivity' beyond the tokenism that has become a trademark feature of Dutch Higher Education. Years of decolonising exercises through the revamping of existing courses and the design of new courses suggest that for as long as "diversity" remains a cosmetic feature of market-oriented reforms no decolonisation will successfully thrive in European Higher Education. Thus, we wonder whether current conceptualisations of 'diversity' and 'inclusivity' in the Netherlands are if not impeding the decolonising of 'the canon'.
Zouhair Hammana (Erasmus University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I ask what it means 'to feel for each other' and 'through each other' as a decolonial praxis within the classroom. In other words, what would such a haptical pedagogy look like? I will do this by looking at the concepts of political love and revolutionary love.
Paper long abstract:
In reflecting and thinking about the importance of emotions and decolonization of the classroom, one point of departure must be the realization that we, educators and students, are in this together. We must realize that study has been made impossible under the conditions in which we are being made to operate by and within the University, which is the realization that we are being put together, students and educators, in the classroom under similar conditions, in the words of Ann Laura Stoler, of (imperial) duress. This realization is what Harney and Moten would call a "terrible gift", precisely because we are grouped/coupled together in, by way of Deleuze and Guattari, a 'mechanospheric' way. This is a space in which we are not only able to feel each other('s pain), but also feel for each other. This is what Harney and Moten call hapticality, the "capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you [and] for you to feel them feeling you". In this paper I would like to delve in to what this 'capacity to feel for each other' and 'to feel through each other' would mean for a decolonial praxis within the classroom. In other words, what would such a haptical pedagogy look like? What does it mean to feel each other and feel for each other? I will attempt to do this by looking at Lauren Berlant's concept of political love and Houria Bouteldja's concept of revolutionary love.
Oda-Kange Diallo (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) Nico Miskow Friborg (University of Stavanger)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on community-based research and scholarly/activist engagements, this collaborative paper reflects on teaching experiences from an anthropological course in Denmark, where we aimed to challenge and dismantle Othering and harmful research practices and establish a norm-critical classroom.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on a teaching collaboration in Applied Anthropology with a class of predominantly white, middle class cisgender students. The class was organized as a collaboration with a local NGO, and the students were given the task to study issues of discrimination and exclusion within youth, leisure activities.
Prior to the course, the students had very limited theoretical and methodological knowledge of racialization, cis- and heteronormativity, intersectionality, (de)coloniality and marginalization. Therefore, we experienced that many students gravitated towards potential field sites where they assumed to find racial and gendered 'others'. This gave us the opportunity to examine, and therefore challenge, what students of Anthropology in Denmark are often taught in terms of 'the other', positionality, accountability in research and particularly dynamics of insider/outsider and researcher/researched.
In the paper, we reflect on how we established a norm-critical classroom, how we made the students investigate their own positionalities and research interests, how to incorporate tools of stepping up/down and calling in/out in academic teaching, as well as how we dealt with discomfort in the classroom.
Our paper also includes reflections on being black and trans, respectively, as teachers of Anthropology and thus also being marginalized in our workplace as well as in the classroom. We hope this paper will contribute to a collective discussion on how we can use norm-critical and anti-colonial tools to better European standards of Anthropological education, while navigating the deeply colonial, cis- and heteronormative fabric of what is considered canon.
Lisette van den Berg (Independent Anthropologist)
Paper short abstract:
This paper questions the common anthropological use of the method of participant observation in regard to its western conception and colonial ties in post-colonial societies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the anthropological understanding of the
concept of participant observation and questions its premises. Participant
observation implies an objective analyses of social activity. This method enables the
researcher to access a distinct level of awareness. This second consciousness, an
ability out of the ordinary, oversees the social activity, without being fully consumed
by it. This method, when successfully applied, should enable an objective reading of
social/cultural activity. Yet, and the question is, is this attempt at objectification
realistic, and in regard to ethics is it desirable? What actually validates participant
observation? This paper examines the premises of participant observation and its
common assumption as an esteemed academic method of inquiry.
It follows that the concept of participant observation is two folded; a deliberate
attempt at gathering information about (distinctive) social/cultural behavior by
observation. Secondary, an attempt to participate or rather to infiltrate in peoples'
lives in a least disturbing manner.
These motivations are examined against anthropology's colonial origins and the
western bias of the anthropological researcher. It follows that this paper examines
the (colonial) anthropological preoccupation with observing and accounting for the
behavior of others, which is often considered to be distinctively different from
western society.
Moreover, this paper reflects ethically upon the impact of teaching participant
observation, a western method of inquiry, in classrooms that are representative of
multicultural/convivial societies.
Victoria L. Klinkert (Universität St. Gallen)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing from experiences as both, a student and a teacher (in the conventional sense), this paper seeks to explore the experiential dynamics that the affect of whiteness has in the classroom.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to explore the emotionality of the classroom from two opposing and complementing perspectives. Being a PhD candidate and thereby set at the (institutionalised) intersection between student and teacher, it draws from experience in both conventionalised settings. After reflecting on positionality, this paper aims to delve into the emotionality of the classroom by interrogating its affective whiteness. Building on many facets of whiteness (Ahmed 2000, 2004, 2007, 2012), such as white fragility (DiAngelo 2011), white shame (Sullivan 2014; Alcoff 2015), white guilt (Lorde 2012 [1981]; Sullivan 2014), white innocence (Wekker 2016), white privilege (McIntosh 1988), white ignorance (Mills 2007) and white vanguardism (Alcoff 2015), it focuses on affective moments of whiteness in the classroom. Often times sparked by a comment, in these moments - marked by uneasy glances, a thickening of air, a palpable presence of silence - whiteness is almost tangible yet so fleeting and forceful that it catches us off guard. This paper will elaborate on what they are and how, if at all possible, to turn these into effective sites of transformative learning.
Angelo Camufingo (University of Potsdam)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores another exemplary confrontation between a Black student and a white professor discussing racism and colonial continuities. As an in-class debate heats up and emotions intertwine with factual knowledge, a dissenting professor manages to silence an important debate on Black agency.
Paper long abstract:
I have been a student for far too long now and especially being an Afro-German student in Potsdam, the time to graduate from university has come. However, being educated and educating in this space has turned my studies into a unique autoethnographic setting. It took me some time to understand how important it was that my experiences became my own subject of study. Triggered by different emotions in class, on and off campus, I started trying to make sense of my existence in this space, whereas for considerably too long I thought I don't belong here and I would be too emotional to be an academic. I began to understand that epistemic violence and specifically epistemic racism were responsible for that feeling and that it was my university that continued these structures. In about half of my courses I have been ending up in discussions on racist uses of language, problematic recountings of history, white evaluations of historic events and more. Meanwhile, I have spoken and written about various of these situations, but like the latest incident, there are still surprises. Analyzing an in-class debate in a linguistics course on West African Englishes taught by a white professor, this paper will examine how this strongly dissenting professor manages to silence an important debate on Black agency and what it means for educational spaces when emotions intertwine with factual knowledge in debates on topics such as race.
Antony Pattathu (University of Tübingen) Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh (University of Exeter)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on experiences and interactions from teaching anthropological courses on colonialism, 'race' and racism, decolonizing knowledge and identity we will give an introduction to the challenges and transformative moments for decolonizing the European classroom in the UK and German context.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper we reflect on our experiences of trying to be engaged, decolonial educators and how this relates to our own positionality, emotions and pedagogies in the classroom. By teaching courses that include readings on race, identity, borders, diaspora experiences, decolonial ways of thinking and gender, we reflect on the hierarchies and power relations in the classroom that both enable and dismantle a decolonizing project based on our own positionalities and experiences as "European others". In this regard we rethink and interrogate the process of 'decolonizing the classroom' through reflecting on the interactions and ways of being we and our students create and produce in this space. Addressing topics such as whiteness, race, identity and experiences of racism within a diverse classroom reveals the transformative potential that lies in addressing our positionalities as part of a transgressive process of reshaping the discipline and opens up questions of whose reality counts? With examples from the UK and the German context we intend to open this panel for critical discussions on the everyday, psychological and ephemeral moments of classroom interactions.
Naasiha Abrahams (KU Leuven)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I investigate how complicitous silence (Bourdieu, 1994) around particular racial attitudes, contributes to an educational atmosphere in which race has a structuring absence.
Paper long abstract:
While it has become commonplace to assert that we have progressed to a 'post-race' era, Goldberg (2015) has identified the way in which the concept of the 'post-race' society has served to further entrench structural racism, and how instances of racist behaviour are then relegated to 'isolated' and 'individual acts'. This can be seen within the broader context of Western post-colonial societies peddling idealized and indeed 'sanitised' versions of European colonialism which negate the centrality of racial hierarchy to the colonial project (Lentin, 2008). Racism is thus portrayed as a transient deviance or as an excess. In this paper, I investigate how complicitous silence (Bourdieu, 1994) around particular racial attitudes, contributes to an educational atmosphere in which race has a structuring absence. By drawing on ethnographic data from a so-called 'concentration' school in Belgium, I explore the way in which race is negotiated in the classroom, and how these interactions act as a microcosm of broader society. I argue that silence concerning racialized interactions between pupils, and the disavowal of race, rather than countering racism (and segregation) in the school arena, serve to increase incidences of racist behaviour and perpetuate the epistemic violence of racial prejudice.