Teaching Anthropology

Object Based Learning in the Social Sciences: Three Approaches to Haptic Knowledge Making.

Glenys McGowan, Gerhard Hoffstaedter, Jennifer Creese — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 03:12:36 -0700

Object-based learning, where students learn by hands-on interactive experiences with skills and objects, provides an active, multi-layered learning experience. Engaging haptic perceptual styles to build meaning and understanding through tactile stimuli, object-based learning can increase student engagement and satisfaction, and improve knowledge retention and higher-level critical thinking. This paper examines three case studies where haptic pedagogical principles were employed to develop learning experiences for key themes, practices and challenges of anthropology. The first, an archaeological laboratory interaction, gave students physical artefacts to touch, manipulate and critically consider, embedded within real-life archaeological case studies. The second, an interactive session using hand-written letters from asylum seekers drawn from an archival collection, connected students with otherwise-inaccessible asylum-seeker voices and multi-sensory modes of critical archival research. The third, a museum curation task, gave students the opportunity to curate and reflect critically on their own museum exhibition of household objects, both meaningful and mundane. All three case studies demonstrate the benefits of utilising the haptic perceptual style in learning design, with engaged and critically reflective understanding being developed. However, there are limitations and considerations inherent in such learning activities, including the ethics of handling objects and the constraints of digital formats for online learning.

From Participant Observation to the Observation of Social Distancing: Teaching Ethnography, Blogging and University Education during the Pandemic

Eleni Sideri, Dr. Elina Kapetanaki — Mon, 27 Jun 2022 05:52:03 -0700

This article draws from a collaborative blog Our Quarantine Diaries created during the first COVID-19 confinement in Greece in 2020. In a context of sharing, participation, and solidarity, the blog aimed to facilitate an online/synchronous shared space between students and educators during this period of social distancing. The blog was a way to experiment and reflect through an ethnography of the ‘every day’ to capture aspects of our experiences in quarantine and communicate them to one another. Through the blog we attempted to trace how participant observation can help us understand this new condition of social distancing, using (self)observation, memory and imagination to grasp experience. The result was eighteen multimodal recordings consisting of visual, sonic, musical and verbal information. By the end of the process, we realized that the experiment helped us, if not to overcome, then to engage and to a degree, ‘exercise’ the fear of this new type of ‘evil’ through digital communication, ethnographic observation and anthropological analysis. In this article, we reflect on the digital aspects of the affective and emotional modalities of teaching/doing ethnography via the use of Our Quarantine Diaries blog during this unusual time.

Engaging with Spontaneous Anthropologies

Antonio Maria Pusceddu — Mon, 23 May 2022 10:25:00 -0700

This paper reflects upon the relevance of ‘spontaneous' anthropologies for the ways anthropological knowledge is produced and circulated, understood and made relevant either in teaching settings or in the broader public discourse. Inspired by Antonio Gramsci's observations on ‘spontaneous philosophy' and ‘common sense', I consider ‘spontaneous' anthropologies those conceptions and views – often fragmentary and contradictory – through which people make sense of the world they live in and act upon. Arguably, this is also what provides the rough empirical materials for more analytical understandings and explanations of the social and cultural worlds investigated by anthropologists. Drawing from my own research experience with Greek and Albanian border populations, I discuss the relationship between anthropology and ‘spontaneous' anthropologies in fieldwork learning practices. I suggest that closer engagements with ‘spontaneous' anthropologies in and across national borders can offer a fruitful basis for strengthening both teaching practices and critical anthropological interventions in the public sphere.

The Ethnographer’s Ethnicity

Eda Starova — Wed, 20 Apr 2022 03:22:30 -0700

Introductions to ethnographic research for university students in Macedonia are understandably starkly different from the often idealized ‘first encounters’ we read in classical anthropological texts, what Hammersley and Atkinson call “the Western ‘rite of passage’”. Students from Macedonia, during their four-year studies, conduct fieldwork in urban and rural areas of their home country, usually focusing on a different geographic region every year. Through this experience, students are introduced to a ‘foreign’ field that is often very familiar – the language is common and the general cultural context is shared. In such a fieldwork context, the question of ethnicity, as a general category of importance in the self-identification of communities and citizens of the region, as well as a category frequently present in the rhetoric of various political groups, cannot be withheld. As such, the aim of this paper is to highlight the need for including ethnicity in conversations about fieldwork in Southeastern Europe, especially in introductory courses on research methodologies. In this sense, it is not only the ethnic identity of our interlocutors that comes to interest, but that of the researcher as well, for whom it can represent either a barrier or a tool with the ability to aid the research process. The paper will examine introductory reading materials and practices in ethnography, and attempt to synthesize understandings of auto-reflexive examples of fieldwork in multi-ethnic communities or multi-ethnic ethnographic encounters by anthropologists from Macedonia to propose methods that ethnicity can be included as a significant factor and characteristic of the researcher in teaching ethnography in the Southeastern European region.