Teaching Anthropology

Introduction to the Special Issue Decolonizing Anthropology: Race, Emotions and Pedagogies in the European Classroom

Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh, Antony Pattathu — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0800

Here we open up the special issue with an introduction to the topic of decolonizing anthropology through the consideration of the emotionality of race, racism, and whiteness within the classroom and the discipline. Focusing on the European Classroom as a construct, we reflect on what the implications of decolonizing anthropology are for teaching the discipline, particularly in regard to the positionality of “European Others” (El Tayeb, 2011) as students and educators. While demands for structural changes in the discipline and the restructuring of canons and curriculums have been widely proposed, the role of affect and emotions in relation to colonialism, race, and whiteness in the decolonizing process have been addressed only marginally. We offer a contribution to the conversation through the focus on emotions, taking these as a form of knowledge and political action. Bringing together literatures on postcolonial studies, decolonial theory with critiques of anthropology, we suggest a space for thinking about the emotional dimensions of decolonization within the university and across disciplines and describe the contribution of each article included herein that show the power that comes from thinking critically about the emotionality of the classroom, and the role of emotions in reproducing colonial epistemics.

Subverting the white cis gaze: Towards a pedagogy of discomfort, accountability and care in the anthropology classroom

Oda-Kange Diallo, Nico Miskow Friborg — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0800

We write from the starting point of teaching an anthropology course together consisting of predominantly white, middle class cis students. The course collaborated with a local NGO, and the students were given the task to study issues of discrimination and exclusion within youth, leisure activities. This gave us the opportunity to examine, and therefore challenge, what we and our students were taught in terms of ‘the other’, positionality and accountability in anthropological research. We share our journey of creating a norm-critical classroom, which was built on our counter-archive (Haritaworn, Moussa & Ware, 2018) of anti-oppressive, queer, trans, BIPOC1 knowledge. We discuss how we made the students investigate their own positionalities and research interests, through our pedagogy of provoking discomfort by decentering whiteness and cisnormativity. We meditate on what it means to be teachers of anthropology that learn and work from differently marginalized positions within the Academic Industrial Complex (AIC). We honor the treasures we find in anti-oppression knowledge from the margins by joining a collective discussion on how to end epistemic violence within the classroom, the discipline and the broader AIC, while navigating the deeply colonial, cis- and heteronormative fabric of what is considered canon.

Glitching the University Machine

Zouhair Hammana, Victoria Louisa Klinkert — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0800

In this piece we explore how to return anthropological study to common use by way of Hilal and Petti’s (2019) use of al masha - a cultivation and reactivation of the commons. In doing so we recognise that our point of departure is one of colonial permanence, as anthropological study is tied to the discipline and its colonial disciplining, which in turn is tied to the University Machine and its infrastructure. In enacting colonial permanence and holding up its decolonial facade it is the sociality of the infrastructure that we have chosen to focus on. We argue that it is in moments of refusal to engage and challenge infrastructural failures of the University Machine, that we find a fugitive poetic potential to glitch (Berlant, 2016; Luchkiw, 2016; Russell, 2020) anthropological study to common use.

Local Indigenous ways of knowing and learning in the classroom through Community-engaged learning

Andrew Judge, Sherry Fukuzawa, Jonathan Ferrier — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 -0800

This paper reflects on the impact of community-engaged learning (CEL) in post-secondary education, as guided by local Indigenous community members, specifically members of the Anishinaabeg Nation and more specifically Mississauga peoples. This CEL way of educating highlights a fundamental difference between Indigenous axiology, where localized relationships and community contributions are paradigm, with traditional Euro-Western hegemonic pedagogies. Within this framework, we hope to contribute to the larger discourse in revising the axiological foundation applied to knowledge within the Academy, based on authentic expressions of an Indigenous way of knowing and learning. We seek to recapitulate the ways that knowledge in the field of anthropology (and post-secondary education in general) is valued and assessed through the first-hand experiences of two cis male Anishinaabe academics, and one cis female Japanese Canadian academic, involved in the development and delivery of community-engaged learning on Turtle Island.