Teaching Anthropology

Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment: An Anthropological Rubric for a Community Ecosystem

Eric James Haanstad — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

The ethnographic team of a community-based engineering project in South Bend, Indiana, continues to create modes of anthropological assessment while conducting collaborative research. The Bowman Creek Educational Ecosystem (BCe2) is a National Science Foundation-funded project designed to restore and enhance a vital but polluted St. Joseph River tributary by linking the efforts of local community groups, schools, and universities in a revitalizing small city. This paper describes the impetus and creation of an ethnographic rubric for assessing community-based anthropological research towards potential replication in future collaborations. Based on a modification of Rapid Ethnographic Assessment (REA), used widely in environmental, medical, military, and other research applications, this paper offers an REA modification called Collaborative Ethnographic Assessment (CEA).

Expecting and Facilitating the Unexpected

Pedram Dibazar, Murray Pratt — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

This paper outlines and interrogates the processes informing the design, teaching and learning of Culture Lab, an intensive field class designed to foster experimental learning in anthropology and cultural studies. The course’s object of study and site of learning is the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) and its multiple associations – the phenomenon, the city, and the forms of participation, debates and instances of urban change that occur during a specific iteration. It draws on problem-based and participatory approaches to learning and advocates approaches to teaching cultural anthropology and cultural studies that combine multi-faceted approaches to cultural immersion and discovery, while at the same time acknowledging the individual motivations of learners, by fostering and developing students’ interests and curiosity. This paper reports and reflects upon the course in its first two iterations of the course at Amsterdam University College, namely the field trips to Paphos 2017 and Valletta 2018.

Dramatizing Ethnographic Fieldwork. Collaborative Laboratory and the Act of Intervening

Magdalena Sztandara, Grzegorz Niziołek — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

What does it mean when an ethnographer intervenes in the public sphere or when a dramaturgist or theatre director conducts ethnographic research? What are the possibilities and values of such collaboration, and how it might be turned into engaged activities? In the following article, we attempt to answer these questions drawing from our pedagogical experience resulted from a joint effort of running and supervising a collaborative laboratory. For a year, groups of students (anthropologists, dramaturgists and theatre directors) jointly conceptualised, problematised and worked on the project about different masculinities. Throughout the project, all of us have been discussing, negotiating and exchanging our research methods, strategies and ways of exploring social practices by combining ethnography and performative. The outcome included thirteen interventions, understood as immediate social actions performed in the public space. The article aim is to engage with our teaching experiences and collaborative research efforts critically, as well as to problematise the real potential of the drama-based approach to ethnographic research. We argue that the form of collaboration between ethnography and performative arts opens not only new possibilities in methodological and pedagogical approach but also has transformative potential. The interventions performed in the public sphere might be understood as new modalities for disseminating research findings, which distort rather static and normative protocols of academic research presentations in Poland. They also allow reaching broader audiences and enabling more critical, intimate and involved understanding of different social and cultural practices.

Teaching engaged ethnography and socio-cultural change: Participating in an urban movement in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Eleftheria Deltsou — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

How can ethnographic research be taught? What kinds of ethnographic environments are involved in the study of contemporary socio-cultural issues? How / where can socio-cultural change be spotted? Where do ethnographic reflexivity and engaged ethnography stand with regard to comprehending and furthering socio-cultural change? Can/should ethnographic work fully conflate with critical activism? Can the teaching of engaged ethnographic research instigate critical awareness of the researcher’s positionality-ies? Considerations of the above questions will be endeavored via the participation of the author in an urban movement in Thessaloniki, Greece. Her double engagement as resident and academic teacher will expose the interrelatedness of these issues and the methodological, epistemological, and political implications that engaged ethnography raises.

Experimental Ethnography: Performativity, Movement, Mediation

Dafni Tragaki — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

The article discusses the ways the method of videowalk is learned in the context of the seminar “Anthropology of the Senses” with a special emphasis on sound studies and how it is theoretically introduced as a performative, intersensorial and embodied ethnographic practice. It explores the potentialities offered by the recent convergences between anthropology and contemporary artistic (audiovisual) production inspired by the “ethnographic turn” in experimental representations of the urban public space. Videowalk is used as a method inviting students to produce cultural knowledge by questioning conventional logocentric (reading and writing) pedagogies and to experiment with reflexive, improvisational, emplaced and affective mediations of urban life and its changing everydayness. It is a method concerned with the intersections of theoretical knowledge with knowing-in-action , a method privileging the synaesthetic authoring of the public space, its meshworked trajectories and stories.

Media Sovereignty and Digital Activism

Laura Zanotti — Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:00:00 -0700

This article describes and analyses a collaborative project that combines service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) objectives and goals with anthropological commitments to support an Indigenous filmmaking collective media centre in one Mẽbêngôkre-Kayapó community, Brazil. We adapted curricular designs already in place in SLCE semester-long or summer abroad programs to incorporate decolonizing methodologies and symmetrical anthropological approaches to co-create media centre design recommendations for community partners. We designed the project to provide opportunities in which partners could critically engage with histories of mis/representation of Indigenous Peoples, dialogically learn about diverse cultural worldviews and ontologies, and confront stereotypes that are commonly associated with Indigenous Peoples engagement with technologies. We discuss how this work influenced how initial design recommendations for the media centre and collective. We conclude by reflecting on this projects’ approach to community-based projects and the synergistic outcomes and tensions that can result from co-creating transdisciplinary projects centred on addressing sovereignty and activism. Finally, we suggest that supporting digital activism and media sovereignty relies on fortifying relational networks of collaboration and respect.

Community-engaged Learning (CEL): Integrating Anthropological Discourse with Indigenous Knowledge

Sherry Fukuzawa, Veronica King Jamieson, Nicole Laliberte, Darci Belmore — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

The Indigenous Action Group (IAG) is an alliance of solidarity between Indigenous and settler faculty at the University of Toronto Mississauga with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN), whose Treaty lands the campus is located on. This partnership of responsibility supports the MCFN goals of truth (through public knowledge and recognition of their history), and reconciliation (through the support and equitable sustenance of Indigenous pedagogy, knowledge systems, and research methodologies in educational institutions). The IAG has developed a Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) course to bring ontological pluralism to the Academy to legitimize Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies, and involve the placemaking of local Indigenous communities (Tuhiwah Smith, 2012). This second year undergraduate course entitled “Anthropology and Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island (in Canada)” was developed and implemented by the Indigenous Action Group to prioritize first person voices from the local Indigenous community. We are hoping this diverse educational model will change the discourse in anthropology courses to begin a collective understanding of ongoing power imbalances and oppression in education from colonial mechanisms.

Reading While Walking

Katharine Anne Keenan, Darwin Tsen — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

This reflection focuses on how the opportunity to co-teach across disciplines illuminates the interconnections between literary criticism and ethnographic methodology. We discuss the value of walking as a way of knowing and of creative genres as modes of representation. Through the class’s final project, a multimedia map of Kenosha, we see the benefits of a combined literary and ethnographic approach in our students’ rigorously observed and sensitively rendered presentations.

Teaching (with) Postcards: Approaches in the classroom, the field, and the community

Mascha Gugganig, Sophie Schor — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

This article showcases the pedagogical possibilities of working with postcards for teaching anthropology and related disciplinary fields by introducing a set of multifaceted tools and examples. It provides a framework for tangible reflexive teaching practices and a research methodology that supports, both intellectually and emotionally, a vibrant and mobile community of scholars. We commence with the emergence of the postcard, and its (widely undervalued) role as a research subject in the social sciences. Examples from the arts, literature, teaching and research offer inspiration for engaged and creative teaching formats. These cases support our claim that as seemingly ‘anachronistic’ object of communication, postcards are useful for teaching in the classroom, for teaching ethnography, and for community-based work and teaching. In fact, as a traveling communication device, the repurposed postcard lends itself to connect the oft-physically and conceptually divided spaces of the classroom and the ethnographic ‘field.’ Concurrently, the opening of postcards allows for a critique of the medium’s historical use in exoticization the ‘other.’ In other writing [anonymized], we explore in more detail the multimodal qualities of working ethnographically on, within, or through postcards. We here extend the pedagogical potentials to use postcards for innovative approaches in ethnographic research, public anthropology, and applied community work.

Teaching Environmental Anthropology in Brazil and Latvia

Paride Bollettin — Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0700

This paper describes two courses dedicated to Environmental Anthropology offered respectively at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil and the Riga Stradins University in Latvia. The courses were organised in parallel modules, enabling the promotion of similar programs in the two. The aim of this paper is to present the discussions following each topic covered by the course and the case studies chosen by enrolled students for their final works in Brazil and Latvia. The final discussion highlights how, despite the differences between the two countries, the effective engagement of students promoted the emergence of their direct participation in the course development and new ways of situating themselves in their environments