Teaching Anthropology

‘Miss, is anthropology about studying ants?’ An experience of university Widening Participation activities reflected upon by a teacher of the rural working-class

Sally Dennehy — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 03:45:47 -0700

As an English teacher and student of anthropology, I have experienced how rural and urban students have different experiences of access to university. This paper is a reflection on the lived-experience of widening participation activities, considering location as a factor of inequality. These experiences raise observations about familiarity as an important concept for considering university study, and exposes how some students are currently strangers to widening participation provision. In contemplating how these circumstances come about, I conclude by proposing some potential solutions for widening participation in the future.

Is a Foundation Year Programme to an A-Level as a 7-UP is to a Sprite: Exploring an Attempt to Diversify an English University

Chima Michael Anyadike-Danes — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 03:37:30 -0700

What contribution might social anthropology make to our understanding of the consequences of successive British governments’ attempts over the last two decades to widen participation in England’s universities? In this article I answer this question by examining a foundation year programme at a university in the nation’s former industrial heartland. Drawing on anthropological literature on rites of passage I analyse working-class participants’ experiences of this admission process. Its creators envisaged it as a rite that would seamlessly assimilate ‘diverse students’ into the university body, but I argue that it does not do so. Instead, as is to be expected from a rite, it marks participants. It thus prevents them from ever just being students in the eyes of themselves and their fellows.

Admitting otherwise: Diversity work, contextuality and the future of anthropology

David Mills — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 03:17:18 -0700

The difficult work of decolonizing UK anthropology teaches us important lessons about our field. Rethinking the curriculum may be the easy part. Making university admissions fairer is a harder task. The biggest challenge of all is transforming the institutional cultures and demographic profile of anthropology’s students and faculty. The Covid-19 pandemic showed that rapid change is possible: its aftermath is an opportunity for more radical rethinking of this diversity work in anthropology.

Many UK universities currently use ‘contextual’ information about undergraduate applicants to make admissions ‘fairer’. Would a more self-reflective understanding of ‘contextuality’ include the institutional contexts of universities themselves? Most social anthropology departments are found in ‘Russell group’ and ‘Sutton-30’ universities. Their student populations are more likely to be able-bodied, white, female and middle class than those in other universities: these students have a disproportionate opportunity to access PhD research funding. The growth in postgraduate education also exacerbates these differences. This paper combines institutional history and student data to reconceputalise and broaden debates around ‘contextual admissions’. Acknowledging the institutional racism within UK universities, a more encompassing definition of ‘contextuality’ would allow a critical attention to the academic cultures that create barriers to widening participation, retention and progression to postgraduate study.

Embodying Difference: Introducing ‘Contact Movement’ as an Ethnographic Method

Harshadha Balasubramanian — Tue, 03 Aug 2021 02:54:30 -0700

This contribution to the special issue advances an ethnographic method which directs the critical project of re-imagining diversity towards studies of how difference emerges in fieldwork encounters. Drawing on my experiences of researching without eyesight, I urge students and teachers of anthropology to acknowledge the value of embodied research methods for examining social and corporeal differences in researcher-participant relationships. Firstly, I call attention to moments when embodied fieldwork may be resisted and how these are expressed as naturalised differences between researchers and participants. To deconstruct such naturalisations, I devise contact movement as a method which allows researchers to embody how these ethnographic tensions, or indeed differences, are negotiated between researchers and their participants. Ultimately, contact movement eagerly re-imagines diversity through a methodological rethink that permits ethnographers to embody and explore the collaborative production of difference in their intersubjective relationships, within the field and beyond.