{"title":"Counter-narratives in the First Person: Whiteness and the Limits of Diversity","authors":"Sara Bafo, E. Dattatreyan","doi":"10.22582/ta.v10i1.582","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/ta.v10i1.582","url":null,"abstract":"This short article focuses on Sara’s experience as the first-ever student BAME department representative at a large post-secondary institution in the UK. Written as a first-person testimonial but grounded in a dialogic method of ethnographic recovery and remembrance, we argue that diversity initiatives that seek to create inclusion and representation, without a careful engagement with power, end up reproducing the university as a white public space that centres white fragility. The article highlights two key experiences during Sara’s tenure as BAME student representative in a department of anthropology that show how the limits of diversity in higher education are found in the refusal to engage with whiteness. \u0000 ","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128960459","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Lesson in Class: the working-class experience of Anthropology","authors":"Chloe Dominique","doi":"10.22582/ta.v10i1.586","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/ta.v10i1.586","url":null,"abstract":"This paper focusses on socio-economic class structures, as they relate to the study and practice of anthropology. More specifically, it discusses the ways that working-class or financially precarious anthropologists (students, researchers and teachers) negotiate tensions found within the British university. It is concerned with the current climate of ‘diversity’ in education, and the role that socio-economic inequity plays in these discussions. This paper seeks to make room for class; it asks what we can learn from giving voice to the insidious silence that plagues it, in a context of neoliberal identity politics (Wrenn, 2014), ensuing ethnicist diversity practices (Brah, 1991), and what I would call ‘cursory diversity’ - what Sara Ahmed refers to as a ‘hopeful performative’ (2010, p.200). It is argued that anthropology as a discipline must start attending to the ways that financial precarity and social class impact the subjects that study, not just the subjects of study, by reflecting on the venacularity of the academy and the discipline itself. It achieves this through exploring the vernacularity of the working-class anthropologists’ experiences in relation to the prism of ‘diversity’; how class refracts to produce multiple forms of experience, of assimilation, and of exclusion - as well as resistance to such enclosure.","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133327284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The “educated teacher”: Joint (self-)reflection on translatability between anthropology and teacher education","authors":"Christa Markom, J. Tosic","doi":"10.22582/TA.V10I3.611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/TA.V10I3.611","url":null,"abstract":"Building on the core epistemological features and aims of Educational Anthropology, in this paper we explore the perception of anthropological educational knowledge among teachers and their related reflections on the educational standards of their profession, as well as their own role in society. Following an overview of (the emerging) intersections between teacher education and Educational Anthropology in Austria, the paper focuses on conversations with teachers in Austria on the outputs of an educational anthropological project (TRANSCA) and their applicability. Two of the project outputs – a Concept Book and a Whiteboard Animation (on “Worldmaking”) – serve as the ground for focusing on three aspects emerging from the conversations with teachers: firstly, the concept of the “educated teacher”; secondly, conceptualization as a form of translation of anthropological knowledge via both text and animation; and thirdly, the differentiation between teaching in terms of schooling versus pedagogy. The latter is explored as a crucial dimension of the discussions among and with teachers and lies at the heart of potential future synergies between anthropology and education.","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126598812","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections On Teaching Anthropologically And Fostering Belonging As Anti-Racist Allies In A ‘Widening Participation’ University: An Ecological Approach","authors":"J. Botticello, A. Caffrey","doi":"10.22582/ta.v10i1.589","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/ta.v10i1.589","url":null,"abstract":"This article critically reflects on anti-racist and anthropological teaching practices in a widening participation university. It argues that to make meaningful change to entrenched racism and awarding gaps in higher education, lecturers must take action and work towards embedding anti-racism into every level of the university structure. We propose using an ecological model with lecturers at its heart as a practical tool to support this work. Lecturers can begin by examining themselves and bring their vulnerabilities and openness to change to their different fields of connectivity – with students, with the curriculum, with academic structures, and with colleagues, across the institution. Such work helps challenge sedimented beliefs and practices and moves the institution toward becoming a more inclusive or pro-belonging university for students and staff alike.","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"33 6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124973139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Access, Privacy, and Gender divides in Teaching Online: Reflections from India","authors":"Rituparna Patgiri","doi":"10.22582/TA.V10I3.618","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/TA.V10I3.618","url":null,"abstract":"The entry of the COVID-19 pandemic into our lives meant that the process of teaching and learning shifted online. While issues of digital divide have been in the limelight, some other problems related to online teaching have remained under the radar. For instance, are there are any privacy concerns associated with online teaching and learning? How does one discuss sensitive matters like gender, religion and caste in an online class? Also, most importantly, how does one ‘teach’ and/or ‘learn’ during a crisis? In this piece, I wish to explore some of these issues drawing from my teaching experiences in New Delhi – India’s capital city, in the past year.","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117245386","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Re-imagining Diversity: Towards an Anthropology for Disruption in UK Higher Education","authors":"Alison Macdonald","doi":"10.22582/ta.v10i1.596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/ta.v10i1.596","url":null,"abstract":"From Athena Swan accreditations to Access and Widening Participation agendas, diversity training and renewed pedagogic approaches to inclusive learning, the higher education landscape is now awash with the language of ‘diversity’ as policy and practice. The institutionalisation of ‘diversity’ is a welcome method of inclusion, yet it is often reproduced as ‘happy talk’ (Bell and Hartmann 2007) that pacifies the call for meaningful structural and institutional change, silencing and even reinforcing the inequality it seeks remedy (i.e. Ahmed, 2012; Alexander, 2005; Archer, Hutchings & Ross 2003; Kirton, Greene & Dean 2007; Mohanty, 2003; Puwar, 2004). Taking these paradoxical dimensions of diversity as ethnographic and conceptual points of departure, this special issue seeks to unravel some of the everyday experiences, practices and policies encoded in diversity ‘speak’ and ‘diversity work’ (Ahmed 2012) across anthropology departments in the UK. By giving credence to accounts of the daily graft of ‘diversity work’, together with embodied and lived experiences of what ‘being diverse’ entails on the ground, we strive to productively mobilise decentred ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1988) in order to displace the continued centrality of white / elite / heteronormative / ableist reference points at the heart of much higher education institutional diversity strategies and inclusion agendas (cf. also Puwar, 2004). For us, the term ‘re-imagining’ is a call for positive political transformation in which we hope the difficult, uncomfortable - but hopefully - fruitful questions and critiques posed by papers in this special issue galvanise a space for diverse-led action. It is thus against this backdrop that we try to re-imagine diversity in a new light: to bear witness to those who live its effects and thereby reveal the potential to democratically and holistically re-structure anthropology from the ground up.","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125286270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Andrew Russell, L. Johnson, Emily J Tupper, Alice-Amber Keegan, H. Akhter, J. Mullard
{"title":"‘Covid-19 and Me’. A Serendipitous Teaching and Learning Opportunity in a 1st Year Undergraduate Medical Anthropology Course","authors":"Andrew Russell, L. Johnson, Emily J Tupper, Alice-Amber Keegan, H. Akhter, J. Mullard","doi":"10.22582/TA.V10I3.604","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/TA.V10I3.604","url":null,"abstract":"‘Covid-19 and Me’ was an affective learning blog post exercise assigned to 1st year undergraduate students taking a medical anthropology module at the start of academic year 2020-21. We describe the way in which a collective analysis of the accounts was undertaken and how these were presented and discussed in a set of online and face-to-face seminars. We discuss whether Covid-19 was indeed a ‘portal’ in Arundhati Roy’s use of the term, arguing that it was the written reflection and collective anthropological analysis of their accounts, rather than the virus itself, that enabled students to ‘imagine the world anew’.","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123922305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plagiarism, rote memorizing and other \"bad\" habits in the Greek University and beyond.","authors":"Alexandra Bakalaki","doi":"10.22582/TA.V10I3.600","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/TA.V10I3.600","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on my experience as professor of Anthropology in Greece, this paper focuses on student practices like rote learning and plagiarism academics commonly consider inimical to meaningful learning, intellectual empowerment and the cultivation of critical independent thinking. In this paper I refrain from viewing such practices from the standard academic perspective according to which they must be eradicated, and try to appreciate them from the perspective of the students who engage in them. I suggest that they serve as means through which students navigate in and cope with the university environment, but they also provide a point of view from which the university appears as a setting within which the “bad habits” academics so despise are sensible and helpful. ","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"442 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131723638","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Ultimate Introvert’ to the ‘Touchy-Chummy’: Using Simulations to Teach Interviewing Skills","authors":"T. Barone, Samantha K. Ammons","doi":"10.22582/TA.V10I3.476","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/TA.V10I3.476","url":null,"abstract":"In-depth interviews represent one of the most commons forms of qualitative data used in social science research, especially in ethnography. Yet preparing students to conduct good in-depth interviews is an area of relative neglect in social science literature, despite the potential marketability of this skill for anthropology and sociology students. Practice in communities may be impractical and/or problematic because of wariness due to historical legacies, as well as current political and economic uncertainty. However, relying on peer-interactions for “mock” interviews is problematic because of students’ collective inexperience. Without sufficient preparation, mistakes can be costly for all. In this paper, we advocate for the use of a simulated interview participant (SIP) to better prepare students as interviewers. We provide 12 SIPs and guidance for implementing them in classrooms. Through SIPs, instructors or other actors expose students to common interviewer pitfalls and better prepare them for research in diverse communities. ","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131375766","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Undergraduate Student Led Research: An Applied Anthropology Course as a Community-Based Research Firm","authors":"Jason Miller","doi":"10.22582/TA.V11I3.581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22582/TA.V11I3.581","url":null,"abstract":"Increasingly, undergraduate students desire hands-on learning experiences to prepare them for life after graduation. Research experience at the undergraduate level unlocks a key skill set students need and desire in terms of its anthropological value and also the value of transferable, critical thinking skills. This article explores the creation and continued development of my Applied Anthropology course which relies heavily on community-engaged research and community-engaged pedagogy. The course is structured as if participants are an independent, community-based research “firm” that has been contracted by a local community agency to undertake research on their behalf. Students manage every aspect of the project including developing data collection tools, seeking Institutional Review Board ethics approval, collecting and analyzing data, and ultimately preparing a technical report, policy recommendations, and presentation for the client. In addition, I will discuss the benefits to both students and community partners (including practical research experience and, in some cases, already implemented policy suggestions) as well as some of the challenges to this approach including time, capacity, and commitment. I conclude by reflecting on my role as mentor during this process and provide suggestions for those who would like to create a similar research experience for their own students.","PeriodicalId":407748,"journal":{"name":"Teaching Anthropology","volume":"33 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125502694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}