Anthropology as Respair: Anthropological Engagements with Hope and its Others (Book Review Essay)

No description supplie

Kōrero Tahi in a cultural anthropology classroom in Aotearoa New Zealand

In this paper I reflect on my efforts to create an educational common in a cultural anthropology course through kōrero tahi, a procedure for managing group discussions as described by Pākehā anthropologist Dame Joan Metge (2001). Kōrero tahi, a Māori phrase that Metge translates as “talking together, the opposite of talking past each other” (2001: 6), offers a framework for commoning grounded in Māori values and inspired by the vision of partnership implicit in Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand. This seemed ideal for a new course I was to teach at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, ‘Anthropology, Education, and Social Change,’ which was open to undegraduate students from a variety of backgrounds and academic disciplines. In this paper I discuss how we used kōrero tahi to attend to our classroom and the process of learning and teaching anthropology together

From crisis to epiphany: what firing a research assistant helped me appreciate about agency and Muslim women in Howrah, West Bengal, India

No description supplie

Book Review: Douglas-Jones, Rachel and Justin Shaffner (eds)2021. Hope and Insufficiency: Capacity Building in Ethnographic Comparison. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781800731011 (ebook)

No description supplie

'Please don't bring her back': Respecting local agency and firing research assistants in Howrah

No description supplie

Guest Editorial: Anthropology and Imagination

No description supplie

Pedagogical Experiments in an Anthropology for Liberation

This piece began as a series of conversations with colleagues about the joys and frustrations I experienced in my endeavours to practice commoning in a new course, ‘Anthropology for Liberation.’ In it, I reflect on my efforts to place pedagogical practices of commoning and decolonising anthropology – critically examining and making space for different ways of learning, knowing, and being – at the centre of our classroom agenda. I go on to discuss how working to untangle the knot of colonialism with my students has been simultaneously the most challenging and the most rewarding aspect of teaching this course. I also examine some of the tensions involved in creating an educational common that encourages dialogue and critique yet sits within a university system built on inherently unequal power relations between lecturer and student. Finally, I reflect on some of the reasons why I was not entirely successful in creating an anthropological community that commons

Moving toward collective responsibility: Beyond Pākehā as ‘punisher’

No description supplie

Editorial

When the journal launched last year, it was not a culmination, but rather a start: of generative conversations, of relationships with a readership interested in the intrinsic political potential of commoning with/in ethnographic practice. In this volume, we tune in to and amplify questions about ethnographic practice as a form of knowledge production. In particular, we engage with the question put forward in the first volume: “What does combining the idea of commoning with the practice of ethnography allow us to think about or to do that we might not otherwise?” (Elinoff and Trundle 2018: 1). Building on that, here we ask: what if ethnography is a source of commoning differently? This question of commoning differently, also taken up by the articles in this volume, encourages us to engage with emerging scholarship and a politics of uncommoning

Introduction: Labours of Collaboration

The four pieces in this section are innovative collaborations at various levels, ranging from anthropologists collaborating with communities to collaborative presentations as a way to subvert hierarchies and Euro-centric modes of being with/in academia. These papers engage with the relationship between collaboration and commoning, some explicitly and others implicitly, as ways to shape knowledge production and practice for a much more egalitarian ethnographic engagement within and beyond the academy. In this Special Section of Volume 2 of Commoning Ethnography, we share four papers that engage with the changing nature of ethnographic collaboration on multiple levels