Drawing with Lynda Barry’s “Syllabus” in a creative ethnographic practices class
A few years ago, my friend Caroline Bennett gave me Lynda Barry’s 2014 book Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor and this term I decided to use some…
Tag: teaching
How an interview request about Gen X sparked a teaching moment in an anthropology class
Last week Jogai Bhatt from RNZ approached me to do an interview about Generation X for a mini-series they are airing in the lead up to Generation X:…
Highland Peoples of Southwest China/Southeast Asia/Northeast India: Spring 2024
During a semester (and a year, and a period) filled with woe, my graduate course was one of the most meaningful and rich educational experiences of my career.…
Museum Practice in Folklore Studies (a.k.a. Museum Methods): Spring 2024
There are too many things needing to be written about. Many of them are grim. Here I want to begin the work week with positivity. This past semester,…
Education Requirements and Museum Jobs (April 2024)
This week in my undergraduate museum practices course, we will discuss museum careers (and graduate school). For the first time since 2017, I have again done my calculations…
Food Anthro for Middle Schoolers: All About Bread
Ariana GundersonIndiana University I recently had the opportunity to share the importance and joys of our discipline of Food Anthropology with sixteen middle schoolers who visited Indiana Universi…
Seminar: Digital Visuality & Popular Culture
The course “Digital Visuality and Popular Culture” for the MA program CREOLE at the University of Vienna provides an overview about digital visuality as a key phenomenon of…
Teaching ‘how to anthropology’ alongside ‘how to university’ in an introductory cultural anthropology class
I have taught our large introductory cultural anthropology course (ANTH 101) on and off since 2014, and every couple of years I redesign it based on conversations with…
When the Syllabus Collides With War
Lunch at Stella Maris Cafe, Arabi, Louisiana. Photo: David Beriss David Beriss In planning my classes this year, I did not count on war. I am teaching Food…
GSA 2023 Keynote Speech: STRIVING FOR MENTAL WELL-BEING IN ACADEMIA
I was invited to speak in a Pardee Keynote Symposium on “Encouraging Positive Mental Health in the Geosciences” at the 2023 Geological Society of America meeting in Pittsburgh,…
Don Miller
On Time. My teacher and friend Don Miller passed away last month. We had published his book “Time and Time Again” in 2022. His memorial is on the…
Cards Against Digital Anthropology
Suzana Jovicic*, Simone Pfeifer** In 2014, US-based associate anthropology professor Matthew Durington held a class on game design. One of the anthropology games developed by his students was…
Dando clases durante la austeridad franciscana: la UADY en 2023
Acabo de terminar de enseñar el curso optativo Antropología del Sonido. Los trabajos de las y los estudiantes fueron muy buenos. Estoy feliz de lo que hicieron, lo…
Returning to UNC-Charlotte Approaching the 4th Anniversary of a Mass Shooting in My Class
Tomorrow, I get on a plane to fly to Charlotte, NC to attend the unveiling and dedication of a new memorial for Reed, Riley, and the other victims…
Meta-Reflection as a Teaching Tool
This semester I taught a new course called “Wicked Science,” which examines the challenges posed by wicked problems — those problems that defy solution because of fundamental di…
How to approach a research proposal: The Literature Review
This is a follow-up to my earlier post “How to approach a research proposal: Writing Questions.” In that entry, I laid out a dynamic hierarchy of questions—conceptual questions,…
How to approach a research proposal
No matter where I have taught, one job that often challenges graduate students is the writing of a research proposal. When first encountered, it is a peculiar piece…
Anthropology for Liberation assessments
Over the past few years I have been sharing the readings I assign for an undergraduate course I teach at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, Anthropology for…
Lecture: Introduction to Social & Cultural Anthropology
It is for the last time that the lecture “Introduction to Social and Cultural Anthropology” in the BA program “Social and Cultural Anthropology” at the University of Vienna…
Choosing Your Own Adventure: My Life as a Teenage Dungeon Master and How It Prepared Me to Become an Anthropologist
In many ways, Dungeon Masters are the ethnographers of their own worlds. Granted, we’re not exactly interviewing the people who populate them, and we’re inventing most of the…
Building a “Web of Intrigue”: Teaching Food Studies
Pamela RunestadAllegheny College I presented a framework for building a Food Studies syllabus at the Umbra Institute in Perugia, Italy on June 10, 2022. Thanks to positive responses…
What is “Labour-Based Grading”?
(This is an explanation of Labour-Based Grading that I provided to a first-year anthropology class I taught in 2020.) Labour-based grading is not what you are used to,…