Teaching and Learning Anthropology

In Spring 2021, I taught Urban Anthropology entirely online. In lieu of the interviews, participant-observation, and neighborhood tours I normally would have included in the syllabus, I asked students to carry out a series of visual exercises in their local neighborhoods to document what it was like to live through the lockdown period of the pandemic. In retrospect, I have begun to think about how utilizing a multi-sensory approach to ethnography during this time might have produced even richer insights about urban life.  In this commentary, I consider how while focusing on one sense, the visual, still allowed us to create an excellent snapshot of life in Indianapolis during the lockdown, utilizing more of our senses in representing local neighborhoods would have encouraged us to think even more deeply about how cities, like all human environments, are always in flux and responding at any given moment to a wide range of pressures, constraints, and opportunities.