Teaching and Learning Anthropology

This article explores how teaching Urban Anthropology can engender new relationships between cities, students, and classrooms. We discuss the generative connections between these actors as processes of becoming, which connect students with practices and theories for understanding urban life. Serving also as an introduction to a Special Issue on “Teaching the City,” this article introduces the issue’s pieces, which discuss teaching and learning across three continents. It also reflects on their collective contributions as an opportunity to think anew about the city through teaching. The four authors of this piece contributed equal labor.

Human-animal co-habitation is a fact of urban existence, yet animals are illegible in the contemporary American city. As climate change, development, and other planetary forces disturb the more-than-human dynamics of cities, often gravely, anthropological pedagogy must go beyond rehearsing urbanicity as a strictly human quality. This article ruminates on an interdisciplinary experiment in teaching the animal city through a local project in design anthropology that coupled ethnographic fieldwork and speculative design. By empirically studying how the built environment unevenly mediates human and animal livelihoods and relations, students uncovered the possibilities of alternative architectures for nonhumans and curated them in a public design exhibition. Through research-based action, this course cultivated a body of dispositions in students that did not just expose the city’s animals but oriented them to the pursuit of multispecies justice—an ethico-aesthetic praxis that I style as “bestial urbanism.”

This article employs Indigenous urbanism as an analytical approach, as developed by Anishinaabe and settler scholar Heather Dorries (2023), to show how pedagogical interventions employed in the teaching of an undergraduate course at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) contributed to an enhanced theorization of the city. It discusses the ways in which pedagogical activities shaped the students’ understanding of historiography, Indigenous urban lives, and the construction of shared urban spaces. In focusing on the local histories, territorialities, and specificities of Montreal as a shared and continuously renegotiated Indigenous-settler space, pedagogical interventions used in the course prompted students to reflect on how their own positionality coproduces knowledge about the city. Understanding themselves as knowledge makers, and thus co-producers of urban spaces, students were able to better define the contours of their own relations to the Montreal urban spatialities and socialities. By generously sharing their evolving meaning-making and positionalities, students demonstrated that the Right to the City is a collective reclamation of the urban space that recognizes and affirms Indigenous peoples as rights holders and not simply stakeholders.

As part of a recent undergraduate seminar on infrastructure, students completed weekly exercises dubbed “infrastructure fieldnotes.” Going beyond conventional discussion board posts or reading responses, exercise prompts incorporated reading analysis, methods practice, writing prompts, and experiments in multimodal representation as students engaged with urban planning and quotidian experiences of infrastructure and made sense of the infrastructures that enable and structure city life. In this research article, the instructor for the course offers a preliminary presentation of the assignment’s structure and pedagogical objectives, followed by an analysis of how some prompts influenced classroom discussions by creating common points of reference and revealing different experiences of the campus and city. This discussion is followed by five student contributions on different aspects of the assignment. Some take up specific prompts to demonstrate how they created openings for engagement with course material, some reflect on how exercises enabled students to cultivate new kinds of awareness or attention to infrastructure, and others extend the fieldnotes project beyond the class to show what kinds of analysis endured after the course ended. Altogether, these student analyses demonstrate and reflect on the utility of sustained, open-ended prompts for student engagement with course material and concepts in an urban campus.

As a graduate student team from an applied anthropology course series, we conducted a yearlong community research project focused on an urban park for a local city government partner. This paper reflects on how learning and working as an applied, interdisciplinary team impacted our research process, our project design, and our experiences as students. Through the project, we experienced the benefits and challenges of collaborative work, like working through different disciplinary expectations and training styles, communication challenges, and equitable work distribution. Our unique positionalities and backgrounds shaped how we engaged with the park, the community, and the research. We all experienced the city for ourselves—through hands-on engagement—and learned about many different park experiences through a novel combination of techniques, including observations, interviews, a survey (with an embedded map feature), and a community design charrette. We engaged with a variety of people and population dynamics, which helped us provide our government partner with insight into how various community voices matter in the future of the park as a public space, while we also had the opportunity to grow as researchers.

This student showcase essay explores how researching the city informs learning about the city. In it, I examine my senior thesis project for the urban studies program at Barnard College, in which I argue for the use of container farms to expand urban agricultural education opportunities in career and technical education settings. I review my research process, results, and the argument I developed about Perkins Act funding being essential to such programs. Through my commentary, I demonstrate how completing an urban-focused thesis can change students’ perceptions of the urban built environment.

Government developers have put up yet another portion of Harlem’s 125th Street for redevelopment. After a 2012 government-sponsored call for development proposals, state developers selected the National Urban League (NUL), a civil rights and urban advocacy organization that serves African Americans and other underserved communities, and Hudson Companies, Inc. for a $242 million development project—the Urban League Empowerment Center (ULEC), which will include the NUL as the lead tenant and will be accompanied by various retailers, other nonprofit organizations, and housing units. In this student showcase essay, I reflect on my experience writing an opinion piece in an urban sociology course about the construction of the ULEC and the story of cross-sector urban development behind it. By bringing primary source documents and relevant course readings into conversation with each other, I was able to revise my understanding of the hidden layers of urban development and the actors that were involved in these processes. Additionally, writing an op-ed that put these sources into conversation allowed me to reflect on my own positionality and relationship to the processes of neighborhood development under study.

Co-written by bachelor students and their lecturer, this commentary is a critical reflection on the Materiality and Urban Politics (SOC387) course taught at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in the summer of 2022. The course unfolded during a time of political unrest at Boğaziçi following the appointment of a new president, which brought the campus under a state of police siege. In this context, SOC387 explored relations between the material and the urban/political through democratic and inclusive pedagogical approaches. Bringing together reflections on the sociopolitical context in which the course took place, classroom pedagogies, and students’ commentaries, we reflect on how the course helped participants redefine their sense of belonging to, and engagement with, Istanbul’s urban/political environment during a time of perceived disempowerment and “crisis of democracy” in Turkey. By exploring the productive tensions between urban space, politics, and democratic pedagogy, this commentary argues that teaching and learning in and about the city can be cathartic in reinforcing participants’ will to act on and contribute to urban politics.

How do airy materials constitute the urban? This is an anthropological question that has been of interest to me as I teach in a university campus in Northern India. Surrounded by agricultural fields and national highways, the campus is at least 60 km from the city of Delhi—infamous as the most polluted place in the world. My ability to notice how air pollution constituted Delhi peaked during a lecture with undergraduate students in late October 2019, when I was informed that they were being forced to sit in the bad air in my classroom because the student body’s request to cancel classes on account of air pollution had been denied. This moment has remained etched in my memory as it led to a long conversation in class about what it means to live with air through breath. Since Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence is a residential university, I wondered how air quality was constituting how students related to living on campus. In acknowledging the agentive quality of air, I use this vignette and the conversation that followed to think through how air simultaneously constitutes the urban/rural divide and dissolves it, thus reformulating our relationship to the urban.

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.

Over the past few decades, scholars and educators have challenged the traditional focus of architectural history on styles and formal features, placing more emphasis on user experience. This experience, however, is not common to all. Each sector of society understands, inhabits, and utilizes architecture differently, leading to divergent ways of performing one’s identity within the city. For example, unhoused people are often excluded from full participation in public life. This commentary shares an experiment that complements an architectural history course with a set of assignments where students engage with sociopolitical aspects of the built environment through mapping and analyzing anti-homeless, hostile design in Eugene, Oregon.

Written by a teacher and two students in an undergraduate course titled Housing: Planning and Policy, this commentary explores screenwriting as a pedagogical device used in service of experiential learning about the city in the classroom. It reflects on the employment of this device over two semesters wherein ethnographic vignettes were drawn upon to iteratively craft scripts, with fictional interventions guided by critical frames derived from the learning objectives of the course. We highlight the usefulness of screenwriting as a tool to embrace the urban as a becoming-space in the classroom, wherein students: 1) freely express their encounters with the built environment and feed them into the process of learning by doing; 2) immerse themselves in the ongoing city politics outside the classroom; and 3) appreciate the entangled realms of policy, governance, markets, bureaucracy, and media. Our experiments with screenwriting have been inspired by anthropological research that has brought out the multiplicity and perpetual becoming of urban political spaces. We articulate here our arrival at the screenwriting exercise and point to its potential for teaching and learning the city in anti-positivist ways.

Tidal Cities was an interdisciplinary, transnational experiment that brought together an environmental anthropologist, an urban geographer, and two landscape architects/artists. We aimed at co-creating a visualization-based pedagogical tool for contemplating and teaching manifold relations between the city and the sea, drawing on ethnographic material from Metro Manila and Jakarta. The project was designed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and its digital format integrated an immersive role play component to spark further debate among tertiary students. Players were encouraged to critically reflect on and engage with trajectories and contestations around coastal planning and urban placemaking, particularly in spaces of informality beset by recurrent flooding, tenurial insecurity, and dispossession. While engaging with the poetics and politics of 2D visual representation, we reflect on the thinking behind the game´s pedagogical co-design and a number of paradoxes that arose from two test-runs with departmental students, researchers, and teaching faculty in Bremen, Germany.

Photovoice is a research and teaching tool designed to document personal experiences and elicit applied discussions. In the classroom, photovoice brings theoretical concepts to life, empowers students to become co-creators of knowledge, sensitizes students to a range of city experiences, and is adaptable to unforeseen events. Photovoice also connects students to a place and community as both insiders and tourists; and beyond exams, papers, and assigned readings, photovoice starts new and experiential conversations on a course’s key topics. Examples from classroom experience will be shared.