Social construction theory is an interdisciplinary discourse. Human reality is greatly influenced, understood, and experienced through cultural and social norms. This constructed reality generally sets parameters on notions of biology, gender, and sexuality. Dichotomous variables such as sex/gender, domestic/public, heterosexual/homosexual were initially proposed to help deconstruct the realities behind social constructs. Further studies showed that even constructionist binaries and essentialisms suffered from the social bias they claimed to challenge. Attention to context, deconstructions of identity, and understandings of intersections of social characteristics such as race and class now characterize the social constructionist approach. This entry examines contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and psychiatrists, philosophers, historians, and biologists.
By the end of summer 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had upended higher education by requiring immediate adaptation by students, teachers, and institutions to new sets of limitations. What did this period of crisis mean for current and future teaching and learning? A rapid qualitative assessment presented here seeks to begin a sustained conversation around instructors' experiences. The anthropology professors interviewed in this study found that preexisting conditions in higher education resulted in pedagogical impacts that aggravated both student and faculty inequalities within their institutions. Far from being a new "crisis," the difficulties encountered in teaching and learning were familiar to professors, who worried ongoing problems in higher education were intrinsic.
Public universities in the United States confront drastic changes as labour relations continue to evolve towards neoliberal managerial practices. Increasingly, faculty feel excluded from decision-making processes influencing their lives. This article provides a case study of Public Midwestern University (PMU, a pseudonym), where a faculty union went from protest to participation with administration to formulate a new model for shared governance. While PMU produced such a model, interviews with participants depict a larger economic context that cultivates mistrust and a great sense of uncertainty. The article discusses conflicting attitudes around unionisation, managerial practices and the future of higher education.
This special issue results from email conversations begun in the summer of 2020 concerning COVID-19's effects on the teaching and learning of anthropology in higher education. The Society for Applied Anthropology's Higher Education Thematic Interest Group listserv functioned as a networking tool, bringing together questions, authors, editors, and the journal. The resulting commentaries, project showcases, and research articles published here offer analyses of teaching and learning within the virtual walls of the academy during the pandemic. They reveal much about student and professor experiences with online tools and digital anthropology as well as the preexisting inequalities in higher education uncovered by the pandemic. Collectively, the essays in this issue offer insights and perspectives that can help guide anthropological teaching and learning in the future.
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