We write from the starting point of teaching an anthropology course together consisting of predominantly white, middle class cis students. The course collaborated with a local NGO, and the students were given the task to study issues of discrimination and exclusion within youth, leisure activities. This gave us the opportunity to examine, and therefore challenge, what we and our students were taught in terms of ‘the other’, positionality and accountability in anthropological research. We share our journey of creating a norm-critical classroom, which was built on our counter-archive (Haritaworn, Moussa & Ware, 2018) of anti-oppressive, queer, trans, BIPOC1 knowledge. We discuss how we made the students investigate their own positionalities and research interests, through our pedagogy of provoking discomfort by decentering whiteness and cisnormativity. We meditate on what it means to be teachers of anthropology that learn and work from differently marginalized positions within the Academic Industrial Complex (AIC). We honor the treasures we find in anti-oppression knowledge from the margins by joining a collective discussion on how to end epistemic violence within the classroom, the discipline and the broader AIC, while navigating the deeply colonial, cis- and heteronormative fabric of what is considered canon.
This paper is a creative, poetic and experimental intervention in the form of collective reflections and writings on Anthropology, as the discipline we have experienced and/or been a part of within the University. It is also a reflection on the process of how the authors came together to form the River and Fire Collective. As a collective we have studied, worked and taught in more than 15 universities, and the aspects we point to here are fragments of our experiences and observations of the emotionality of the discipline. These are experiences from different forms of Anthropology from Northern Europe and settler-colonial contexts including Great Turtle Island Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. In a metaphorical manner we invite the reader to our collective fireside dialogues and reflections, to be inspired, to disagree or agree and to continue a process of transformation. The paper sets out to provocatively question whether Anthropology is salvageable or whether one should ‘let it burn’ (Jobson, 2020). Exploring this question is done by way of discussing decolonial potentialities within the discipline(s), the classroom and exploring fire and water as a radical potential to think through the tensions between abolition and transformation. The reflections engage with concepts of decolonization, whiteness/white innocence, knowledge creation and -sharing, the anthropological self, ethics and accountability and language. The paper emphasizes Anthropology’s embeddedness in colonial narratives, structures and legacies and draws attention to how these colonial, able-bodied realities are being continuously reaffirmed through multiple educational practices and methodologies. It suggests that collectivity in writing, thinking and being is part of a healing process for those of us feeling our way through colonial continuities and prospective potentialities of Anthropology.
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