The most popular post on my blog describes the fieldnote template I developed during the early stages of my PhD research with community-based NGOs running educational and economic development initiatives in Kolkata (India) and Lae (Papua New Guinea). This fieldnote template has made its way into other blog posts about ethnographic research, textbooks and articles, course outlines, and academic commons. Last year my colleague Grant Jun Otsuki assigned it as a reading for his first year Cultural Anthropology class at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington as a way of helping students ..read more

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 colleagues, research into learning and teaching strategies, and student feedback. In this post I describe a major change made in 2022: incorporating sessions on ‘how to university’ alongside ‘how to anthropology’. In 2022 I decided to add an extra weekly lecture to ANTH 101 (moving from two 1-hour lectures per week to three) in order to introduce an academic skills component to the course. This change was inspired by: the diffe ..read more

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 Liberation. I modify the course every year in response to the conversations we have in our classroom and wider scholarly conversations. This course takes its cue from the book Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation edited by Professor Faye Harrison. An anthropology for liberation leans into ideas of transformation and bringing about social change to make life more bearable for all pe ..read more

2021 marks the fourth year I have taught Anthropology for Liberation, an undergraduate course in the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. The course is inspired by three influential books: Left to right: Faye Harrison (ed)’s Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation (2010); Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2010); and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1996). Each year I revise the course and change the readings. This year I took a new approach: I ..read more

The University of Hawaiʻi Press has been publishing some excellent books lately, including Eli Elinoff’s first monograph, Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand (2021). Having seen this book develop from a draft into its final form – Eli is one of my colleagues in the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington – I was looking forward to reading it. I was not disappointed (and yes, I would have let him know if I was!). As the title suggests, Citizen Designs is a book about democracy and citizenship in Thailand, as seen from ..read more

In 2017 I taught a new course for the first time: Anthropology for Liberation. Here’s the short course description: How can Anthropology advance human emancipation from racism, gender inequality, class disparities, and other forms of oppression and exploitation? In this course we will consider what it means to approach anthropology from a decolonising perspective, and explore what an anthropology for liberation might look like in theory and practice, drawing on examples from Asia, Oceania, and Latin America. I’ve written about how that went in an article called Pedagogical Experiments in an An ..read more