CALL FOR PAPERS, TAJ Special Issue: Teaching & Learning Anthropology & Ethnography in Eastern & South-Eastern Europe.

Deadline for Abstract Submissions:

SEPTEMBER 15, 2018

On behalf of the editor and editorial collective of Teaching Anthropology Journal, we would like to invite you to submit a paper for the special issue on

“Teaching and learning anthropology and ethnography in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe”.

Guest Editor: Dr. Ioannis Manos Dept. of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece

Regional Editor (Europe) of the international editorial collective of Teaching Anthropology

 Questions about the special issue should be directed to Dr. Ioannis Manos: imanos@uom.edu.gr 

The editor and editorial collective of Teaching Anthropology (TA) invite article submissions for a special issue on Teaching and learning anthropology and ethnography in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. The special issue will tentatively be published in June 2019.
Teaching Anthropology (TA) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to the teaching of anthropology. A journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, TA promotes dialogue and reflection about anthropological pedagogies in schools, colleges and universities. Bringing together anthropological and educational ideas, the journal fosters a critical engagement with teaching practices and their role in developing our anthropological capacities. It also aims to stimulate scholarly discussions about the relationship between pedagogy and its social, institutional and political contexts.

THEME
Following these objectives, the purpose of this special issue is to gather together contributions that address aspects of teaching and learning anthropology and ethnography in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, in both discipline-related and interdisciplinary, academic and non-academic contexts. Anthropology as an academic discipline has experienced a vast growth in terms of university departments and student numbers in this geographical area which has been the focus of intensive anthropological research, especially after 1990.
Moreover, the necessity of dealing with the diverse political, social, cultural and economic phenomena that affect and transform the lives of the people residing in this part of the world, has intensified the demands for academic knowledge production, increasingly through joint and multi-disciplinary research. Yet, this is an area in which disciplines such as ethnology, folklore studies, sociology and geography have been established as dominant ways of sociological understanding and produced a rich and important body of theoretical and ethnographic knowledge. And they should be included in the dialogue this issue wishes to launch.
Thus, this special issue aspires to offer a forum for an inter-disciplinary exchange about the ways we teach how we study society and culture in the context of Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. This is not a discussion only about teaching but also about the state of anthropology and the other ‘kin’ disciplines with regard to the specificities of the national educational systems and the particular teaching environments they are part of. It concerns their position in understanding and dealing with the present social phenomena and contemporary social problems. It also involves anthropology’s and the other disciplines’ flexibility to engage with alternative methodologies and reflexive approaches towards the prevailing political ideologies, the role of education and the perceptions of the ‘Self’ and the ‘Other’. Eventually, it implicates their public outcomes and visibility and serves as a form of critique of the post-socialist condition, post-conflict policies, neoliberalism and the “global knowledge economy”.

PROPOSED TOPICS
The following questions/topics are proposed as potential focal points of investigation:

• What practices, pedagogies, formats and techniques can be developed to assist the learning and teaching process and meet the demands of the contemporary social research?
• How do we train our students to understand and use various concepts How do we train our students to understand and use various concepts (i.e. theory, culture, representation, ethnocentrism, context, and contextualization, research questions and objectives, ethnographic data and data analysis, ethical issues, reflexivity etc.) within familiar and unfamiliar research contexts? How do we teach about ways of representation such as the ethnographic writing? 
• How do we address in our teaching the emotional, sensual and affectionate dimensions of fieldwork as well as the sensory and bodily experience of the fieldworker and her/his interlocutors and their implications for the production of anthropological knowledge?
• How do we face the challenge of the ethnographic method within complex urban, glocal, virtual and websited environments?  How do we accommodate the traditional notion of fieldwork as the long stay and first-hand acquisition of knowledge in a specific location with the increasingly dominant format of short-stay, learning-by-doing, intense research projects (summer/field schools, laboratories, workshops, short trips, interdisciplinary courses etc)?
• What is the impact of ethnography, as a basic method of carrying out grounded research beyond Anthropology?
• How do we incorporate in our teaching the existing theoretical, methodological and ethnographic knowledge that has been produced by disciplines such as ethnology, folklore studies, sociology and geography? How do we disseminate this knowledge, especially at the levels of pre-school, primary and secondary education?
• How can the context of multidisciplinary and joint research help us improve our teaching and learning methods?
• How do MA or PhD students and junior researchers in anthropology from Eastern and South-Eastern Europe cope with international standards of research funding as well as publication and access to internationally recognized journals? How important, easy or difficult is this international recognition for their national professional career?
• How can new technologies, social media, distant learning and e-learning support or advance the teaching and learning of the ethnographic process? Should anthropologists be trained as bloggers, Twitter users, journalists, YouTubers, social media experts?
• How do we teach anthropology and ethnography to non-academic audiences such as policy makers, corporation executives and managers, social workers, journalists, commercial advertisers? Can applied, ‘engaging’ and ‘public’ anthropology be taught to both anthropologists and non-anthropologists?

SUBMISSIONS
This special issue invites two kinds of submissions: A. 6000-word articles for the “MAIN SECTION”. B. 3000-word reports and reflection pieces for the “DEVELOPING TEACHING SECTION”.
Authors submitting manuscripts should indicate in a cover letter that they wish the submission to be considered for the special issue on Teaching anthropology and ethnography in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. Submissions for this special issue will follow the normal peer-review practices of TA.
Prospective authors are strongly urged to acquaint themselves with previously published issues of the journal and to follow the guidelines for submission that are to be found on TA’s website (https://www.teachinganthropology.org/ojs/index.php/teach_anth/about/submissions).
Submitting an article indicates that the work reported has not been previously published, that the essay—in present or revised form—is not being considered for publication in other journals or in edited volumes, and that the author(s) will not allow the essay to be so considered before notification in writing of an editorial decision by TA.
All authors should (a) include an abstract of 100 to 150 words; (b) select five keywords (which do not appear in the title) to facilitate electronic search; (c) provide a cover page that includes the title of the submission, author name(s), institutional affiliation(s), e-mail address(es), and a short biographical note of 100-150 words for each author.