Teaching Anthropology

An Introduction to Trauma-Informed Teaching in Anthropology

2024-10-21T09:29:59-07:00

This editorial introduces the significance of a trauma-informed approach for teaching and learning in anthropology. It will provide an overview of key terms relating to trauma, and how these might apply to anthropological teaching and learning contexts. It also considers what these teaching contexts might reveal about trauma-informed approaches, drawing on conversations with colleagues from across different institutions into their experiences working with trauma. It identifies the centrality of trust and control in reflecting the needs of participants and students.

This collection brings together pieces from anthropologists working at different academic career stages: from those writing up PhD fieldwork to those reflecting on longer teaching and research engagements with trauma. The issue also comprises of work on very different ethnographic contexts including the UK, Greece, Italy, South Africa, Palestine, and Lebanon. This heterogeneity illustrates the usefulness of trauma as a lens through which to interpret multiple forms of experience, whether considering how to teach students about challenging topics, engage with those who have experienced trauma, or make sense of how to navigate our own experiences. Overall, it suggests that conversations around how to work with trauma need to be had with others - between students, colleagues, departments, and institutions.

Keywords: Trauma, vicarious trauma, historical trauma, trauma-informed approaches

Trauma and Emotion in Decolonising Anthropology

2024-09-30T08:19:33-07:00

Teaching a module entitled ‘Decolonising Anthropology’ means having to approach numerous difficult and challenging subjects with students. It also means having to respond to and reflect on the traumatic responses that these topics bring about in individuals. During classes in this module, on the use of human remains in biological anthropology, students have become overwhelmed by the subject matter and removed themselves from the laboratory. Students have also expressed anxiety and feelings of uncertainty due to the assessment of this module, where we encourage the production of alternative assessment types and learning outcomes as a reaction to traditional essay style submissions. This paper highlights the impact of learning about decolonising the curriculum and challenging traditional pedagogical approaches on undergraduate students studying anthropology. Reflections from students will be discussed, including transformative feelings from overwhelm to having constructive conversations about unsettling and unfamiliar topics, the juxtaposition of conventional academic thoughts against personal emotions and narratives, and how thinking about decolonising anthropology has been an unsettling experience. Personal reflection will be given to how such ‘risky teaching’ (Harrison et al., 2023) can help create more effective teaching and learning within the discipline and help develop a trauma-informed pedagogy for anthropology.

Keywords: Pedagogy; Decolonising; Trauma; Reflective.

What Does It Mean to Teach Trauma-Informed Anthropology?

2024-02-15T05:43:42-08:00

This Teaching Brief is an extended discussion on the findings presented in our article ‘Field of Screams Revisited: Contending with trauma in ethnographic fieldwork’ (Procter, Spector and Freed, this Special Issue). In the article, we report on a survey on the fieldwork experiences of 43 anthropologists. The survey sought to understand the kinds of trauma exposure experienced by anthropologists; the ways in which researchers were affected by this exposure both during and after fieldwork; and the support they received – or would have benefitted from – to anticipate, prevent and mitigate this. In summary, analysis of the survey led to the following core findings: first, that trauma exposure is a feature of many fieldwork experiences whether or not the fieldwork takes place in a violent or chaotic setting. Second, that there are notable gaps in the skills, preparedness and support of researchers who are exposed to trauma in the course of their fieldwork. Third, that encounters with trauma, even if ‘only’ vicarious trauma, during fieldwork can have significant adverse impact on researchers, which in turn has an impact on the overall quality and integrity of the research produced as a result of the fieldwork. Finally, we shared findings on how researchers coped with the difficulties they had faced, including levels of support received from departments and supervisors (more than half of respondents who felt able to share the challenges they had faced doing fieldwork with their supervisors or other senior academics felt that their concerns had been downplayed or dismissed). Taken together, it appears that many aspects of the fieldwork preparation experience are not sufficiently trauma-informed, and that this is detrimental both to the wellbeing of some researchers and to the quality of research produced. In this Teaching Brief, and in the style set out by this journal, we offer educators a series of questions to reflect on in order to move towards a trauma-informed anthropology, prompted by the findings of this survey.

Field of Screams Revisited: Contending with Trauma in Ethnographic Fieldwork

2024-07-08T06:05:00-07:00

This article explores ways that trauma can come into tension with anthropological methods, specifically during fieldwork. It is based on findings from a survey conducted among anthropologists in 2023, which sought to understand preparation for fieldwork, including personal preparation, formal support and the ethics process; fieldwork experiences, including forms of trauma exposure and other aspects of context which may have heightened vulnerability or reactivity to traumatic stressors; researcher responses to accumulated distress of fieldwork; and finally, how supervisory relationships and institutional culture shape and influence researchers’ experience. We suggest that by looking at fieldwork experiences through the lens of trauma, we can achieve a rich and specific understanding of the extent to which this is an issue within the discipline. Doing so can enable us to think constructively about moving towards a trauma-informed anthropology.

Key Words: Fieldwork; trauma exposure; vicarious trauma; training; supervision; institutional culture

Anthropology’s Need for Trauma-Informed Approaches: Recognising the Prevalence of Trauma, Navigating its Impacts, and Considerations for Teaching.

2024-07-08T06:17:47-07:00

Traumatic experiences are prevalent across all cultures and all Higher Education contexts will almost certainly have survivors of trauma in the classroom as students or teachers. Focusing on the UK Higher Education context, this article draws on data indicating the rates of traumatic experiences among UK University populations in order to demonstrate the need for a trauma-informed approach to teaching anthropology. It goes on to show the ways in which anthropologists have worked with trauma and those who have experienced trauma in order to develop an anthropological interpretation of trauma-informed practices. Trauma-informed approaches centre the needs of survivors in the provision of services. Through reflecting on techniques for teaching a session on ‘child sexual abuse and trauma,’ I consider practical solutions for teaching challenging topics in ways that diminish possibilities of retraumatisation and vicarious traumatisation.

Workaround as Practice: Gauging Risk in Ethnographic Method

2024-01-26T08:23:18-08:00

This reflection questions how “trauma-informed anthropology” as a method and reflexive praxis undergirding fieldwork evolves: How do attempts to mitigate re-traumatisation shape the meanings of the relationship between researcher and interlocutor? Issues of vicarious trauma are similarly near-impossible to anticipate, and there are few existing structures in place to aid researchers during their fieldwork, particularly as it isolates them from existing structures of care in their own lives. In the steps we have both taken to ensure our safety and that of our interlocutors, we ask: Does the workaround then become part of the practice?

Keywords: Trauma, method, positionality, risk, interviews, ethnography.

“I Think Too Much” – Culture, Trauma, and Expressions of Distress.

2024-07-08T06:08:11-07:00

The 21st century has seen a dramatic increase in chronic non-infectious diseases, and medical anthropologists have noted a rise, particularly, in the area of mental health. Past studies have shown that a lack of cultural understanding of trauma narratives resulted in non- or mis-diagnosis which ultimately has negative repercussions. Culturally specific and appropriate understandings of trauma narratives are necessary for correct diagnosis and treatment. Diagnostic manuals, such as the DSM and ICD, rooted in Western culture thrive on their universal nature, however, they are exclusionary to non-Western societies ignoring cultural and spiritual elements that are embedded in understandings and treatment of trauma. This paper draws on the experiences and understandings of trauma from the perspective of South Africans who have non-Western cultural affiliations. Distress has its own language and expression according to culture. Cultural practices provide a safe haven from distress and help us to make sense of what we are experiencing enabling healing and closure in their processes. This paper draws from several in-depth semi-structured interviews, with South Africans from differing cultural backgrounds, conducted over the course of six months. The results of the study reflect that the structure of trauma narratives are heavily influenced by cultural concepts and contexts, illustrating that cultural awareness and appropriateness is important when engaging with trauma discourse. Through the ethnographic study of trauma narratives, anthropologists have an important role to play in the global mental health crisis. This paper, therefore, posits that cultural awareness of perspectives of trauma must be brought into curriculum, especially in the discipline of Psychology, in order to ensure that treatment, intervention, and prevention strategies are culturally aligned for success.

Keywords: trauma, culture, distress, cultural appropriateness, anthropology of distress, mental health.

Facing the Consequences: The Case for Transformative Fieldwork in Undergraduate Curriculums

2024-01-13T13:02:25-08:00

In this paper I argue that transformative fieldwork can and should be a pillar of an undergraduate education in anthropology. By transformative fieldwork, I mean long- or medium-term immersive participant observation that challenges the investigator’s beliefs, bodily experience (embodiment), and/or ethics, prompting adaptive responses that, collectively over time, fundamentally alter their experience of the world. My proposal has two parts. First, I advance the “senior thesis” – an in-depth research project undertaken in the final year of undergraduate study – as a viable placeholder for substantive fieldwork in an undergraduate curriculum. Such fieldwork, carried out locally or online, has advantages in accessibility, affordability, and authenticity relative to the conventional undergraduate gateway to fieldwork experience: methodological “field school.” Second, addressing a significant challenge to doing fieldwork on local (culturally familiar) terrain, I argue that such fieldwork can be transformative, and not merely a replication of familiar experiences, if students and their advisors design participant observation projects that carry significant consequences for the student’s beliefs, bodily experience, and/or ethics. I outline strategies for designing such projects, illustrated by examples drawn from my own students’ senior theses. The concluding section addresses three potential reservations about undergraduates undertaking “consequential” research.

Deluged Fieldsites, Traumatised Selves: Environmental Trauma and Its Implications for Disaster Research in Anthropology

2024-07-09T06:28:21-07:00

What can the contribution of anthropologists be when working with communities facing post-disaster trauma? What are the role, responsibilities and – equally important – needs of the anthropologist in a post-disaster site? What are the processes for conducting fieldwork when a disaster hits and the ethics of researching a community struggling with its wellbeing?
This paper addresses these questions based on ethnographic material gathered during and in the wake of an unforeseen deluge that hit Samothráki, a remote island in NE Greece, in September 2017. I am employing two quite different types of data, responses to an online survey and (auto)ethnographic observations, to discuss the experience of post-traumatic stress following a disaster, as this was expressed in private and public spaces. Instead of pathologising trauma and treating people as its passive recipients, the concept of ‘environmental trauma’ is introduced as a dynamic, formative process through which disaster survivors resituate themselves and consider their way forward in a future of climate crisis. The paper also raises important ethical issues related to conducting research in a site and/or with people affected by a disaster, and concludes with providing three key recommendations for a trauma- and disaster-informed anthropological research, particularly useful for teaching and training.

Keywords: Post-disaster trauma, post-traumatic stress, environmental disasters, climate change, research ethics, autoethnography

“The academic space is not a safe space to be an indigenous person”; Responding to the Trauma of the Settler-Colonial University Through African Indigenous Knowledge System (AIKS)-Informed Pedagogy

2024-01-12T09:01:09-08:00

The colonial university has long existed as a site of traumatic incorporation of western knowledge systems into the lives of indigenous populations across the world. Western academic styles of teaching and learning in South Africa reenact indigenous traumas of violent loss of identity and the spiritual relationship to the wider world of self, family, community, ancestors and the environment on which the indigenous South African health model is based. As a result, academia in South Africa becomes a space in which the trauma of violent and unequal incorporation into the colonial social world is reproduced. Like other societies shaped by settler colonial domination, South African education systems have historically excluded indigenous knowledge systems and indigenous identities through both violent and subtle methods, including language and appearance policies aimed at disciplining and subduing the indigenous body.

What has been termed ‘intellectual colonization’ sees the ongoing dismissal of African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AIKS) as inferior, or as a resource to exploit. AIKS have been an object of study for anthropologists since the discipline’s inception, but the ontological possibilities it offers to transforming teaching practice from within have not been taken up. This has subsequently led to a situation in which academia exists as an unsafe space for indigenous people to engage with knowledge. There has been much discussion about the decolonization of education in South Africa, but very rarely are these decolonial discussion efforts met with actual change in pedagogical approaches.

We reflect here on attempts to integrate indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) into the curriculum and pedagogical approach of an Anthropology Hons course in an English-Medium South African university in the Eastern Cape, Rhodes University. We argue that sharing understanding of content, and incorporating teaching practices, from an AIKS approach can enhance learning, and complement existing academic practices of text-based enquiry to produce a knowledge-transmission experience grounded in indigenous modes of learning which might mitigate the violence and trauma of the colonial university’s locking of students into one ontological frame presented as ‘normal’.

Keywords: indigenous knowledge systems (IKS), decolonization, indigenous health models, university pedagogy.