{"id":52038,"date":"2025-01-28T00:15:58","date_gmt":"2025-01-28T00:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/anthropology\/anthropology-for-liberation-readings-3-0-lorena-gibson\/"},"modified":"2025-01-28T00:15:58","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T00:15:58","slug":"anthropology-for-liberation-readings-3-0-lorena-gibson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=52038","title":{"rendered":"Anthropology for Liberation readings 3.0 \u2013 Lorena Gibson"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

2021 marks the fourth year I have taught Anthropology for Liberation<\/a>, an undergraduate course in the Cultural Anthropology Programme at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington. The course is inspired by three influential books:<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Left to right: Faye Harrison (ed)\u2019s Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation <\/em>(2010);
<\/em>Linda Tuhiwai Smith\u2019s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples <\/em>(2010);
and Paulo Freire\u2019s Pedagogy of the Oppressed <\/em>(1996).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Each year I revise the course and change the readings<\/a>. This year I took a new approach: I moved journal articles, book chapters (including chapters from the books above), and other relevant resources to \u2018recommended reading\u2019 status, and set four books as required reading. <\/p>\n

Why would I assign four books when we know that \u201cup to 80% of uni students don\u2019t read their assigned readings<\/a>?\u201d Two reasons:<\/p>\n

To slow down<\/h3>\n

My first reason is a response to feminist calls for \u201cslow scholarship\u201d (Mountz, Bonds, Mansfield, Loyd, Hyndman, Walton-Roberts, Basu, Whitson, Hawkins, and Hamilton 2015<\/a>; O\u2019Neill 2014<\/a>). In our first lecture I explain that slow scholarship is a bit like the slow food movement in that it calls for academics (and everyone involved with tertiary institutions) to slow down, resist the fast-paced demands of the neoliberal university, and demonstrate our commitment to good scholarship, teaching, service, and a collective feminist ethics of care. As Alison Mountz et al (2016<\/a>) write:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cSlow scholarship is a way of making visible all of the work of academia that has been rendered invisible, the work not accounted for in metrics designed to evaluate our worth: the reading, the agonizing over writing, the teaching preparation, the mentoring of fellow faculty and students, the outreach to community partners, as well as the failures (grants not received, papers never published) that are never accounted for.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The approach to anthropology that we take in this class means that we need to be thoughtful, reflexive, and deliberate in everything we do. I draw attention all of the work that goes into a course \u2013 theirs and mine \u2013 and how most of it takes place outside of the classroom. (Our university expects students to spend 14-16 hours per week on this course, and it can be an interesting exercise to ask students where the course is, <\/em>given that we only spend 2-3 hours per week together in lectures and tutorials.)<\/p>\n

Reading four books might not feel like slowing down, especially as we work through 3-4 chapters every week (our 12-week term = three weeks per book). However, dwelling on a book allows for a different, slower<\/em> method of engagement with each text, compared with reading the same number of journal articles or individual book chapters from different sources. <\/p>\n

To practice \u201cclose reading\u201d<\/h3>\n

My second reason comes from seeing the success my colleague Grant Otsuki<\/a> has in his classes, where he does a close reading of texts in class with students. Grant recommended an excellent article by Joe Dumit called \u201cHow I read<\/a>,\u201d where he outlines a mode of reading that is close, constructive, positive, generous, slightly genealogical, methodological in focus, and ethical (Dumit 2012):<\/p>\n

\n

Close<\/strong>\u00a0reading means that I attend to the specifics of the text.\u00a0 I am interested in how a text as a text makes arguments.\u00a0 What specific modes of writing, grammars, uses of words, modes of characterizing others, and of characterizing others\u2019 arguments are used.\u00a0 I bring up the author\u2019s other works as part of a general context of the kinds of problems being addressed but am committed to figuring out how to find these problems within the text, even if this means reading across a number of pages for a small number of passages.\u00a0 My aim here is to locate the textual basis for making a claim about what the text is doing.\u00a0 Hence my predilection for comments about the method of the text within the text.\u00a0 A\u00a0general\u00a0<\/strong>reading I would (perhaps unfairly) characterize as one that sees a text as an instance of something that transcends it (the author\u2019s intention, oeuvre, the times, etc., see Foucault\u2019s \u201cWhat is an author?\u201d).<\/p>\n

Joe Dumit, \u201cHow I read\u201d, 2012<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I start our close reading sessions by introducing the author(s); who they are, where they are from, what their research interests are, and so on. Then we move into a series of questions:<\/p>\n