Advice for PhD students approaching the examination process in Aotearoa New Zealand (or other contexts featuring external examination of theses), by Dr April K. Henderson

I am delighted to share this invaluable resource from my friend and colleague, Dr. April K Henderson. April has written the most thoughtful and practical advice I’ve seen on navigating the PhD examination process, which involves a viva/oral defence here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her advice is grounded in years of supervisory experience in Pacific Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, and exemplifies her generous mentorship. If you or someone you know is approaching a thesis examination in Aotearoa New Zealand, this is essential reading.

Approaching examiners’ reports

Your first and lasting response to examiners’ reports—even the one with the toughest-to-take criticism—should be gratitude for the detailed engagement with your work they provide. Let’s face it: reading a thesis, even a beautifully written one, is a bit of a slog, but these three people read yours, re-read it, thought deeply about, formulated opinions and crafted several (or five, or sometimes even eight) pages of detailed discussion and advice. No one else, apart from your supervisors, will read your work this closely.

Examiners are people, and just like other people we know (friends, relatives) some examiners are better at wording their critiques in a generous and supportive way, while others may be more blunt. Some critiques you may easily see the truth of, others you may reject. But no matter how they sound, examiners’ comments are always (at least in my experience) intended well and meant to improve your thesis. Therefore, the first note you should sound in the oral exam is gratitude that these esteemed, busy people have given so much time and attention to your work.

In your oral exam, you will need to be prepared to address critiques in your reports. Here’s some strategies for preparing to do that.

So you have your examiners’ reports—what to do now?

I advise students to work your way methodically through all the reports, developing a list of every critique/request made and who made it. More specifically, I suggest developing a spreadsheet with three columns.

In the left column of the spreadsheet, enter each critique/request in a new row.

In the middle column, write a statement about whether the critique was echoed or contradicted in the other two reports. Why this middle column is important:

It will help identify the key areas of agreement across all three reports, and these will most likely feed into predictable questions in the oral exam and possibly revisions you will be asked to make;
It will help you to have perspective on the reports when taken as a whole. Otherwise, our natural human negativity bias means that we will obsess about the most critical bits in the reports, losing sight of the big picture—including that some examiners may have loved the exact same aspect of the thesis that another hated. So Professor X thought you did a really poor job elaborating [key concept] in your thesis. But Professor Y and Dr Z thought you did a great job and said so! This middle column can help your fragile scholarly ego maintain perspective. It also can suggest positive strategies for approaching the stinging bits of critique in the oral exam: if examiners’ responses were contradictory on a particular point, it can be useful to gently (and non-defensively!) work a reference to the positive commendations of other examiners into your considered response to the critique (a suggestion for doing this below). Which brings me to the final column…

In the right column, put your carefully considered response to the critique and what (if anything) you are willing to do to address it, including practical changes you might make to the final thesis. Also note for yourself if/how you might (implicitly or more directly) work a reference to the critique in your opening fifteen minute presentation. (More about how you will use and draw on this column is at the end of “The Oral Exam” section).

Here is an example of a table of examiners’ comments and student responses. (Note: this is an anonymised, generalised composite, not a particular student’s exact spreadsheet).

CRITIQUE	CONVERGENCE/DIVERGENCE in REPORTS?	MY RESPONSE
1. One examiner said thesis invokes divergent conceptions of [key concept] from multiple theorists and “the way in which [key concept] is being used as expounded in Chapter 2 and especially in later descriptions and analysis could have been clearer” (Professor X p2)	Critique not reflected in Professor Y’s or Dr Z’s reports, who write approvingly of thesis’s use of [key concept]: “[insert their flattering, approving statements here]”.	Two examiners were very satisfied with my treatment of [key concept]. I can offer an implicit response to Professor X’s critique in my opening 15-minute presentation in the oral exam; As part of narrating the thesis’s key original contributions, I can say something like: “I agree with examiners that the concept of [key concept] is critical to the thesis. It underpinned my analysis of x and y and allowed me to see z. Given its importance, I was gratified by Professor Y’s and Dr Z’s commendations of how the thesis introduces and uses the concept.” If Professor X raises a specific question later in the exam, I am prepared to restate/elaborate clearly on the thesis’s use of [key concept], making reference to particular passages in the thesis that I feel address Professor X’s questions. Ways to do this non-defensively: open the response by agreeing with X that clarity is important. After pointing to specific passages that I hope address X’s critique, close by welcoming suggestions X may have for bringing further clarity.
2. “Textual descriptions of x and y are rather hard going” (Professor X p2)	Critique not reflected in Professor Y’s or Dr Z’s reports. Both of these other examiners are trained in [specifically relevant field] and write of the thesis’s textual descriptions in very positive terms: “[insert their flattering, approving statements here]”.	Professor X’s critique seems a bit pointed here—it’s very specific and not shared by the other examiners who have more expertise in [relevant field]. I don’t think I need to pick up on it in my opening presentation. If it comes up later in the exam, I could discuss why I chose to describe x and y in the level of detail I did, the relationship of these descriptions to my analysis, and end by acknowledging with gratitude Professor Y’s and Dr Z’s commendations of my descriptions in their reports.
3. “The Conclusion [was short]. I craved more. What I expected here was a greater connection between the research questions posed at the start, the subtle exposition of complex theories, the graphic depictions of [thesis content], the lived realities of [thesis participants] than is presented in these short, final paragraphs. This was a profound disappointment and I can only presume that the author ran out of time or energy. This deficiency might be redressed in the final version.” (Professor X p7)	While phrased more generously, the other examiners agreed: “The thesis concludes with a short chapter that briefly summarises [xxx], reiterates the central argument, and sketches some preliminary ideas for future research.” (Dr Z p4) “[The student] might well want, in any future revision, to expand and amplify the thoughts indexed in their concluding chapter.” (Professor Y)	This critique was shared across all reports and is likely to come up in oral exam. I agree with examiners that my Conclusion was too short. It was not a matter of running out of time or energy, though—just running out of word limit. I think there’s a way to acknowledge this shortcoming of the thesis towards the end of my opening 15-minute presentation, and to do it in a way that explains this shortcoming as an unfortunate by-product of what examiners appreciated as the strengths of the thesis: all of the rich detail in the substantive chapters meant that the thesis was at the maximum word limit. In terms of practical steps to address what we all agree was a shortcoming in the thesis: prior to the oral, I will gain clarity from FGR on whether the revised, final (post-exam) thesis can exceed the 100,00 word limit – if so, I will readily offer to expand the Conclusion. If not, I will explain the word constraints to examiners and seek their advice on parts of the thesis they think could be sacrificed to make space for an expanded Conclusion.

Once you’ve got a draft of this spreadsheet, circulate it to your supervisors in advance of your preparing-for-the-oral-exam meeting. When you meet, supervisors can help you go through the list and provide additional guidance on ways to approach responses to critiques in the oral.

Note that this table is a tool for you to help make sense of the examiners’ reports and prepare in the lead up to the oral exam. More about how to use this table is at the end of the next section.

The oral exam

Your opening 15-minute presentation

At the start of the oral exam, after the chair has welcomed everyone and discussed the general process, you will be invited to make your opening remarks (at our university, these are usually limited to fifteen minutes). In your opening remarks, what you want to do is: 1) thank the examiners for their careful consideration, 2) tell them the story of your thesis (how it came to be what it is, what it accomplishes, and why it matters), and then 3) end by explicitly welcoming the ensuing discussion and questions as a valuable opportunity to improve your work.

Discussing each of these, in turn:

First, re-read the opening lines of “Approaching examiners’ reports…”, above. Gratitude should be the opening note you sound in the oral exam. You will never again in your life have this many people focused solely on you and your work (even if you write a book, you’ll just get peer review reports—not the additional benefit of getting to talk to those people for 2–3 hours about your work in person and explain why you wrote what you wrote). Even if you disagree with some of their comments/critiques; even if you think one or two of them don’t “get” your work, express gratitude for their careful consideration of your work—they really do intend well (in my experience).

Second, I usually advise students to think of this opening presentation as a chance to tell the story of your thesis. Of course you will want to ensure clear statements about the thesis’s key arguments and original contributions to knowledge, and especially why it matters, but this is also a chance to contextualise the thesis. This is a chance to narrate why and how the work they’ve all read came to be what it is. It’s quite common for examiners to simply be curious about some things that may not be explained in the thesis: they’ll have questions about certain decisions you made to zig instead of zag, why you went here and not there, or how you ended up in this research area in the first place.

Of course, there are endlessly different ways to tell a story, including the story of your thesis. Take your cue for what parts to emphasise by what’s in the reports. For example:

If a common question or critique emerged across the examiners’ reports about an aspect of the thesis (for instance something in the research design: where you went, who you talked to, how you talked to them, what theoretical concept was centred, what archives you consulted; or some key consideration that they thought was missing; or even why the thesis was structured like it was), and you can work an explanation of this into “the story of your thesis,” do it! I’ve seen examiners’ concerns about something melt away when they hear the backstory of why the student chose to do it like they did. Just hearing that the decisions were carefully considered and that the student had good reasoning behind them can sometimes appease examiners, such that things they raised as big concerns in their reports are no longer concerns (or even mentioned) in the recommendations for final revisions.
Sometimes, if it’s not clear in the thesis, examiners will want to know more about you and how you came to do this research (at least in my field of Pacific Studies, people’s personal stakes in the work usually matter). I recall two of my past PhD students who both produced theoretically nuanced, ethnographically rich, and immaculately written theses, but both chose, for various reasons, to give minimal details about themselves in their theses. In both cases, multiple examiners came back asking them for more discussion of their relationship to the research topic. Partially this was about ethically disclosing their positionality, but partially it was also curiosity: how did someone who appears, on the surface, to be so different from this research context come to be studying this specific thing? So when one of these students crafted his opening presentation, he devoted some time to telling his coming-to-the-thesis backstory (aspects of which I’d never even heard, as his supervisor) and examiners seemed delighted to hear it: it was like, Ahhh, I get it now! And in the end, they didn’t even ask him to add any of that extra biographical detail into the final thesis—they were just curious and wanted to know.
In contrast to #2 just above, many of my other supervisees include quite a lot about their personal biography and relationship to the research in their theses (I’ve had at least two that incorporate auto-ethnography as a specific method). In these cases, examiners probably aren’t going to ask for more about you and your relationship to the project, but they will be curious about other aspects of how the thesis came to be what it is. Look for questions in the reports that you might be able to address (in a positive, implicit, way) in your opening narration of why and how the thesis came to be what it is.

The important thing in this opening 15-minute presentation is to keep the focus on what you did do in the thesis. The most effective opening presentations tell that story of what the thesis did accomplish, and why and how it came to be in the form it is, in a way that implicitly answers some of the examiners’ questions. Narrating the decisions you made, and why, will implicitly explain why you chose not to research or write the thesis in another way. Where relevant, feel free to lightly work in explicit acknowledgement of things the examiners said they liked into this story (c.f. Row 1 Column 3 of the spreadsheet above, where it says “Given its importance, I was gratified by Professor Y’s and Dr Z’s commendations of how the thesis introduces and uses the concept.”)

You can weave more explicit mentions of examiners’ critiques into your opening presentation as well, but keep the main thrust of your presentation to the positive work you did, and see if there’s ways to frame (what examiners’ identified as) shortcomings or gaps in the thesis as by-products of some of its strengths, or the result of decisions that were well-considered and necessary. For instance, see Row 3 Column 3 in the example spreadsheet table above: in that example, all of the examiners (and the student) agreed that the thesis conclusion was too short. The student’s opening presentation foregrounded the rich, original contributions made in the thesis’s substantive chapters and thanked examiners for their commendations of those chapters (e.g. leading with the positive story of what the thesis did do well), and then acknowledged that the rich substantive chapters strained the word limit and regrettably left little space for a Conclusion.

I strongly advise rehearsing your opening presentation with supervisors to get both substance and tone right. What you don’t want to do in this 15 minutes is foreground examiners’ critiques first and then respond to them point-by-point with an explanation. It’s common for students to think that’s what they should do in their oral exam or oral defence presentation, but don’t do that: it sounds defensive and sets a combative tone for the oral exam. (So don’t go down your spreadsheet point-by-point! That spreadsheet was to help you process the reports and plan effective responses).

Finally, be sure to end your presentation by explicitly welcoming the ensuing discussion and questions as a valuable opportunity to improve your work. This last bit is key: by inviting their critiques, you actually retain more power in this situation. Examiners will visibly relax and feel more comfortable about raising questions, and the tone is more likely to feel like an engaged scholarly conversation rather than an inquisition. That’s what you want. 🙂

Some final reflection on examiners

You may be wondering, how the heck did these people come to sit in the seat of judgement on my work?

Examiners are ultimately nominated by supervisors. Your supervisors usually consult each other and will have varying degrees of responsibility for the final examiners. I can’t speak for all supervisors, but everyone I’ve ever co-supervised with has sought the same qualities in examiners: people with some expertise relevant to the thesis who will be rigourous and kind. We want them to hold students to a high standard and help ensure that the student’s final published thesis can withstand scholarly scrutiny anywhere, but we also hope that their criticisms will be voiced in a generous and supportive way. In Pacific Studies we’ve been fortunate to have many rigourous and kind examiners over the years, but occasionally we’ll see an examination report that surprises us.

Pacific Studies is a pretty small field (big ocean, tiny field), so we often know the “Pacific Studies” examiners personally and have expectations of what kind of examiner they will be. However, sometimes a colleague we think we know well surprises us when they put their “examiner hat” on. At other times, the student’s topic or the unavailability of people we initially ask necessitates that we get an examiner who supervisors don’t know personally and/or don’t have a sense of as an examiner—in these cases we always hold our breath a bit and hope that they turn out to be great, rigourous, kind examiners.

So, if the ideal type of examiner (and, I assure you, the vast majority of past examiners of PASI theses are this way) is rigourous, engaged deeply with the thesis, and able to relay comments and critique in a kind and generous (but firm) manner…what are the other types? Here’s some characters I’ve encountered:

The off-in-some-other-field examiner: this is the “one of these things is not like the others” examiner—their report bears little relationship to the other two, and in your (and your supervisors’) opinion bears little relationship to your work. Parts of their report might seem downright wacky, like huh? What the…?

If this person is the overseas examiner, YAY! This is the best case scenario for an oddball examiner because the overseas examiner does not attend the exam and the examiners who are there (internal and NZ examiner) have discretion over how they incorporate the overseas examiners’ questions and whether to include any of the overseas examiner’s requests into the final required revisions. If the overseas examiner’s report was really wacky, trust that everyone present at your exam (the internal and NZ examiners, the chair, your supervisors) are aware of it. They will have to be diplomatic and professional in their comments about it, but they know. The examiners who are present will still have to pose some of the overseas examiner’s questions (they are required to), so do your best to remain poised and professional also as you generously and diplomatically address the irrelevance of the overseas examiner’s questions to the work you did.
If this person is the internal examiner, take a deep breath and know that you will get through this. The internal examiner wields a greater amount of power over the very last stage of the thesis process because they are usually the person responsible for overseeing and approving the final (post-exam) revisions (your revised thesis will not go back out to the overseas and NZ examiner). Again, remain poised, professional, and diplomatic in the exam, and be prepared to do whatever is the minimum required to appease this person if their requests get included in your final required revisions. For instance, they might want you to include a new section that the other examiners (and you, and your supervisors) think is totally unnecessary, but they’ve managed to get this included in the list of required revisions. Unfortunately, you’ve just got to suck it up and do enough to satisfy them. Remember, the thesis is a means to an end goal (your PhD). If oddball examiner is gonna throw up this one last hurdle for you at the end of your marathon, take a deep breath and do what you need to do to get yourself over it.
If this person is the NZ examiner, be professional, poised, and diplomatic when responding to their comments in the exam. See what, if any, of their odd requests get included in the final required revisions. If some of them do get included, you will need to do something to show the internal examiner that you diligently attended to their requests, but you may not need to do as much as you would if the oddball requests were coming from the internal examiner themself.

The I-actually-think-this-thesis-is-really-good-but-I’m-having-a-bad-day (or) I-actually-think-this-thesis-is-really-good-but-I’m-just-too-tired-to-write-kindly examiner. This is the examiner that buries some stinging little comments in a report that otherwise mostly contains praise for the thesis (see Professor X in the example spreadsheet, above). Developing a spreadsheet (as advised above) will help put this examiner’s comments in perspective. Try your best to look past their little barbs: those ouchy bits may not be representative of examiners’ comments as a whole, and (funnily enough) they may not even accurately represent this particular examiner’s overall estimation of your thesis. I’ve encountered variations of this type of examiner several times: students dwell on the stinging critiques in the report and assume the examiner hates their thesis, and then are shocked when the same examiner sums up the thesis as excellent and is totally pleasant and encouraging in the actual exam. Sometimes people are tired, or annoyed about something when they write their reports, and things come out more harshly than they intend or realize. Or, due to time pressure, they had to send the first draft of their report rather than the draft they would’ve sent if they had time to sleep on it, go back in, and soften their language. Focus on crafting well-considered responses to the useful and productive elements of examiners’ critiques, and try not to focus on the stinging or ungenerous ways the critiques may have been delivered.

The Your-thesis-makes-me-think-about-all-these-things-I’m-interested-in-in-my own-work-that-I’m-about-to-tell-you-about examiner. This type seems to be less interested in engaging your work on its own terms and discussing what your thesis actually did, and rather more interested in using your work as a jumping off point to talk about their own scholarly interests. There’s a couple variations of this type:

The easier-to-handle variation will talk a lot about their own research interests in their report, and want to talk more about them in the oral exam, but will not insist that you do a lot of revisions to make your final thesis more like their work. This type might be annoying (if you are actually wanting them to focus on your thesis for two hours), but they are ultimately benign because they aren’t going to put up additional hurdles at the end of your marathon. In some ways, this type of examiner’s response is a form of flattery: they are reading your work like they might read an exciting new book in their field, and it’s sparking off all these ideas for their own work that they are keen to talk about. They are treating this examination as a chance to have a stimulating scholarly conversation. Be diplomatic and pleasant, engage with them, gently guide the conversation back to your thesis in your responses if you need to, and trust the chair to do this as well.
The more difficult version of this is an examiner who then insists on revisions that will align your thesis more with the project they would’ve done, or are doing, rather than respecting your thesis on its own terms. The extent of the challenge this examiner poses may depend on whether this person is the overseas, NZ, or internal examiner. See points 1, 2, and 3 from the off-in-some-other-field examiner above.

The This-is-my-first-examiner’s role-and-I-think-I’m-supposed-to-treat-the-thesis-like-the-articles-we-savaged-in-my-graduate-seminars examiner. This person may think their job is to be a finely-honed machine for dispensing incisive, exhaustive critique that tears apart what someone else has built, rather than approaching examination as an opportunity to support and strengthen another person’s scholarship. Many competitive graduate programmes in the US, for instance, foster an ethos where tearing apart someone else’s work is equated with competence. If an examiner has only recently emerged from that type of environment, and not yet had a lot of experience publishing their work and supervising postgrads (both of which tend to make you a bit more generous towards imperfect texts, I think), they may think that “doing a good job” means being as relentlessly critical as possible. This is enough of a “thing” that some supervisors deliberately avoid asking very junior academics to serve as examiners. But sometimes the niche subject matter of the thesis, combined with the unavailability of the one or two more senior scholars with relevant expertise, means that your supervisors do approach a first-time examiner and hope for the best. If you do receive a report that offers unrelenting critique of all the thesis’s faults without attentiveness also to its strengths, it may just be that the examiner mistakenly thinks this is what is expected of them. Your supervisors (and the middle column of the table strategy I suggest above) can help you to keep some perspective on this report.

I’m sure there are other less-than-ideal types out there, but these are the ones I’ve encountered. But as I said before, by far the vast majority of examiners I’ve experienced are the kind we hope for: rigourous but kind, deeply engaged in the work of the thesis, and intent on helping you make the final published thesis as strong as it can be.

Best wishes for your preparation!

Dr. April K Henderson
Pacific Studies
Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington

Ethnographic writing intensive: Five activities for the fieldwork-to-writing transition

Recently I have been thinking about how I learnt to transition from fieldwork to writing. Like many graduate students, mid-way through my thesis research I found myself with a stack of notebooks and detailed fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and hundreds of photos (among other things), but I wasn’t sure how to transform this material into ethnographic writing. The shift from gathering data to crafting compelling stories requires a different set of skills that aren’t always explicitly taught in methods courses.

Over the years, as I have supervised graduate students and taught courses on ethnographic methods, I have noticed others struggling with this fieldwork-to-writing transition. In this post I share five activities I have developed to help with that transition. The activities are modelled after the best writing course I have ever done (“Unstuck: The Art of Productivity” with Kel Weinhold from The Professor Is In) and draw on prompts in Kirin Narayan’s excellent book Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012) as well as my lecture notes from courses I have taught (including ANTH 312 Creative Ethnographic Practices).

These activities form an ethnographic writing intensive designed to strengthen your ethnographic writing practice. They address common challenges I see students facing: how to separate your thoughts from your writing; how to structure a piece of work; how to start with participant perspectives, how to write yourself into the narrative, how to write an ethnographic story.

Activity One: Investigate your thoughts with The Professor Is In

I recommend starting here, with a blog post by writing coach Kel Weinhold from The Professor Is In, because I have found it helpful in dealing with negative thoughts (hello imposter syndrome, my old friend!) in my own writing. This approach has helped me separate my thoughts from my writing process.

Tasks:

Read this blog post: https://theprofessorisin.com/2022/06/07/just-one-thing-investigate-your-thoughts/
The blog post suggests that writers sometimes have thoughts that feel completely true but actually interfere with making progress. As Kel writes, “The issue is not whether or not we have unhelpful thoughts; the issue is what we do with thoughts” (Weinhold, 2022)
See if any of the examples in the post resonate with your own writing experiences
If so, work through the investigative process in Kel’s blog post

Reflective question:

What, if anything, did you find useful in this approach that you might carry forward in your own writing practice?

Activity Two: Reverse outline a model piece of writing

I first learnt about reverse outlines through “Unstuck” and since then have recommended doing them to just about all of my graduate students.

For this activity, you are going to create a reverse outline of a model of the kind of writing you are currently working on (e.g. a MA thesis chapter, a journal article). This is a technique I regularly use myself. Usually people create reverse outlines of their own work, but I like to do it with examples of other peoples’ work so I can get a feel for how the piece of writing is structured and what each paragraph does for their argument and overall flow of the writing.

Tasks:

Read this blog post on reverse outlines: https://writing.wisc.edu/handbook/reverseoutlines/
Read another blog post on reverse outlines: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/the_writing_process/reverse_outlining.html
Choose a model piece of writing to work with (e.g. a chapter from a thesis your supervisor recommends, or an article from the journal you want to write for)
Sit down and read the piece from start to finish. Just read it; don’t take notes or do any highlighting
Read the piece again with a pen. Number each paragraph as you re-read
On a fresh piece of paper, write down the number of each paragraph and a sentence or phrase that describes what the author is accomplishing in that paragraph (e.g. this paragraph introduces and defines key concepts; explains the purpose of the chapter; lists the central research questions; situates the chapter in relation to other literature; etc)
Optional: add a star next to the paragraph numbers that you think are doing especially important work, or that you particularly like
Then, look at a draft you are currently working on to see where you might use elements of the model piece in your own work (e.g. ‘I need to have a paragraph that explains how this chapter contributes to my overall thesis argument’)

Reflective question:

What was useful about this activity? Might you use the reverse outline process on your own writing?

Activity Three: Starting on the ground

“The term “ethnography” has its roots in the Greek words ethnos (folk, the people) and grapho (to write). Ethnography is to write about people, society, and/or culture, but it is much more than writing. It is also a method and a theory. As a method, ethnography is an embodied, empirical, and experiential field-based way of knowing centered around participant observation. Ethnographic research requires participation, not just observation. It is to participate in rather than just observe the daily life, logics, rhythms, and contradictions of a cultural group or society. As such, it requires discipline and commitment beyond what is visible to someone not trained in ethnographic methods. As a theory, ethnography is to start on the ground, with the concepts that ground people’s lives, worldviews, actions, and words in particular ways to that community.”

McGranahan, Carole. 2018. “Ethnography.” In The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by H. Callan, Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118924396.wbiea2262

This activity takes its cue from the first lecture I give in my Creative Ethnographic Practices class. In it, I discuss Carole McGranahan’s point that theory, in ethnography, means to start “on the ground”, with what your participants have to say. Rather than starting with theories developed by others, ethnographic writing tends to ask: what’s going on here? What are my participants telling me about how their world works?

Tasks:

Choose a paragraph from a draft you are working on
What does the paragraph start with? If it starts with someone else’s theory, can you see a way to rewrite it so your participant’s words and explanations guide your analysis?
Note that not every single paragraph needs to do this; the activity prompts you to show how you are building understanding inductively, starting “on the ground” with what your participants said

Reflective question:

What did you notice about the difference between starting with other people’s theories versus starting with participant explanations? How might this approach change the way you build arguments in your writing?

Activity Four: Writing yourself into the text

This activity is drawn from two sources. The first is a lecture I give on autoethnography (a methodology many of our students are drawn to), where I discuss Leon Anderson’s argument that analytic autoethnography requires “narrative visibility of the researcher’s self” (2006, 378).[1] Autoethnographic writing requires you to be visible as a researcher while being in conversation with your participants. Ethnographic writing, too, often includes the presence of the researcher to show how their knowledge was produced. Since dialogue can be a generative way of illustrating key insights from your research while showing the relational nature of knowledge-production, the second source I have drawn on is Kirin Narayan’s chapter “Voice” from Alive in the Writing. This chapter has an excellent discussion of how to “build texts from conversations” (page 69 Kindle edition), and in my course on Creative Ethnographic Methods I ended each lecture with in-class writing prompts (like the ones below) based on Narayan’s work.

[1] Anderson, Leon. 2006. “Analytic Autoethnography.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 35 (4): 373–95.

Tasks:

Read “Chapter Four: Voice” from Narayan’s Alive in the Writing
Writing activity 1: Locate a quote from one of your participants on the issue you’re writing about and experiment with working just a line or two into an introduction (adapted from the prompt on page 73)
Writing activity 2: Write an extended conversation in which one of your participants explains a concept to you. Include your questions in the dialogue (adapted from the prompt on page 75)
Writing activity 3: Revisit one of your interview transcriptions, using different colour pens to highlight (a) the main questions you asked, (b) your subsidiary questions, and (c) your participant’s answers (adapted from the prompt on page 77)
Writing activity 4: Draw on the interview transcript you looked at for the previous activity to create a 2-page dialogue between you and a participant that reveals information or insights central to your project. Pay attention to the textures, cadences, and intonations of voices, including your own (adapted from the prompt on page 92)

Reflective question:

After experimenting with these different ways of writing yourself in to your work via dialogue, what did you notice about how the presence of your questions and responses changes the way insights emerge in your writing? How might dialogue work differently than summary or analysis for revealing what you learned in interviews?

Activity Five: Ethnographic storytelling

“Focusing on stories that have been co-created enables me to work on the ethnographic narrative and its process of coming into life through storytelling. In starting with the creation of ethnographic stories and story lines I am following an argument by Soyini D. Madison; she has criticised the tendency to avoid transparency in oneʼs own ethnographic storytelling techniques by hiding behind the writing of others and showing off (with the theory of others) in order to give more weight to oneʼs own ethnography while hiding possible flaws. She observes that rather than taking guidance from and trusting the stories, instead “the researcher becomes so enamored with […] impressing colleagues that honoring the narrative becomes less important than acrobatics of abstraction and theoretical word play” (Madison 2014, 394)”.

Bönisch-Brednich, Brigitte. 2018. “Writing the Ethnographic Story: Constructing Narrative Out of Narratives.” Fabula 59 (1-2): 8–26. Page 12.

This activity is based on a lecture I give on ethnographic storytelling. I begin that lecture by talking about a blog post Carole McGranahan wrote in 2015, where she writes: “What is defective is how we miss the power of stories and storytellers even as well tell them. We tell stories to get to the point, to make our points. We miss that the stories are the point” (my emphasis added). McGranahan puts forward an argument similar to the one that Madison makes in the quote from Bönisch-Brednich’s article cited above (which I also discuss in that lecture): that we use our participant’s voices to make our own theoretical arguments (often drawing on the theory of others) rather than letting their stories carry the weight of ethnographic insight.

Tasks:

Choose a story that one of your participants shared with you that you found especially memorable (perhaps one you are working with in a current piece of writing). You will work with this story in three ways
Writing activity 1: write the story as if you are reporting it for a newspaper, using the journalistic who-what-when-where-why-how questions and describing the basic sequence of events
Writing activity 2: write the story as your participant might (see the ethnographic vignette that Bönisch-Brednich shares on pages 12-13 of her article for an example)
Writing activity 3: Following Bönisch-Brednich’s article or McGranahan’s blog post, write the story for your draft, discussing what it shows about broader patterns in your research and connecting it with relevant theory. This is how it becomes ethnographic storytelling

Reflective question:

After writing the same story three different ways, what did you notice about how each approach revealed different aspects of the experience? How did writing activity 3 differ from simply adding analysis to writing activity 1?

I designed these activities with individual work in mind, but they might also be useful starting points for a ‘shut up and write‘ session with peers. If you try one or more of them, please let me know your thoughts in the comments – I would love to hear from you!

Developing a ‘Cultural Anthropology Pathways Explorer’ for a university Open Day

If you work at a university, you’ll know that Open Days are an important recruitment event. Universities here in Aotearoa are facing increasing financial challenges (a result of neoliberal higher education policies, years of government underfunding, and recent changes to the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund that saw funding removed for humanities and social sciences), and all staff are expected to contribute to Open Day in some way. This year, we were asked to create interactive activities for prospective students and their parents to draw them to our Expo Stand. After learning that we would have access to a button badge making machine for Open Day, I decided to see if I could create a ‘pick-a-path’-style tool to answer the questions we are most frequently asked: what is anthropology, and what kind of career path does it lead to? I envisioned a web-based tool that would provide people with a scenario based on the kind of research that my colleagues and I do, give them some options to choose from, and then have an ‘outcome’ page with an anthropology pathway that they could then turn into a badge. This post describes how I developed that interactive tool.

(If you want to skip ahead to see the interactive tool about Cultural Anthropology at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, please visit: https://lorenagibson.github.io/ANTH/)

Developing the tool with Claude AI

I don’t have the technical skills to build an interactive tool, so my first step was to ask Claude AI whether it could build a pick-a-path web app to guide students through our cultural anthropology pathways. Of course it could:

A pick-a-path app for Cultural Anthropology is a fantastic idea! It’s definitely doable and would be perfect for engaging high schoolers who learn best through interactive experiences. Here’s how you could structure it:

The Core Concept: “What Would an Anthropologist Do?” – Students face real-world scenarios and make choices that reveal different anthropological approaches and career paths.

Sample Pathways:

Urban Explorer: Click if interested in cities → scenarios about studying street art cultures, food truck communities, or gentrification patterns

Digital Native: Click if interested in technology → paths exploring online gaming communities, social media rituals, or digital activism

Global Citizen: Click if interested in travel → scenarios about documenting disappearing languages, studying migration patterns, or working with indigenous communities

Social Justice Advocate: Click if interested in equity → paths through medical anthropology, educational inequality research, or corporate culture analysis

Interactive Elements:

Photo/video snippets from real fieldwork

“Field Notes” mini-games where they observe and interpret cultural practices

Quick polls: “What would you investigate first?” with branching outcomes

Meet-the-anthropologist video clips triggered by their choices

Technical Feasibility: Very manageable! You could build this as a simple web app using tools like Twine (designed for interactive stories) or even a basic HTML/JavaScript setup. No complex programming needed.

Engagement Hooks: End each path with “Your anthropological superpower is…” and connect to specific courses or faculty research areas.

Want me to help you map out the decision tree structure or create a prototype?

(Claude Sonnet 4 response)

I asked Claude AI to create a decision tree structure and a prototype so I could see what it might look like. I ran the idea by my colleagues (who were all happy for me to experiment with this), arranged to have an iPad as well as the button badge machine at our booth, and set to work on revising the decision tree structure and writing my own content.

Designing the content

I am somewhat unusual among my colleagues in that I enjoy creating communications materials about cultural anthropology. (Yes I know that makes me susceptible to the ‘busywork’ that academics are increasingly asked to do.) Cultural anthropology is not taught as a subject at many secondary schools in Aotearoa, so it can be challenging for us to entice students into taking our courses at Open Day when we also need to explain what it is in the first place. In 2023 I created a new Cultural Anthropology flyer for Open Day that explains what cultural anthropology is, lists New Zealand secondary school subjects that are suited to it (which I developed by trawling the New Zealand Qualification Authority’s list of subjects and learning areas), lists a number of workplaces that our graduates have gone on to have successful careers at, and groups our courses into pathways so they are legible to students planning their degrees. You can check out our 2025 flyer here:

Cultural Anthropology 2025 Open Day flyer

We’ve received a lot of positive feedback on our flyer, especially the careers section, and I wanted to use these pathways as the foundation for a pick-a-path style interactive tool.

The first design decision was the main entry question. It needed to communicate what cultural anthropology is (the study of humanity) and why we are drawn to it (we’re fascinated by people). I found this one easy: What fascinates you most about people?

Next, I created a list of possible career paths that people could follow with a degree in cultural Anthropology. I read Career Tools for Anthropology: An Anthropology Career Readiness Network Workbook (edited by Jennifer Studebaker, Elizabeth K. Briody, Zahra Malik, and Riall W. Nolan) – which I highly recommend – and the ‘careers’ sections of various anthropology association websites to expand my initial list. This information would appear on the ‘outcome’ pages I wanted, along with recommended courses.

After that, I worked on what the outcomes would be. Claude AI’s initial decision tree had four pathways each with three choices and 12 outcomes, but that was too many for me to create so I decided that our five pathways would each have two choices and only 10 outcomes. Looking at the list of courses associated with each pathway, and thinking about my colleagues’ areas of research expertise, I came up with 15 possible outcomes, ran them past a colleague (thanks Eli!), and settled on the final 10 that appear in the interactive tool.

The most challenging aspect involved creating scenarios and choices for each of our five pathways. The scenarios needed to speak to the courses associated with each pathway, and I wanted to ground them in the research that my colleague and I do so that we could talk about it further with students on Open Day. Each scenario would end with a question (“what do you do?”) followed by two choices, which needed to clearly lead to different outcomes. Here I sought feedback from Claude AI on my scenarios, sharing what I wrote and prompting Claude AI to check for clarity, accessibility (for a target audience of 17 year olds), and alignment with each pathway and its intended outcomes.

I started with the Science, Technology and Innovation pathway, which was a new addition for 2025. I wrote an initial scenario loosely based on my newest colleague Sumin Myung‘s research and shared that, along with the descriptions for our courses on STS and design anthropology, with Claude AI, which responded with:

Science, Technology, and Innovation Scenario: You’re studying South Korea’s celebrated forest regeneration projects, where scientists have transformed landscapes devastated by colonialism and war into thriving forests. But you discover that different groups tell very different stories about these “anthropogenic forests.” Government officials celebrate them as triumphs of national resilience and scientific progress. Forest scientists are developing new methods to help forests adapt to climate change, seeing themselves as “climate sentinels” monitoring environmental threats. However, some communities remember different histories – traditional forest practices disrupted by colonial forestry, or question whether these scientifically-managed forests truly represent ecological recovery. How do you want to approach understanding these different perspectives?

Two potential outcomes:

Focus on how scientific knowledge and practices shape environmental policy → Science and Technology Studies/Environmental Anthropology

Focus on how different groups understand progress, tradition, and environmental futures → Applied Anthropology/Development Studies

This captures:

The scientific/technological intervention (reforestation science)

Multiple stakeholder perspectives (scientists, government, communities)

Historical/political dimensions (colonial legacies, nationalism)

Innovation aspects (climate adaptation, new scientific methods)

Real anthropological questions about knowledge, power, and environmental futures

Does this direction work for your Science, Technology, and Innovation pathway?

(Claude Sonnet 4 response)

Claude AI’s feedback helped me see where my fictionalised scenarios were overly complicated and wordy, and once I shared the specific outcomes I had created for each pathway (here ‘Science and Technology Studies (STS) Anthropology’ and ‘Design Anthropology’), I realised it was especially useful for developing the two choices that would accompany each scenario. I revised the scenario, told Claude AI what the two choices needed to lead to, and prompted it to develop the choices. I edited and refined the choices and worked with Claude AI in a similar iterative manner to develop the outcome descriptions for each choice. Once I worked out the right prompts to use, I was able to develop the remaining four scenarios (always starting with my own writing), choices, and outcome descriptions within a couple of hours.

Building the interactive tool and badges

I saved the decision tree as a Word document and uploaded it to Claude AI with the prompt: can you build an interactive web app with this decision tree? It could, and did. Within minutes I had prototype to test, which immediately showed me that I needed to include more specific instructions about our university’s branding (colours, fonts) and how to lay out the tool. Again these changes were implemented quickly and I was able to send the prototype to my colleagues and web designer sister (thanks Corinne!) for their feedback.

I used Canva to design the 10 button badges, each with a pathway outcome (e.g. ‘Development Anthropology’), and again in consultation with colleagues. Graphic design is not my forte so both the button badges and the interactive tool are what I like to call “minimalist” but they did the job.

One hiccup occurred when I tested the interactive tool on the university’s iPad. I had originally planned to use the tool as a published artifact on Claude AI, but I was unable to open it using the iPad’s web browser. Instead, I downloaded the html file from Claude AI and set up the tool on GitHub (which, fortunately, was very easy to learn how to use).

Open Day Experiences

Open Day this year attracted a record number of prospective students so we had a good number of people try out the interactive tool. Those who used it said it was very useful and informative, and I was surprised to see several people pull out their phones to take photographs of the outcome pages they landed on. The button badges were a hit (although my plainer designs were not as popular as the ones made by the marketing team) and we had distributed all 500 by midday.

One issue I noticed was that there was too much text on the scenario and outcome pages for people to read at Open Day, when they are surrounded by people and noise and other visual elements all competing for their attention. I think the interactive tool will work better on a university web page, where people can spend time thinking about the scenarios and trying out different choices. We might also continue to develop it so that it has images and more interactive elements. If you’d like to check it out, please visit: https://lorenagibson.github.io/ANTH/

Using GenAI to think critically about grading in a Cultural Anthropology class

In 2019, my friend and colleague Grant Otsuki started experimenting with Generative AI (GenAI) – GPT-2 by OpenAI – to see how well it did at writing an essay for a first year Cultural Anthropology class he taught. As he wrote in a 2020 article for The Conversation, he trained GPT-2 on actual essays his students had written in response to the essay prompt, then worked with it to generate its own essay. I remember reading the work generated by GPT-2 and thinking that although I wouldn’t have awarded it a passing grade (for reasons Grant writes about in his 2020 article), it had potential and that a student could have turned it into a C-grade essay in less than 10 minutes. I also remember thinking that if Grant hadn’t told me it was generated by GPT-2, I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell that it hadn’t been written by a student.

It is no exaggeration to say that GenAI technology and use has exploded since Grant wrote his article, where he argued that we should be teaching students how to work with GenAI tools rather than ignore or try to ban them. Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington, where I work, recently developed a policy on Student use of artificial intelligence tools to help write assignments that directs students to check in with their instructors about whether they can use GenAI:

Take time to understand expectations around the use of AI

Expectations may vary from course to course or even from assignment to assignment. This may include rules around how you can or can’t use AI, and what kinds of AI it is acceptable to use. For example, it might be ok to use translation software, but not generative AI like Chat GPT. Your course coordinators should make it clear when you can and cannot use AI and if there are any limitations on how you use it. If you’re not sure, just ask.
(https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/students/study/exams/academic-integrity/student-use-of-artificial-intelligence, accessed 24 November 2024)

This policy offers teaching staff a lot of flexibility and accommodates people like me, who want to bring GenAI into our classrooms so students can learn how to use it while discussing some of the concerns around its use (including its environmental impact and the looming issue of reliable information only being available to those who can afford it).

Class activity: Grade a mini-essay generated by ChatGPT

Earlier this year, I decided to adapt Grant’s activity for my undergraduate course Anthropology, Education, and Social Change. The first assignment for that course asked students to write two mini-essays of 500-600 words about different concepts and/or theories that were discussed in lectures and assigned reading material. I asked ChatGPT (version 2, by OpenAI) to generate a 500-word mini-essay on the topic of “grades” for a course on anthropology of education, that drew on and cited Susan Blum’s book “I Love Learning; I hate School” An Anthropology of College, which we read and discussed in class. I also asked ChatGPT to adhere to the assignment instructions (below) and spent a bit of time editing the mini-essay it generated.

ANTH215_MiniEssayInformation Download

In Week 4 of our course, I brought printed copies of the mini-essay that ChatGPT generated to class and asked students to read it and assign it a grade using the marking guide for this assignment. I had two goals in mind with this activity: 1) to encourage students to think critically about GenAI use in the classroom; and 2) to encourage students to engage with the marking criteria that I was going to use to assess their work.

We began the activity by discussing the following:

how they can use GenAI in my class (e.g. to refine their ideas or fix errors with spelling, grammar, and referencing)
the University’s policy on using AI to help write assignments
the limitations of using GenAI (e.g. hallucinations)
some of the ethical, environmental, and privacy considerations involved in working with GenAI
how to acknowledge their use of GenAI by including an Acknowledgement Statement at the start of their work (our Library provides information about how to cite AI use)

After that, I handed out Chat-GPT’s essay (below) and asked students to give it marks and written feedback. They had the option of doing this individually or in pairs/small groups, and I invited them to share their marks and feedback to our class Miro board.

Mini Essay class exercise Download

After about half an hour to mark the mini-essay, we shared our marks and comments with one another. The students – who, for the most part, failed the mini-essay with very critical feedback – were surprised to learn that I had given it a C- grade, which prompted a constructive conversation about the kinds of grading-related issues that Blum writes about in her book and that we had discussed in earlier lectures. It also provided a good entry point for me to discuss why and how I had designed their second assignment using task-based grading (the term I now use to describe my version of labour-based grading). Finally, several students said that they appreciated the opportunity to grade an assignment like this because it helped them better understand the marking criteria.

This activity achieved my goals and I was pleased to see students acknowledging and citing their use of GenAI in later assignments. I also noticed a slightly higher grade distribution for Assignment 1 compared with the previous year. While this approached worked well in my classroom, I know there are many other innovative and meaningful ways to integrate GenAI tools into teaching and assessment practices. If you are working in this space, I am keen to hear about your experiences!

Drawing with Lynda Barry’s “Syllabus” in a creative ethnographic practices class

A few years ago, my friend Caroline Bennett gave me Lynda Barry’s 2014 book Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor and this term I decided to use some of Barry’s creative drawing and writing prompts in the Creative Ethnographic Practices class I’m teaching at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington.

Cover page of Lynda Barry’s 2014 book “Syllabus: Notes from an accidental professor.”

As I wrote in a previous blog post, in this class I guide students through the process of crafting their own independent ethnographic research projects. Along the way, we discuss how to generate, analyse, and present our ethnographic findings in a variety of creative methods and genres, and Week 9 is about graphic ethnography. In that week’s class I adapted some of the exercises from Barry’s book and invited the class to bring some pens, pencils, and paper to class so we could draw together to think about their data and their final research projects. I am not someone who draws (although I will happily join my kids to do some colouring with them) and was apprehensive about how it would go. To my delight, students embraced the activity and many commented on how useful it was in their weekly reflective research journals, prompting me to share the activity here.

“But I can’t draw!”

Keenly aware of my own hesitancies about drawing, I began the session with a quote from Mark Westmoreland’s 2021 chapter “Graphic anthropology: A foundation for multimodality”:

“When it comes to drawing as a serious activity – as an ethnographic method, for instance – many feel they lack the expertise to perform such a task. In classroom settings, the announcement of a drawing exercise typically provokes a reaction ranging from the defensive “But I can’t draw!” to the confessional “I don’t know how to draw!” Beginning from this place of not knowing, unskilled and uncertain, says less about our innate abilities than it does about the pervasive undervaluing of drawing in our educational systems. But we should not be deterred; as Betty Edwards famously proclaimed, “I have discovered that any person of sound mind can learn to draw; the probability is the same as for learning to read” (2012, 43). While drawing is a favourite pastime for young children, who exhibit a “beguiling freedom and charm” in their depictions, around the age of ten “children confront an artistic crisis” as they become obsessed with producing realistic drawing (Edwards 2012, 66, 64). Without training to cultivate these skills, they become discouraged and possibly ashamed.”

– Westmoreland 2021, 61

After discussing Westmoreland’s article for a short time, I introduced Lynda Barry’s work and we began the activity I adapted from her book (pages 76-81 and 124).

Step 1. Draw a spiral

You will need: something to draw on, and something to draw with.

Page 76 of Lynda Barry’s 2014 book “Syllabus: Notes from an accidental professor.” — Barry, Linda. 2014. *Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor.* Canada: Drawn & Quarterly. Page 76.

Make a two-page spread (e.g. fold an A4 piece of paper together, or find two clean pages in a drawing book)
Write today’s date at the top of the left page
Number the right side from one to ten
Begin on the left page and make a dot in the middle
Spiral a line around the dot
Keep going, making your spiral bigger and trying to keep the lines as close together as possible without letting them touch
As you make your spiral, think about a memorable moment you had doing fieldwork for your research project (5 mins)

Step 2. Make a list

Turn to the numbered list you made on the right page
Write down 10 of the memories that come to mind when you think about your memorable fieldwork moment (2 mins)
Read over your list and choose a memory that stands out to you
Circle that memory
Turn to a clean page and write the memory you circled at the top, as if it were the title of a story
Draw a big ‘X’ across the page

Step 3. ‘X’ page

Start by picturing yourself in the memory
Pretend we’re on the phone. You can see the image but I can’t. I’m going to ask you some questions that will help me ‘see’ it too
Write or draw your answers anywhere on the ‘X’ page
You will have 20 seconds to write or draw your answer before I ask the next question
No detail is too small or unimportant

Page 79 of Lynda Barry’s 2014 book “Syllabus: Notes from an accidental professor.” — Barry, Linda. 2014. *Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor.* Canada: Drawn & Quarterly. Page 79.

The questions:

Where are you?
What time is it?
How did you get there?
What’s the temperature like?
What can you smell?
What can you see?
What can you hear?

What are you doing?
Is anyone with you?
Why are you there?
How do you feel?
What happened at the start?
Who did you interact with?
How did you leave?

Step 4. Craft an ethnographic story

Turn to a clean page to write this up into a story
Write a sentence about each question you responded to
Draw on all of your senses and use vivid details
Freewrite without stopping for 5 minutes
Use first person (e.g. “I”)
Use present tense (e.g. “I can hear …”)

Step 5. Make a 4-panel comic

Take a clean piece of paper and fold it into four quarters
Draw a border around each panel
In one of the panels, draw an image related to the story you just crafted
In the three other panels, draw that image three other times, making any kind of action you like

Page 124 of Lynda Barry’s 2014 book “Syllabus: Notes from an accidental professor.” — Barry, Linda. 2014. *Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor.* Canada: Drawn & Quarterly. Page 124.

This activity took us an hour. Barry’s book is full of creative prompts so if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend checking it out!

How an interview request about Gen X sparked a teaching moment in an anthropology class

Last week Jogai Bhatt from RNZ approached me to do an interview about Generation X for a mini-series they are airing in the lead up to Generation X: 50 Artworks from the Chartwell Collection, a City Gallery Wellington exhibition shown at Te Papa from 27 July-24 October 2024. I’m not a Generation X researcher, but as a Gen Xer I felt qualified to answer a few questions and as an anthropologist I know how to get up to speed on a topic in a short space of time. I was also preparing a lecture for the Creative Ethnographic Practices class I teach at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington and decided to use the intensive research sprint I did in preparation for the interview as the basis for a session on how to develop a research topic.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/522746/x-plainer-who-are-generation-x

In our Creative Ethnographic Practices class, I guide students through the process of crafting their own independent ethnographic research projects. I designed the class after reading the Teaching Ethnographic Research Methods Syllabus Archive published in Cultural Anthropology and attending the 2024 Grading Conference, held online in June. The key textbooks I’m using (alongside journal articles and other resources) are Luke Eric Lassiter and Elizabeth Campbell’s Doing Ethnography Today: Theories, Methods, Exercises (2014), Carolina Alonso Bejarano, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein’s Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science (2019), Raymond Madden’s Being Ethnographic: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Ethnography 3rd edition (2022), and Kenneth J. Guest’s Cultural Anthropology Fieldwork Journal 4th edition (2023).

When RNZ contacted me I was planning the second lecture for our class, which would include a discussion of the goal of ethnographic research as well as how anthropologists construct “the field,” research ethics (this is something we discuss in every class; I have approval from my university’s Human Ethics Committee for students to undertake independent research projects within specific parameters), and advice for students about how to think about their own potential fieldsites and research topics. I knew some students would appreciate some help in choosing a research topic and I thought “generations” would be a good prompt for them to think with. (Plus I’d done a whole lot of cramming about Generation X and was looking for opportunities to infodump.) So, I recreated my research steps for the lecture and talked the students through how they could develop an anthropological research question about Generation X.

Brainstorming Gen X

The first thing I did was crowdsource ideas from my Cultural Anthropology and Sociology colleagues at Te Herenga Waka. I work with Baby Boomers, Gen Xers, and Geriatric Millennials (although I’m told they prefer the term “Elder Millennial”, which comedian Iliza Shlesinger used as the title for her 2018 Netflix comedy special), and we often talk about generational differences in our lunchtime conversations. For example, some of us are parents to Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids, and we have been discussing how slang and memes (think “Skibidi Toilet”) travel and gain popularity. I began a targeted conversation with them about Generation X and the RNZ interview on Wednesday last week. We are still (irreverently) debating its boundaries and characteristics, which suggests that it is compelling and multifaceted area of inquiry.

Next, I asked Jogai to send me the list of interview questions so I could decide how much time I would dedicate to the interview, which was to take place the next day. Seeing the interview questions helped me narrow the scope of my research, select key terms to use in my search of our library’s catalogue, GoogleScholar, and anthropology databases, and allocate a set number of hours to searching, reading/watching/listening to what I found, synthesising information, and preparing responses to the questions. Knowing that this interview would be recorded for a radio station, I also considered how I could communicate my responses in sound bite form.

In my lecture I explained how students could follow a similar process and emphasised how time should be one of the primary resources they take into account when planning their own projects. In this 12-week course they need to develop a proposal, collect data using selected ethnographic methods, analyse that data, connect their findings to scholarly literature, and communicate their research in a final project. I also suggested that they think about what kind of final project they would like to craft, as this would inform the methods they chose. A series of informative Instagram posts or a ‘zine might call for different methods to a podcast, for example. After this I asked them to do the following activity:

Lecture slide that reads:
Activity: Research topic brainstorming
What research topic might you explore for ANTH 312?
* Spend 1 minute THINKING about this and another 3-4 minutes freewriting your response. Use this as a writing prompt: “The topic I am most interested in exploring for ANTH 312 is …”
* If you can’t think of a topic, use “generations” as a placeholder topic for this exercise and this writing prompt: “The generation I am most interested in exploring for ANTH 312 is …”
* Turn to a classmate and SHARE your research topic idea. Ask them what they think of it

Asking an anthropological research question

Students have to submit a research proposal for me to approve before they begin their research, where they are asked to state the anthropological research question they will explore. In the lecture I discussed what makes a question anthropological and shared the following tips:

Do a GoogleScholar search on the topic you are interested in, using “anthropology” and “ethnography” as part of your search terms. What do other anthropologists ask about your topic? What do their questions look like? What methods do they use to answer them?
Read a few anthropological publications on your topic (e.g. things written or made by anthropologists and published in anthropological journals or on anthropology websites) and make a list of key words that frequently appear, or draw a concept map. See if you can develop questions by using those key words.
Using those same anthropological publications, do some bibliographic mining to see what resources the authors cite and who some influential scholars might be. Bibliographies are often a great place to find further resources on a topic (thanks Eli for the reminder!), and you can also do a forward citation search to see what other publications have cited the one you are looking at. George Mason University’s Library has a good resource on citation mining: https://library.gmu.edu/tutorials/citationmining
Start with “how” questions and keep them open-ended.
Keep the goal of ethnographic research in mind.
The University of Connecticut has a excellent webpage on how to do anthropological research: https://guides.lib.uconn.edu/anthresearch/pickatopic

I shared RNZ’s list of questions and talked about how I turned them into anthropological questions as I read work on generational studies, aging and life course studies, and technology by anthropologists, sociologists, and other social scientists. That looked like this:

RNZ interview questions

Who fits into Generation X?
What are the other Generations?
Where did these labels come from? Who invented these cohorts?
What are the tropes attached to Gen X?
Do these cohorts exist outside Western culture?
What are the key events that have shaped Gen X?
What do Gen Xs get nostalgic about?

Anthropological questions I developed

How do we talk about social change and cultural differences?
What do generational labels do? How do we use them?
What are the limits to generational labels?
How do generational labels help people make sense of the world?

After that we talked about what kind of methods we might use to explore Gen X as an ethnographic research topic, and I gave a short infodump about Gen X based on what was essentially a preliminary literature review. We were particularly interested in discussing Jogai’s excellent question of whether these cohorts exist outside of Western culture, and how generational labels help people make sense of the world. Hopefully some of the class will take up the idea of “generations” in their research projects.

Further reflections on writing ethnographic fieldnotes

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 prepare for an assignment that involved doing fieldwork, writing fieldnotes, and turning those fieldnotes into a piece of anthropological writing. Grant invited me to come and speak to the class, and that experience has prompted me to write some further reflections on writing ethnographic fieldnotes as a disabled, neurodivergent anthropologist.

In my guest lecture I spoke about why anthropologists keep fieldnotes, what my fieldnotes consist of (handwritten notebooks, photographs, maps, drawings, emails, ticket stubs and other ephemera, voice recordings, notes jotted in an app on my phone, a personal diary, and of course the hundreds of electronic documents generated with my fieldnote template), and my relationship with my fieldnotes, including how I draw on fieldnotes alongside headnotes (Ottenberg, 1990) when I write. I also discussed how ethnographic fieldwork is an all-encompassing activity that involves your body, mind, senses, and memories, and how my fieldnote template offers me a way to document my experiences and begin identifying what and how I “know” about my topic. As part of that, I described some of the strategies I use to manage my energy levels and wellbeing during fieldwork. In India and Papua New Guinea this included ensuring I had access to my medication at all times, packing my own food, wearing headphones, trying to avoid situations that would trigger migraines, and scheduling rest days in between fieldwork days so I could process sights, sounds, smells, and social interactions.

What I didn’t say during my guest lecture was how I have largely developed these strategies on my own. When I began my first major research project in the early 2000s, there were no guides on how to do ethnographic fieldwork as a disabled neurodivergent anthropologist. Neurodiversity, disability, and chronic illness were subjects of anthropological studies that I read as a student, but I don’t recall reading anything written by openly neurodivergent, disabled, or chronically ill anthropologists. We also did not use the terms “neurodivergent” or “disabled” in New Zealand in the early 2000s to describe people like me, who have been diagnosed with various mental health disorders (not all of which I am comfortable disclosing) and medical conditions like chronic migraine and endometriosis (which I am comfortable to share publicly). And I did not write this part of myself into my academic work. Indeed, in one instance I was actively discouraged from writing about how depression and anxiety affected my fieldwork by a well-meaning colleague who worried about how such a disclosure would negatively affect (a) how the quality of my work would be perceived, and (b) my chances of future employment in academia. “You can do that once you’ve finished your PhD and got a permanent job,” was the advice. Now, 13 years on from finishing the PhD and 9 years after securing a permanent job, I am still ambivalent about bringing my neurodivergence into my writing, research, and teaching. All anthropology is filtered, as Amelia Frank-Vitale (2022) points out, but I think there is still considerable stigma against neurodivergent filters. However, as Cinzia Greco (2022) asks,

… if ethnography and participant observation represent core anthropological methods, through which reality is filtered and turned into knowledge, what does it mean to observe, analyze, and conduct fieldwork as a neurodivergent subject? How can variation in how we see, hear, and perceive the world influence ethnographic practice?

These are important questions and I am heartened to see growing conversations about neurodivergence, abelism, and anthropology in academic circles (including, but by no means limited to, Durban 2022; Friedner with Kasnitz and Wool 2018; Gibson 2018; Kinsell 2022; Kasnitz 2020; Morgendorff 2023; Radher 2018; Starn 2022). If you have reading or researcher recommendations, please feel free to comment below or get in touch.

References cited:

Durban, Erin L. 2022. “Anthropology and Ableism.” American Anthropologist 124 (1): 8–20.

Greco, Cinzia. 2022. “Divergent Ethnography: Conducting Fieldwork as an Autistic Anthropologist.” Member Voices, Fieldsights, May 26. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/divergent-ethnography-conducting-fieldwork-as-an-autistic-anthropologist

Frank-Vitale, Amelia. 2022. “Writer’s Block.” In “Taking Note: Complexities and Ambiguities in Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes,” edited by Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori and Verónica Sousa, American Ethnologist, 26 August. https://americanethnologist.org/features/collections/taking-note-complexities-and-ambiguities-in-writing-ethnographic-fieldnotes/writers-block

Friedner, Michele, with Devva Kasnitz and Zoë Wool. 2018. ‘What I Wish I Knew about Anthropology and Disability: Notes toward a more enabling anthropology’, Anthrodendum, 10 January. https://anthrodendum.org/2018/01/10/what-i-wish-i-knew-about-anthropology-and-disability-notes-toward-a-more-enabling-anthropology/

Gibson, Hannah. 2018. “Access denied: the dark side of prestige.” Chronically Academic https://chronicallyacademic.blogspot.com/2018/01/access-denied-dark-side-of-prestige.html

Kasnitz, Devva. 2020. “The Politics of Disability Performativity.” Current Anthropology 61 (S21): S16–25.

Kinsell, Hannah. 2022. “Am I an Anthropologist if… I am (dis)abled?” Anthways https://sites.gold.ac.uk/anthways/am-i-an-anthropologist-if-2022/am-i-an-anthropologist-if-i-am-disabled/

Mogendorff, Karen. 2023. “Countering Ableism in Knowledge Production. Empowerment of Subaltern People and Reproduction of Epistemic Hierarchies.” Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology 28, 41–60.

Ottenberg, Simon. 1990. “Thirty Years of Fieldnotes: Changing Relationships to the Text.” In Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, edited by Roger Sanjek, 139–60. New York: Cornell University Press.

Radher, Micha. 2018. “Ethnographic Ableism: Structural Silencing of Physical Disability in Anthropological Research.” The New Ethnographer, 20 August. https://thenewethnographer.com/the-new-ethnographer/2018/08/20/ethnographic-ableism-structural-silencing-of-physical-disability-in-anthropological-research

Starn, Orin. 2022. “Anthropology and the Misery of Writing.” American Anthropologist 124 (1): 187–97.

Teaching ‘how to anthropology’ alongside ‘how to university’ in an introductory cultural anthropology class

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 different knowledge and experiences that incoming first years bring to the classroom – as students who had completed their secondary schooling during a global pandemic – gauged by the kinds of questions students asked and how they wrote their assignments;
the labour-based grading practices that my colleague Grant Otsuki and I began implementing in 2020 (which you can read about here);
a “first year transitions” professional development course I took in 2021, run by my university’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, which took us through some of the reasons why students are not well prepared for university (including NCEA, the standards-based assessment system used in secondary schools in Aotearoa) and strategies we can use to facilitate their success.

ANTH 101 had two new goals: (1) to teach students ‘how to anthropology,’ and (2) to teach students ‘how to do well at anthropology at university,’ or ‘how to university’ for short. I also co-taught ANTH 101 for the first time in 2022 with colleague Corinna Howland, who was instrumental in helping enact my vision for the course.

How to anthropology

‘How to anthropology’ introduced students to key concepts in cultural anthropology in two parts. The first six-week block started with the concept of culture and focused on the methods anthropologists use to study culture. We read selected chapters from Mike Wesch’s free online textbook “The Art of Being Human” together with journal articles or book chapters written by members of our Cultural Anthropology Programme, who were invited to join us in the second lecture of each week for a conversation about the piece they wrote. This enabled students to get to know everyone in our Programme as well as key anthropological concepts and methods. During those conversations we asked our colleagues:

Tell us about yourself (who you are, what kind of anthropology you are into)
Thinking about your book chapter or article that our ANTH 101 class is reading, what were your aims and overall argument?
What methods did you use for that research and why?

I connected this part of the course to the first assignment, which asked students to write a narrative biography of an anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research in Aotearoa New Zealand, and/or who is currently based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Not all of our colleagues were able to join us in class for a discussion about their research, so I included them and their work on the list of anthropologists students could choose to write about for this assignment.

The second half of the 12-week course changed gears to focus on sugar. We used sugar as a material object to explore a range of other key concepts, such as colonialism, capitalism, and gender and sexuality, and we read work by anthropologists who have theorised these concepts in different ways. This half of the course showed students how to think like an anthropologist about sugar (and hopefully other things as well!). Students were invited to write an essay on what an anthropological study of sugar can tell us about the world for their third and final assignment. (The second assignment, a take-home test, is described below.)

How to university

The ‘How to university’ lectures took place on a Friday, after the two ‘how to anthropology’ lectures on Monday and Tuesday. Corinna and I brainstormed a list of everything we thought students needed to know in order to do well in anthropology at university and designed these lectures to equip students with those skills. We started by taking an anthropological approach to the university, explaining what it means to do that and discussing the university as an institution, what it does, who and what makes up a university, how they are different from schools, their history and what they look like now, and what it means to become a university student. In the first six weeks of the course we moved through a series of skills including how to take notes, how to understand assignment questions, how to write thesis statements, how to do a close reading of an article, how to write introductions and conclusions, and how to structure a narrative biography (their first assignment). In the second half of the course, when we shifted to thinking like anthropologists about sugar, our ‘how to university’ lectures focused on ensuring that students understood the theories and concepts discussed in lectures, readings, and films, and that they felt confident about their upcoming assignments.

Lecture topics

Corinna and I decided upon a list of key concepts we thought our students should know and developed a series of questions about them. We then designed each ‘how to anthropology’ lecture to respond to one of those questions. Our 2022 lecture schedule looked like this:

Week	‘How to anthropology’	‘How to university’
1. Introduction to the course	What is cultural anthropology? What is a concept? What is this course about?	What is a university?
2. Culture	How did anthropologists come to make difference through the concept of culture? What is culture, who has it, and how do we talk about it?	Notetaking, critical reading, and how to approach the first assignment
3. Ritual	How do anthropologists study culture and rituals? What is a ritual? What is liminality?	How to do a close reading of a journal article, and how to write a thesis statement
4. Development and disagreement	What is the relationship between anthropology and development? How do anthropologists study and think about disagreement?	Review of key concepts, tips for writing an introduction, and how to structure a narrative biography
5. Difference	What does it mean to be human? How can we critique cultural practices that are not our own?	Tips for writing a conclusion and time management
6. Storytelling	Why do stories matter to anthropologists? What do anthropologists need to think about when writing about people’s lives?	Screening and discussion of Arnav at Six (as an example of visual ethnographic storytelling)
7. Thinking like an anthropologist about sugar	What does studying sugar anthropologically allow us to look at? What does a historical approach to sugar involve? What are the goals of comparison in cultural anthropology?	(No class)
8. How sugar changed the world	What is the relationship between sugar, slavery, capitalism, and race? What was blackbirding in the South Pacific? How have people theorised race and whiteness?	Screening and discussion of Sugar Slaves
9. Sugar and the world system	How do different theories provide different answers about global inequality? What is political economy in cultural anthropology? How do anthropologists study commodity chains? And how do we put culture into history?	Essay workshop #1: Who to contact about an extension, how to break down the essay question, how to apply theory to your topic, and how to develop a research question
10. Sugar, consumption, and social class	How do anthropologists theorise social class? How did sugar come to be connected with social class? How are race and class connected? How is social inequality reproduced?	Essay workshop #2: Why structure is important, what introductions are for and how to write them, what body paragraphs are for and how to write them, what conclusions do and how to write them
11. Sugar, gender and sexuality	How do anthropologists think about gender and sexuality? What is the relationship between sweetness, gender and sexuality?	(No class)
12. Cultural appropriation and course review	What is cultural appropriation? What have we learnt in this course?	Screening and discussion of Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny

Readings

Each week had one or two required readings and some recommended readings. As the course progressed, I created weekly review quizzes as a study aid for students with questions about the required readings as well as lectures. These weekly review quizzes also helped students prepare for the take-home test, the second assessment item, which was delivered through Blackboard (the learning management system our university was using at the time) and contained questions similar in content and style to the review quizzes.

Week 1

Wesch, Michael. 2018. ‘Lesson One: Fieldwork.’ In The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology, 9–26. Kansas, USA: New Prairie Press ebooks. (required)
Anthes, Emily. 2016, May 12. ‘The Glossary of Happiness.’ The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-glossary-of-happiness
UQx World101x Anthropology of Current World Issues. 2014. ‘Episode 1 – Module 1: Anthropology 101 – Conversation with Anthropologists Part I.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPS_3aF-w6E
UQx World101x Anthropology of Current World Issues. 2014. ‘Episode 1 – Module 1: Anthropology 101 – Conversation with Anthropologists Part II.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV3ISkRT4EE&list=PLBvA_xukT8iO-HiikQp25xsGVLzKcuDlk&index=4

Week 2

Wesch, Michael. 2018. ‘Lesson Two Culture: The Art of Seeing.’ In The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology, 28–51. Kansas, USA: New Prairie Press ebooks.

Week 3

Bönisch-Brednich, Brigitte. 2015. ‘Rituals of Encounter: Campus Life, Liminality and Being the Familiar Stranger.’ In Crossing Boundaries and Weaving Intercultural Work, Life, and Scholarship in Globalizing Universities, edited by Adam Komisarof and Zhu Hua, 118–30. New York: Routledge. (required)
Treagus, Mandy. 2012. ‘From Whakarewarewa to Oxford: Makereti Papakura and the Politics of Indigenous Self-Representation.’ Australian Humanities Review, 52, 35-56. (We did a close critical reading of this article in the Week 3 ‘how to university’ lecture)

Week 4

Lewis, David. 2012. ‘Anthropology and Development: The Uneasy Relationship.’ In Handbook of Economic Anthropology, 469–84. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. (required)
Eli, Elinoff. 2021. ‘Introduction.’ In Citizen Designs: City-Making and Democracy in Northeastern Thailand, 8–37. Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press.

Week 5

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2002. ‘Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others.’ American Anthropologist, 104 (3), 783-790. (required)
Wesch, Michael. 2018. ‘Lesson 7: Superstructure.’ In The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology, 215–69. Kansas: New Prairie Press.
Otsuki, Grant Jun. 2021. ‘Frame, Game, and Circuit: Truth and the Human in Japanese Human-Machine Interface Research.’ Ethnos 86 (4): 712–29.
Hancock, Tayla. 2015. ‘Reflexivity.’ Anthsisters. 2 September. http://www.anthsisters.com/2015/09/theorythursday.html

Week 6

Wesch, Michael. 2018. ‘The Power of Storytelling.’ In The Art of Being Human: A Textbook for Cultural Anthropology, 320–34. Kansas, USA: New Praire Press ebooks. (required)
Bryers-Brown, Tarapuhi. 2015. ‘Te Ara O Te Pūkeko: Methodology and Methods.’ In “He Reached across the River and Healed the Generations of Hara”: Structural Violence, Historical Trauma, and Healing among Contemporary Whanganui Māori, 17–26. MA thesis, Cultural Anthropology, Victoria University of Wellington.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. 2009. ‘The Danger of a Single Story | TED Talk.’ https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?langu age=en#t-106653
Case, Emalani. 2020. ‘A Future Built by Stories.’ He Wahī Paʻakai: A Package of Salt. 26 February. https://hewahipaakai.wordpress.com/2020/02/26/a-future-built-by-stories

Week 7 – note the increase in recommended readings here, which were provided as potential resources for student essays

Mintz, Sidney W. 1986. ‘Chapter 1. Food, Sociality, and Sugar.’ In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 3–18. New York: Penguin Books.

Week 8

Hall, Catherine. 2020. ‘The Slavery Business and the Making of “Race” in Britain and the Caribbean.’ Current Anthropology 61 (S22): S172–82. (required)
Togo-Brisby, Jasmine. 2021. ‘An Umbilical Cord That Was Never Cut – Pantograph Punch.’ The Pantograph Punch. 17 September. https://pantograph-punch.com/posts/An-Umbilical-Cord-that-was-Never-Cut (required)
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran . 2019. ‘The Barbaric History of Sugar in America (part of The 1619 Project).’ The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html
‘The Bitter Taste of Sugar Slavery | RNZ.’ 2017, 29 July. https://www.rnz.co.nz/concert/programmes/upbeat/audio/201856488/the-bitter-taste-of-sugar-slavery
‘Before Cotton, Sugar Established American Reliance on Slave Labor | PBS NewsHour.’ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/before-cotton-sugar-established-american-reliance-on-slave-labor
‘BBC Radio 4 – Sweetness and Desire: A Short History of Sugar, Slaves to Sweetness.’ https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09nvzgc
‘Legacies of British Slave-Ownership Project.’ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

Week 9

Errington, Frederick Karl, and Deborah B. Gewertz. 2004. ‘Introduction: On Avoiding a History of the Self-Evident and the Self-Interested.’ In Yali’s Question: Sugar, Culture, and History, 1–20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (required)
Cook*, Ian. 2004. ‘Follow the Thing: Papaya.’ Antipode 36 (4): 642–64. (required)
Diamond, Jared M., Tim Lambert, Cassian Harrison, Peter Coyote, Lion Television Ltd, and National Geographic Television & Film. 2005. Guns, Germs, and Steel (documentary).
‘The Story of Stuff.’ https://www.storyofstuff.org/movies/story-of-stuff/

Week 10

Ho, Hang Kei. 2021. ‘Why Has Wine Consumption Become Popular in Hong Kong? Introducing a New Sociocultural Paradigm of Traditional, Aspiring and Creative Drinkers.’ Asian Anthropology 20 (4): 248–68. (required)
Kollnig, Sarah. 2020. ‘The “good People” of Cochabamba City: Ethnicity and Race in Bolivian Middle-Class Food Culture’. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 15 (1): 23–43.
Baglar, Rosslyn. 2013. ‘”Oh God, Save Us from Sugar”: An Ethnographic Exploration of Diabetes Mellitus in the United Arab Emirates.’ Medical Anthropology 32 (2): 109–25.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. ‘What Makes a Social Class? On The Theoretical and Practical Existence Of Groups.’ Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32, 1-17.
Smith, Raymond T. 1984. ‘Anthropology and the Concept of Social Class.’ Annual Review of Anthropology 13: 467–94.

Week 11

Holtzman, Jon. 2018. ‘The Weakness of Sweetness: Masculinity and Confectionary in Japan.’ Food, Culture & Society 21 (3): 280–95. (required)
Kutia, Kahu. 2019. ‘Episode 3: Decolonising Gender & Sexuality In Wellington City – He Kākano Ahau.’ 22 October. https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/hekakanoahau/story/2018715687/episode-3-decolonising-gender-and-sexuality-in-wellington-city-he-kakano-ahau
Kutia, Kahu. 2020. ‘Re: Decolonising Gender and Sexuality in Wellington City.’ https://www.renews.co.nz/decolonising-gender-and-sexuality-in-wellington-city/

Week 12

No assigned readings.

Reflections

Overall we found this to be a fun way to teach an introductory cultural anthropology course. We learnt a lot about our colleagues’ research by inviting them into the classroom and enjoyed the challenge of using sugar as a framework in the ‘how to anthropology’ lectures. We noticed that the Friday ‘how to university’ lectures attracted fewer students (in-person and online) than the ‘how to anthropology’ lectures earlier in the week. However it is difficult to know whether this was because the lecture was at 9am or whether it was due to the subject of the Friday classes. The feedback we received from students about this component of the course was overwhelmingly positive despite low attendance rates, and we saw an improvement in the quality of work students submitted at the end of the trimester.

Corinna taught this course as the sole course coordinator in 2023, and is co-teaching it with Jacs Forde in 2024. I look forward to seeing what they do with it!

Anthropology for Liberation assessments

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 people in all places. Harrison explains that it is “designed to promote equality- and justice-inducing social transformation” (1991, 2). This kind of anthropology is practiced by anthropologists “committed to and engaged in struggles against racist oppression, gender inequality, class disparities, and international patterns of exploitation and “difference” rooted largely in capitalist world development” (Harrison 1991, 2). In my view, an anthropology for liberation seeks to unsettle disciplinary boundaries, decentre Western epistemological imperialism, and foster solidarities with those working towards similar goals of liberation and otherwise worlds.

This year I redesigned the assignments to incorporate elements of labour-based grading (my colleague Grant Jun Otsuki has a nice piece explaining what labour-based grading is for those who are curious). As I was doing so, I saw two threads on Twitter by Dr Sereana Naepi and Associate Professor Sarah Martin that offered me a way to better align my assessment practices with the ethos of this course. In this post I share the assignment information I provide to students along with the grading criteria I developed. Please feel free to adapt or remix these ideas into your own course materials, and if you do I would love to hear from you!

There were three assignment for this course in 2022:

Book review
Research Journal (the first part of the major research project)
Final research project

Book Review (30% of final grade)

This assignment involved an optional revise-review-submit process, where students could submit a draft of their book review for feedback prior to marking, and also to revise and resubmit their work once it had been marked. I was inspired to take this approach after reading Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (And What To Do Instead).

Your first assignment is to write a book review of one of the books on the list below. This assignment encourages deep learning of selected themes covered in this course as well as critical engagement with books dealing with contemporary social justice issues.

In ANTH 302, book reviews are not book reports that summarise a book’s content. Instead, book reviews are essays that critically evaluate how effective a book has been in fulfilling its stated goals, and how it relates to key themes discussed in ANTH 302.

What should the book review look like?

Book reviews are a common type of academic essay. You can find examples in anthropology journals such as American Anthropologist, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Quarterly, and The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. Your review should look like the reviews you can find in these journals.

As you will see from these journals, book reviews vary in structure but are like other types of academic essays in that they have a title, an introduction with a thesis statement expressing your evaluation of the book, body paragraphs that support the thesis statement, and a conclusion. If you refer to other sources you should also include a list of references. Subheadings are not necessary.

Your book review should contain the following features:

A concise summary of the book, including the author or author’s goals in writing it as well as the main theories and/or concepts the author(s) use to make their argument(s);
A critique of the evidence used by the author(s) to support their argument(s), and how well they used it;
An evaluation of how well the author(s) achieved their goals in writing the book, and of the book as a whole;
A discussion that shows how this book relates to key course themes.

I strongly recommend reading other published book reviews before you start work on your own. You might even be able to find reviews of the book you have chosen to write about.

Books to choose from

Alonso Bejarano, Carolina, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein. 2019. Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science. Durham: Duke University Press.

Byler, Darren. 2022. Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Durham: Duke University Press.

Chao, Sophie. 2022. In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua. Durham: Duke University Press.

Dave, Naisargi N. 2012. Queer Activism in India: A Story in the Anthropology of Ethics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Holmes, Seth M. 2013. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kirsch, Stuart. 2018. Engaged Anthropology: Politics Beyond the Text. California: University of California Press.

Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mora Bayo, Mariana. 2017. Kuxlejal Politics: Indigenous Autonomy, Race, and Decolonizing Research in Zapatista Communities. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, + Schooling in San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press.

Note: if you would like to review a book that is not on this list, please contact me (Lorena) to discuss it. I need to approve your selection before you can review it for ANTH 302. You cannot review a book that is not on this list without obtaining permission beforehand.

Critically reading your chosen book

The following questions might be useful as note-taking prompts as you read the book:

What is the book’s central argument? If you had only one sentence to summarise the book, what would it be?
How does the author support their argument (or arguments)? What evidence is provided? Do you find that evidence convincing? Why or why not?
How is the argument structured? Does it make sense? Are you persuaded? Why/why not?
What theories and/or concepts does the author use in their analysis?
Why was this book was on the list of books you could choose from? How has it helped you understand key themes from ANTH 302?
Would you recommend this book to your classmates?
You could also consider the circumstances under which the knowledge in this book was produced (e.g. who the author is, background and training, relationship to the topic/ participants/fieldsite, theoretical persuasion).

Tips for writing your book review

There are lots of online resources with advice about how to write academic book reviews, such as https://culturematters.wordpress.com/2016/12/20/how-to-write-a-book-review/
Focus on critically evaluating the book, with an argument to back up your evaluation, rather than simply summarising it or describing how much you loved or hated it;
This is a good opportunity to practice how to offer generous, constructive critique. You can be critical without being an “academic asshole” (see https://thesiswhisperer.com/2013/02/13/academic-assholes/).

Marking criteria

The book review is marked out of 100. In this book review you are expected to:

Concisely summarise the book (20 marks)
Critique the evidence used by the author(s) to support their argument(s) (20 marks)
Evaluate the book (20 marks)
Relate this book to key course themes (20 marks)
Structure your review appropriately (e.g. an introduction with a clear thesis statement, a main body supporting the thesis statement in a logical manner, and a conclusion) and reference correctly using the Chicago 17th author-date referencing style (20 marks)

Instructional words

Course theme	An important idea, subject, or topic that is commonly discussed in an anthropology for liberation (e.g. ‘liberation,’ ‘decolonisation’)
Critique	Express your judgement about the evidence the author uses throughout the book to support their argument(s). Provide examples and commentary to support your critique
Evaluate	Present a careful judgement of book, stressing both its strengths and limitations. Provide an evidence-based argument for your evaluation
Relate	Explain the connection between the book and course theme(s)
Summarise	Give the main points in shortened form, without details, examples, comment, or criticism. Your summary should include the author or author’s goals in writing the book as well as the main theories and/or concepts the author(s) use to make their argument(s)

Getting feedback on a draft of your book review

This assignment uses an optional submit-revise-resubmit process. This is designed to give you an early opportunity to see if you are on the right track with your book review. It works as follows:

Submit a draft of your book review by 4pm on Monday 1 August. We will provide you with some feedback using the marking criteria above and EMRN rubric below. Our feedback will be returned by Monday 8 August.
Revise your book review based on our feedback.
Resubmit your final book review by the due date of 4pm on Friday 12 August.

Points to note:

You do not have to submit a draft of your book review; this is optional.
If you would like feedback on a draft of your book review, you must submit it on or before 4pm on Monday 1 August. This is a hard deadline. No extensions will be given. Any drafts submitted after this date will not be provided with feedback.
You are able to request an extension on the final version of your book review.

The EMRN Rubric

We will use this EMRN rubric to provide feedback on your draft book review. It allows us to quickly identify how you are tracking in relation to the marking criteria, and areas you might need to work on for your final book review. This rubric is based on the EMRN rubric developed by Robert Talbert and I have adapted it for ANTH 302. You can read more about this rubric, its origins, and the Creative Commons licence under which Talbert published it on his website: https://rtalbert.org/emrn/

When we read your draft, we will put it into one of four categories (E, M, R, or N). We will let you know which category we have assigned it to, and we will also note which of the marking criteria might need more work (e.g. 2 Critique, 3 Evaluate). This rubric does not indicate what grade you might receive for your final book review.

Does the book review meet all five expectations outline in the marking criteria? Does it demonstrate a thorough understanding of the book and how it relates to ANTH 302?

Work will be sorted into four categories:

E (Excellent/Exemplary): The book review meets or exceeds the expectations. Communication is clear and complete. There are no nontrivial errors. This could be used as a classroom example.

M (Meets Expectations): Most of the expectations are met and communicated through a well organised book review. Some revision or expansion is required, but no significant gaps or errors are present.

R (Revision Needed): The expectations are partially met but there are significant gaps or the review is unbalanced (e.g. spends too much time summarising and not enough on critique and evaluation). Needs further work.

N (Not Assessable): Not enough information is present to determine whether the expectations are met. Might contain significant omissions or be fragmentary (e.g. an outline rather than a draft). Or, there are too many issues to comment on. Significant work required.

EMRN Rubric remixed from Robert Talbert’s EMRN Rubric, which is based on the “EMRF” rubric created by Rodney Stutzman and Kim Race and described in a 2004 article in Mathematics Teacher magazine. I replaced the text to suit the requirements of the book review assignment.

Book review revise and resubmit process

You are welcome to revise and resubmit your book review once it has been graded. The steps are:

Read your marker’s feedback and reread your book review. Decide which of their comments you are going to address.
Revise your book review.
Write a short summary of how you have responded to your marker’s comments in your revisions (e.g. “I condensed my summary of the book and added a new paragraph critiquing the book, in response to the comment that my summary was too long”). This can be in bullet-point form.
Use the marking criteria to provide an honest self-assessment of your revised book review, and give yourself a mark out of 100.
Submit your revised book review, your summary of the changes you have made, and your self-assessment and mark to the submission link on Blackboard by 11:59pm on Friday 30 September.

I will read your revisions and let you know whether or not I agree with your self-assessed grade.

This revise and resubmit process is available to everyone in the class who would like to improve their grade. You do not have to revise and resubmit your book review if you don’t want to.

Major Research Project

In ANTH 302 you will work on a major research project throughout the course. You will choose one of the options below, conduct research for it, and prepare two pieces of assessment:

Research Journal (2000 words, 30% of your final grade), due 23 September
Final Research Project (3000 words or equivalent, 40% of your final grade), due 14 October

This assignment has been designed to give you the opportunity to:

Create and carry out a piece of secondary (not primary) anthropological research that reflects critically on one or more course themes, drawing on ethnographic examples from Asia, Oceania, the United States, or Latin America;
Review existing scholarly literature and other material (e.g. archives, pūrākau [myths, legends, stories], whakataukī [proverbs], artwork, exhibitions, pamphlets, ‘zines, government documents, blog posts, podcasts, maps, music, film) to identify and engage with core theoretical concepts, and keep a record of your activities in a research journal;
Construct convincing arguments that connect your research findings and your own personal experiences with contemporary issues and social justice debates in an anthropology for liberation.

What will the final research project look like?

Depending on the option you choose, you are welcome to present your final project in the form of a research essay, ‘zine, blog post, poetry, podcast, or another innovative format (approved by Lorena). You are encouraged to discuss your presentation ideas with Lorena as you develop them.

We will talk about what secondary research means, the research journal, and the final research project in class and tutorials, and further information will be provided on Blackboard.

Research Project Options and Instructions

Option 1: Anthropology and activism

What does it mean for an anthropologist to be an activist? Draw on at least two of the ethnographies we discuss in this course to answer this question. You will need to critically discuss the history and goals of activist anthropology (also known as “engaged,” “action,” “advocacy,” and “militant” anthropology), what “activism” means, and the possibilities and limitations associated with scholar-activism. Use examples from the literature you consult to illustrate what such scholar-activism looks like in theory and in practice.

Option 2: Anthropology, decolonisation, liberation

How can anthropology be used in decolonising and emancipatory endeavours? Draw on ethnographic work by at least two different anthropologists to answer this question. You will need to take a position on whether anthropology can, in fact, be used in decolonising and emancipatory endeavours, critically discuss the history and central tenets of an anthropology for liberation, and critique what this kind of anthropology looks like in theory and in practice. Use examples from the literature you consult to illustrate your discussion.

Option 3: Design and enact an intervention related to a contemporary liberation movement

This option invites you to put what you have learned about an anthropology for liberation into practice by posing an intervention. The goal is to draw on anthropological practices discussed in this course, and the research you conduct, to act in solidarity with others working towards emancipatory goals. We will discuss what “intervention” means to anthropologists, as well as the ethics and politics of intervening, during lectures and tutorials.

Option 3 has two parts:

Choose a contemporary liberation movement (broadly conceived – examples could include Free West Papua; Protect Pūtiki; Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Pacific Climate Warriors; Rhodes Must Fall; LGBTQI+ activism; Fat Liberation; Disability Rights) and design and enact an intervention that will advance their visions of liberation. You are welcome to work individually or in groups on the intervention. The intervention can be on a large scale (e.g. a ‘zine-making session or awareness-raising event), or a small scale (e.g. Instagram or TikTok content, poster or ‘zine drop around the university, syllabus design, activist clothing). You are encouraged to discuss your ideas with Lorena as you design your intervention.
Submit a critical reflection that introduces the liberation movement; outlines the issue you sought to bring attention to and the rationale for your intervention; situates your intervention in relation other examples of scholar-activism; explains how you applied anthropological practices and course themes to your intervention; reflects upon the impact of your intervention; and provides an honest assessment of the work you put into the intervention and what you think your grade should be based on the assessment criteria. This must be an individual submission and can be made in written (2000 words) or oral (10 minutes) form.

Option 3 is a new addition to ANTH 302 for 2022. I am grateful to Dr Sereana Naepi, who teaches Sociology at the University of Auckland, and Avery Smith, who teaches Education here at VUW, for providing the inspiration for this new option (it is based on an intervention assignment Dr Naepi has in one of her classes) and for discussing the logistics of this type of assessment with me.

This semester I assigned an intervention into modernity and the Pacific and it has been inspiring to read and hear about dinner talanoa between families and flatmates, postering campaigns, laptop stickers, kava circles, poems, Instagram posts, and t-shirts. 100% will do again.
— Sereana Naepi (@SereanaNaepi) June 20, 2022

Research Journal (30% of final grade)

This assignment requires you to maintain and submit a research journal containing critical analyses and reflections of course readings, class discussions, and independently sourced resources useful for your final research project. It has the following specific learning goals:

Enable you to keep track of your activities and ideas as you carry out anthropological research relevant to your final research project;
Develop your skills in critical reading, critical and creative thinking, and the ability to synthesise key course themes and concepts in your own words;
Develop your technical skills in referencing while engaging in citational politics (Ahmed 2013) in a way that practices gratitude and recognition (Liboiron and Li 2022);
Develop the argument you will make in your final research project (for Options 1 and 2), or the intervention you will design and enact for your final research project (for Option 3).

I recommend spending about 32 hours on this assignment, and starting it in Week 4. This includes conducting research, thinking, talking with your classmates, critically engaging with material and synthesising ideas, completing the main tasks listed below, and maintaining your research journal.

This assignment will be assessed using a task-based grading system. This means that your grade will be based on your ability to meet the requirements of three main tasks by their due dates.

Main tasks and due dates:

Task 1	Contribute to a Group Bibliography	Due: 9 September
Task 2	Compose two emails to contemporary authors (one from our course readings, one from your research journal) that includes a quote from the reading, your response to the quote, and how the quote has informed your thinking	Due: 16 September
Task 3	Maintain (over a period of at least four weeks) and submit a 2000-word research journal containing critical analyses and reflections of course readings, class discussions, and independently sourced resources useful for your final research project	Due: 23 September

What is a research journal?

A research journal – sometimes known as a research diary – is a place to track your research activities and ideas. Researchers use them to note our thoughts and feelings about a project, references to look up, summaries of articles we’ve read or other material we’ve consulted (including lectures we attend), interesting quotes (and where they come from!), connections we can see between published literature and our research topic, and research questions we might follow. We also use them to critically engage with the material we find, synthesise the main arguments and issues, and develop our arguments and refine our analyses. Your research journal will be an important source of information and inspiration for your final project.

The research journal is a new addition to ANTH 302 for 2022. I am grateful to Associate Professor Sarah Martin, who teaches Political Science at Memorial University in Canada, for generously sharing information about an assignment she teaches in one of her classes. Her work provided the inspiration for the third learning goal of this assignment.

🧵on my favourite assignments from the last year that aim to move from the standard policing model of academic citation to a practice of connection and recognition. I am inspired by @SaraNAhmed and @maxliboiron’s work on citation.
I am grateful for their work. 1/n
— Sarah J Martin (@eatingpolitics) April 24, 2022

What is “task-based grading?”

This is the latest iteration of the labour-based grading pedagogy I discussed in a recent article co-authored with Grant Jun Otsuki and Jordan Anderson entitled “The most seen I have ever felt”: Labour-based grading as a pedagogical practice of care.

Task-based grading is an alternative assessment method that aims to reward students for the time and effort they spend on an assignment, rather than the range of subjective measures normally found in assessment criteria. Task-based grading uses the number of tasks that students work through in writing their assignment to determine their grades. Your grade will be assessed by whether or not you meet the requirements of the three main tasks listed below.

In short, if you complete the requirements of all three main tasks listed below, you will receive an “A” grade for this assignment regardless of the quality of your work. It will not matter what your lecturer, your marker, or your classmates think of your research skills. It will only matter that you complete the requirements for the tasks on time, in the manner and spirit they are asked (in other words, no bullshit), and work with your classmates and lecturer in a way that contributes to the success of the course as a whole.

It is important to note that the quality of your research journal still matters. We will read your research journal and give feedback designed to help you in your final research project.

If you would like to learn more about alternative assessment methods, check out these resources:

Blum, Susan D. 2017, November 14. “Ungrading.” https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/11/14/significant-learning-benefits-getting-rid-grades-essay

Inoue, Asao B. 2019. Labor-based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. Fort Collins, Colorado: The WAC Clearinghouse.

Robinson, Ken. October 2010. “Changing Education Paradigms.” RSA Animate. https://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_changing_education_paradigms

Stommel, Jesse. 2020, February 6. “Ungrading: an FAQ.” https://www.jessestommel.com/ungrading-an-faq/

How does task-based grading work for this assignment?

Task-based grading values all of the effort that goes into maintaining a research journal: choosing a topic; finding and critically reading/viewing/listening to relevant resources; talking with classmates and teachers and friends and whānau; practising gratitude and recognition in our citations; as well as thinking, daydreaming, making connections, and developing your argument. This effort is not always visible in a 2000-word written assignment. My goal is to free you from the concerns of “getting it right” so you can focus on doing research, planning your final research project, and developing your citational skills.

Your assignment is graded out of a total of 100. Your grade will be based on whether or not you complete the requirements for the three main tasks listed below. Each task is designed to develop a particular skill, meet the learning goals, and help you create a strong basis for your final research project.

You must complete the requirements for Task 3 in order to pass this assignment. If you only complete Task 3, you are guaranteed a C (57%) for this assignment. If you complete Task 3 and one other task, you will receive a B (72%). If you complete the requirements for all three main tasks by their due dates, you will receive an A (87%).

We will review the tasks you submit to see whether they have been submitted on time and meet the requirements. If they do, we will mark them as “Complete.” If you do not submit a task by the due date or meet the task requirements, then it is “Incomplete.” You can submit Tasks 2 and 3 late (by 4pm on 23 September) and have them marked as “Complete,” but you will not receive feedback on late tasks. You can request an extension for Task 3.

Research journal overall grade	No. of main tasks completed
A (87/100)	3
B (72/100)	2 (Task 3 and one other)
C (57/100)	1 (Task 3 only)
D (45/100)	1 or more tasks but not Task 3
E (0/100)	0

Task 1. Contribute to a Group Bibliography

Due: 9 September, 4pm

In ANTH 302, we use the Chicago 17th author-date system to format our references. Task 1 helps us develop our technical skills in using this referencing system. We will do this by creating a Group Bibliography together. This will be a shared resource that everyone in the class can draw on and contribute to as they conduct research.

During the lecture in Week 3, when we discuss the politics of knowledge production, we will collectively decide on the format our Group Bibliography will take. For example, we might decide to create a shared library in Zotero, a free and open-source reference management software (https://www.zotero.org/). Alternatively, we might decide to create a shared document on Google Docs or OneDrive. Once we have decided on format, I will set up our Group Bibliography during Week 4 and share it with the class.

What you need to do: contribute a minimum of two peer reviewed resources that you think will be useful for the final research project to our Group Bibliography, formatted using the Chicago 17th author-date referencing style. If you see that someone has already added the resources you chose to the Group Bibliography, you have two options: you can either go and find two new peer reviewed resources; or you can find one new resource and add a short annotation to one of the resources someone else found that briefly summarises what it is about and why you endorse it being in our Group Bibliography.

Your resources must be different from the ones in the course reading list on Talis and from the list of books you can choose for your Book Review.
Your resources must be peer reviewed; in other words, they need to have been evaluated by a group of experts in the field. Academic books and journal articles are peer reviewed. An official TED talk is peer reviewed. A film that has been screened as part of a film festival or on a streaming service (e.g. Netflix) is considered to have been peer reviewed. Some websites peer review their blog posts before publication (e.g. https://allegralaboratory.net/, https://anthrodendum.org/, and https://footnotesblogcom.wordpress.com/). YouTube channels or Instagram accounts are not peer reviewed (although they can be subject to complaint). I recommend spending up to 30 minutes formatting and/or annotating your peer reviewed resources, and adding them to the Group Bibliography.

Task 1 Requirements:

EITHER submit a minimum of two peer reviewed resources to our Group Bibliography, formatted using the Chicago 17th author-date style; OR submit a minimum of one peer reviewed resource formatted accurately and one annotation and endorsement of a peer reviewed resource to our Group Bibliography (if someone already added resources that you chose).
Go to the Task 1 assignment submission link on Blackboard and briefly describe what you did (e.g. “I submitted Tuck and Yang’s 2012 article “Decolonization is not a metaphor” and Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s 2012 book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd edition)”); OR “I submitted Tuck and Yang’s 2012 article “Decolonization is not a metaphor” and added an annotation and endorsement to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s 2012 book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (2nd edition)”).
Complete Task 1 by 4pm on Friday 9 September

Task 2. Compose two emails to contemporary authors

Due: 16 September, 4pm

This task is based on Associate Professor Sarah Martin’s assignment, which showed me how I could bring classroom discussions of citational politics into this assignment. I am grateful to Prof Martin for tweeting about assessment practices.

Third assignment – graduate students write three emails to contemporary authors. Students choose a quote from the author’s reading, and describe their reactions and reflections and how it informed their thinking and work. 11/n pic.twitter.com/f7rz44DyZz
— Sarah J Martin (@eatingpolitics) April 24, 2022

Task 2 encourages us to engage with academic citation in the style of an anthropology of liberation: as a political (Ahmed 2013; Harrison 1997) practice of gratitude, recognition, and connection (Liboiron and Li 2022). We will discuss what this means, why it matters, what it looks like, and how to do it, in class throughout the course.

What you need to do: compose two emails to contemporary authors (one from our course readings, including the people on the list of books to choose for the book review; and one from your research journal) that includes a quote from the reading, your response to the quote, and how the quote has informed your thinking. Please note that you don’t necessarily have to send these emails; it is enough for this task just to compose them. Once we have commented on your emails, you could consider sending them to the authors you chose. If you do, let us know if you get a response!

This task is best completed after you have started keeping your research journal. This is because you will use your journal as a way to engage with the resources you consult and start thinking through (and writing about) the connections you can see between the resource, course themes, ideas discussed in lectures in tutorials, and your research topic. You will be able to refine your thinking in your research journal and draw on that work to compose your emails.

Your emails must:

Have an informative subject line
Be formal and in appropriate language: e.g. start with Dear/Tēnā koe Dr/Professor [Surname], end with Yours sincerely/Ngā mihi
Introduce yourself: e.g. “I am a 3^rd year student in Cultural Anthropology at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.”
Explain how you found out about their research: e.g. “For one of my courses, I read your article/book/chapter [insert name of resource] …”
Explain why you are emailing: e.g. “I wanted to let you know how much of an impact/how useful/etc your work has been for a research project I am working on.”
Include a specific quote from the resource by introducing it: e.g. “This quote in particular … [insert quote]”
Include a concise response to the quote and how it has informed your thinking. Try to keep this to 2-3 lines.
Have a clear end point: e.g. “Thank you for taking the time to read my email.”
Sign off with your full name.

I recommend spending up to 1 hour on this task.

Task 2 Requirements:

Submit the text of two emails (containing all of the features listed above) to the Task 2 assignment submission link on Blackboard by 4pm on Friday 16 September.

Task 3. Maintain and submit a 2000-word research journal

Due: 23 September, 4pm

What you need to do: maintain a research journal over a period of at least four weeks, and submit a 2000-word research journal to the submission link on Blackboard by 4pm on Friday 23 September. We will discuss how to start and maintain a research journal during lectures (including how to show evidence of work over time), and set aside time to write in them during tutorials. I recommend spending up to 30 hours on this task.

You can record entries in your research journal using whatever method works best for you. This might include bullet points, mind maps, drawings, freewriting, or a visual representation of how you file pdfs and other relevant material. Your journal could include definitions of key theories and concepts, the search strategy you use to find resources, and quotes (with citations). There is no specific format required for the style of your research journal, but it does need to be legible, converted into an electronic document for submission, and meet the 2000-word requirement.

Your research journal should:

Track your ideas and how you are thinking about the final research project.
Show evidence that it has been maintained over a period of at least four weeks (e.g. by including your thoughts and reflections on lectures, tutorial discussions, or assigned reading material from different weeks).
Contain critical analyses and reflections of course readings, lectures, tutorial discussions, and independently sourced resources.
Format citations using the Chicago 17^th author-date referencing style.
Show that you have engaged with a minimum of eight resources relevant to your topic. This could include peer-reviewed literature and other resources such as archives, pūrākau (myths, legends, stories), whakataukī (proverbs), artwork, exhibitions, pamphlets, ‘zines, government documents, blog posts, podcasts, maps, music, dance, and film.
Develop the argument (for Options 1 and 2) or intervention (for Option 3) you will make in your final research project, based on your research.

We will read your research journal and provide written feedback designed to help you with your final research project. The quality of our feedback will depend in part on the quality of your research journal. For example, if you don’t discuss the argument or intervention you plan to make in your final research project, we won’t be able to provide you with any feedback on it.

Task 3 Requirements:

Submit a 2,000 word research journal that has been maintained over a period of at least four weeks, engages with a minimum of eight resources relevant to your topic, and contains critical analyses and reflections of course readings, lectures, tutorial discussions, and independently sourced material.
Your research journal must be no less than 1900 words and no more than 2100 words in length.
You must use the Chicago 17^th author-date referencing style in your research journal.
Please include your name, ID number, and the word count for your research journal either in a document header or at the start of your journal.

Submit your research journal in electronic form to the Task 3 assignment submission link on Blackboard by 4pm on Friday 23 September.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I have an extension on the main tasks?

You can submit Tasks 1 and 2 up until 4pm on Friday 23 September without penalty. Please note that while you will not be penalised for lateness, you will not receive feedback on late tasks. In most cases it will be much better to hand in what you can on time rather than try to do a good job later.

You can request an extension for Task 3 (the 2000-word research journal). Please email Lorena before the due date to discuss this. If you submit Task 3 late without an extension, a late penalty of 5% per day will be applied to the assignment.

I didn’t do Task 3. Can I still pass the assignment?

No. You must complete Task 3 in order to pass the assignment. If you were not able to do so, please contact Lorena to discuss your circumstances and what you might do in order to complete it. We want you to complete the course to the best of your ability so please do get in touch.

Are there any other ways I can improve my grade?
(E.g. I got a B but I want an A)

Yes. If you submit Task 3, you can increase your grade by doing the optional supplementary tasks listed below on or before 4pm on 23 September.

Please note that extensions do not apply to these supplementary tasks. You will not be able to complete them after 4pm on 23 September.

Optional supplementary tasks

These optional supplementary tasks are each worth an additional 5% grade increase. You can complete a maximum of three in order to receive a 15% grade bump on your assignment. You can complete an additional supplementary task designed to give one of your classmates, and not you, the 5% grade bump. Supplementary tasks are assessed by their completion, not on the quality of the task itself.

Book a 15-minute Zoom meeting with Lorena to discuss the argument or intervention you will make in your final research project. The meeting needs to take place before Friday 16 September. (Space is limited. First come, first served.)
Create a short description of the method you are using to keep track of your searches (this could take the form of a table or spreadsheet) and any criteria you developed for assessing the material you find (e.g. must be peer reviewed; must be ethnographic; must contain a specific term such as “liberation”). Upload this description to the ANTH 302 Discord server (or send it to Lorena to upload on your behalf) by 4pm on Friday 23 September. You also need to mark supplementary task 2 as complete in the optional supplementary task submission link folder on Blackboard (otherwise Lorena might not see it).
Present an excerpt from your research journal in a 10-minute presentation to the class during tutorials in Week 6 or Week 8. You can share an interesting research finding or show how you are organising your research journal. You cannot present a description of your search method (the subject of supplementary task 2) as supplementary task 3. Your presentation can be a live oral presentation or a recorded video played to the class. (Space is limited so you will need to book this in advance by emailing Lorena.)
Write a short self-assessment of your research journal (Main Task 3) that answers the following questions:

a) What were your goals for this assignment? How have you met them, or not met them? Give an example.
b) What are the specific strengths of your research journal? What makes you most proud? Provide an example.
c) What are the weaknesses of your research journal? What could you do differently in future?

Upload your short self-assessment (no more than one page) to the submission link on Blackboard.
Write an email to Lorena nominating one classmate from ANTH 302 who has helped you with your research journal in some way, explaining how they helped and what their help meant to you. You will need to show how they helped you – and give an example –rather than wax lyrical about what an awesome person they are. Note: for this task, the nominee (rather than you as the nominator) will receive the 5% bump. Nominees can only receive one 5% grade bump regardless of how many people nominate them.
You may also propose your own supplementary task that relates to the course in some way and will be helpful to other students. For example, a student in a different course recorded themselves reading one of the required readings and provided this as a resource for other students. If you are interested in proposing your own supplementary task, please get in touch with Lorena before completing the task. Your task must be pre-approved for you to receive credit, and the task must be completed by 4pm on Friday 23 September.

If you complete all three main tasks and three of these optional supplementary tasks, then you will receive an A+ (100%) on this assignment. If you did not submit Task 3, you are not eligible to receive a supplementary grade bump.

Final Research Project (40% of final grade)

The research project is the final phase of your research. You will draw on your research journal to address your central argument or intervention, critically discuss your findings, and critically reflect on them in your final project. I recommend spending up to 40 hours on the final research project.

Final Research Project presentation

Depending on the option you choose, you can present your final project in the form of a research essay, ‘zine, blog post, poetry, podcast, or another innovative format (discussed with Lorena).

For Options 1 and 2, your final project is what will be assessed (meaning if you create a podcast, we mark your podcast). Because of this, you are also required to submit a paragraph of no more than 300 words (not included in the final research project word count) that:

Explains the rationale for your chosen format (e.g. if you present your findings in the form of a research essay, explain why that is the most appropriate format for your topic); and
Provides an honest assessment of the work you put in to the final project and what you think your grade should be based on the assessment criteria.

Option 3 involves designing and enacting an intervention related to a contemporary liberation movement. In addition to the intervention (which is not assessed) you are required to submit a critical reflection about your intervention and how it relates to ANTH 302 (which will be assessed). For your critical reflection, you are required to introduce the liberation movement; outline the issue you sought to bring attention to and the rationale for your intervention; situate your intervention in relation other examples of scholar-activism; explain how you applied anthropological practices and course themes to your intervention; reflect upon the impact of your intervention; and provide an honest assessment of the work you put into the intervention and what you think your grade should be based on the assessment criteria. This must be an individual submission and can be made in written (2000 words) or oral (10 minutes) form.

Final Research Project Assessment Criteria

Your final research project will be assessed out of a possible mark of 100 using these criteria:

Your ability to follow the instructions for the topic you chose, as outlined in the ANTH 302 Research Project Overview document (10 marks)
Your ability to construct and present a convincing argument that answers the research question (for Options 1 and 2) or that shows how your intervention was designed to advance the visions of liberation of your chosen liberation movement (for Option 3) (20 marks)
Your ability to critically engage with and apply core theoretical concepts and course themes (20 marks)
Your ability to synthesise and analyse at least eight relevant resources (20 marks)
How well your work is presented (e.g. spelling, grammar, layout, subtitles, production quality, use of colour) and the appropriateness of the format to your topic (10 marks)
The accuracy of your referencing technique (10 marks)
Your ability to critically reflect upon your position within this research (10 marks)

These assessment criteria need to be visible regardless of the format of your final research project. Marks will be deducted if we cannot easily see how your work meets these criteria.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Anthropology for Liberation readings 3.0

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 moved journal articles, book chapters (including chapters from the books above), and other relevant resources to ‘recommended reading’ status, and set four books as required reading.

Why would I assign four books when we know that “up to 80% of uni students don’t read their assigned readings?” Two reasons:

To slow down

My first reason is a response to feminist calls for “slow scholarship” (Mountz, Bonds, Mansfield, Loyd, Hyndman, Walton-Roberts, Basu, Whitson, Hawkins, and Hamilton 2015; O’Neill 2014). 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) write:

“Slow 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.”

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 – theirs and mine – 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, given that we only spend 2-3 hours per week together in lectures and tutorials.)

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 method of engagement with each text, compared with reading the same number of journal articles or individual book chapters from different sources.

To practice “close reading”

My second reason comes from seeing the success my colleague Grant Otsuki 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 “How I read,” where he outlines a mode of reading that is close, constructive, positive, generous, slightly genealogical, methodological in focus, and ethical (Dumit 2012):

Close reading means that I attend to the specifics of the text. I am interested in how a text as a text makes arguments. What specific modes of writing, grammars, uses of words, modes of characterizing others, and of characterizing others’ arguments are used. I bring up the author’s 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. My aim here is to locate the textual basis for making a claim about what the text is doing. Hence my predilection for comments about the method of the text within the text. A general reading I would (perhaps unfairly) characterize as one that sees a text as an instance of something that transcends it (the author’s intention, oeuvre, the times, etc., see Foucault’s “What is an author?”).
Joe Dumit, “How I read”, 2012

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:

What is their positionality in this book?
What are their politics/ethics?
What is this book’s central argument? What is the author’s aim in writing this book? Are the two the same?
How is the book structured? Is there a central organising metaphor, for example?
What ethnographic methods does the author use?
What is their theoretical argument?
What is their style of writing?
What scholarly literature are they engaging with? What else counts as knowledge?
What kind of knowledge is being produced through this book? What intervention are they seeking to make (e.g., to anthropology, to West Papua)?

After that I will focus on the book by discussing a paragraph, following an idea as it appears throughout the book, or sometimes going through a section sentence by sentence.

More recently I have been inspired by #collabrary, a project by Max Liboiron and Deondre Smiles, that involves reading with reciprocity, accountability, and generosity, and posting short literature reviews on Twitter. I highly recommend reading Liboiron’s blog post, “#Collabrary: a methodological experiment for reading with reciprocity.” Liboiron’s book Pollution is Colonialism (2021) is on the list of books students can choose to read for one of their assignments – an Anthropology Book Club Kit – which I might write about in another blog post.

Books we read in 2021

Books from left to right:

Kiddle, Rebecca, Bianca Elkington, Moana Jackson, Ocean Ripeka Mercier, Mike Ross, Jennie Smeaton and Amanda Thomas. 2020. Imagining Decolonisation. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books.

Walker, Ranginui. 2004. Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (revised edition). Auckland: Penguin.

Webb-Gannon, Camellia. 2021. Morning Star Rising: The Politics of Decolonization in West Papua. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

Reese, Ashanté. 2019. Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

References

Dumit, Joseph. 2012. “How I read.” https://dumit.net/how-i-read/

Freire, Paulo. 1996. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin.

Harrison, Faye Venetia (ed). 2010. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation (third edition). Arlington, VA: Association of Black Anthropologists, American Anthropological Association.

Liboiron, Max. 2021. “#Collabrary: a methodological experiment for reading with reciprocity.” https://civiclaboratory.nl/2021/01/03/collabrary-a-methodological-experiment-for-reading-with-reciprocity/

Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution is Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, and Winifred Curran. 2015. “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance Through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14 (4): 1235–59. https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058

Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, and Winifred Curran. 2016. “All for slow scholarship and slow scholarship for all.” https://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/slow-scholarship-slow-scholarship/

O’Neill, Maggie. 2014. “The Slow University: Work, Time and Well-Being.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 15 (3): Art. 14. https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/2226/3697

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (second edition). London: Zed Books.

Approaching examiners’ reports

So you have your examiners’ reports—what to do now?

The oral exam

Your opening 15-minute presentation

Some final reflection on examiners

Activity One: Investigate your thoughts with The Professor Is In

Tasks:

Reflective question:

Activity Two: Reverse outline a model piece of writing

Tasks:

Reflective question:

Activity Three: Starting on the ground

Tasks:

Reflective question:

Activity Four: Writing yourself into the text

Tasks:

Reflective question:

Activity Five: Ethnographic storytelling

Tasks:

Reflective question:

Developing the tool with Claude AI

Designing the content

Building the interactive tool and badges

Open Day Experiences

Take time to understand expectations around the use of AI

Class activity: Grade a mini-essay generated by ChatGPT

“But I can’t draw!”

Step 1. Draw a spiral

Step 2. Make a list

Step 3. ‘X’ page

Step 4. Craft an ethnographic story

Step 5. Make a 4-panel comic

Brainstorming Gen X

Asking an anthropological research question

RNZ interview questions

Anthropological questions I developed

References cited:

How to anthropology

How to university

Lecture topics

Readings

Reflections

Book Review (30% of final grade)

What should the book review look like?

Books to choose from

Critically reading your chosen book

Tips for writing your book review

Marking criteria

Instructional words

Getting feedback on a draft of your book review

The EMRN Rubric

Book review revise and resubmit process

Major Research Project

What will the final research project look like?

Research Project Options and Instructions

Option 1: Anthropology and activism

Option 2: Anthropology, decolonisation, liberation

Option 3: Design and enact an intervention related to a contemporary liberation movement

Research Journal (30% of final grade)

What is a research journal?

What is “task-based grading?”

How does task-based grading work for this assignment?

Task 1. Contribute to a Group Bibliography

Task 2. Compose two emails to contemporary authors

Task 3. Maintain and submit a 2000-word research journal

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I have an extension on the main tasks?

I didn’t do Task 3. Can I still pass the assignment?

Are there any other ways I can improve my grade?(E.g. I got a B but I want an A)

Optional supplementary tasks

Final Research Project (40% of final grade)

Final Research Project presentation

Final Research Project Assessment Criteria

To slow down

To practice “close reading”

Books we read in 2021

References

Are there any other ways I can improve my grade?
(E.g. I got a B but I want an A)