Ethnographic Pedagogies: Circulating Anthropology’s Strengths as a Public Discipline, Mitra Emad

These comments offer the story of how Cultural Studies began, programmatically and pedagogically, at a mid-sized, land-grant state university in northern Minnesota. Revising an existing humanities program and drawing from collaborators’ experiences as union and community organizers, this small Cultural Studies program ultimately developed and sustained its efforts through core engagements with ethnography. Ethnography has long been an important research method for Cultural Studies. Since the late 1980s, the critical rethinking of ethnographic method by cultural anthropologists has led to new pedagogical styles especially effective for undergraduate programs oriented towards civic engagement and public lives. The development of this particular Cultural Studies program in its ethnographic and pedagogical specificities draws from and reflects an epistemological moment currently at play in the human sciences that challenges the humanities to engage directly with contemporary culture – a challenge that has at times in the public culture of academia, been dismissed as “vocational.” Fostering reflexivity, socio-political action, and interdisciplinarity, ethnographic pedagogies drawn from contemporary anthropology create a playing field for undergraduate students’ civic engagement and public lives.