For Us, with Love
Teaching Anthropology
Category: English
A To-Do List: Song Writing as Anthropological Method
Teaching Anthropology
Disrupted Velocities: Embracing Student Agency
This article explores anthropological insights in/outside of classroom spaces and is also a pedagogical experiment in embracing student agency. Co-first authored by four undergraduate students at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LS…
Toward a Tactile Anthropology
Teaching Anthropology
Introduction to the Special Issue Reciprocal Vulnerability
In this special issue, we seek to uncover the vulnerabilities of researchers in anthropological fieldwork and academia, tracing their political and epistemological potential for the creation of ethnographic knowledge that is based on pract…
Editorial SJSCA 31/2025
Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology
Anthropoesy
What might the transformation in transformative anthropology entail? While several responses might be generated, one element that is generally kept to the background is transformation from within. This “inner enquiry” is not necessarily of…
It Takes More Than One To Hold Complexity
This article discusses the potentials and challenges of psychoanalytically oriented “interpretation workshops”: interpretive, collective spaces that address ethnographic fieldwork’s subconscious, emotional, and experiential aspects. While …
Ascona Charter Response—Towards a Just Academia
This contribution proposes a primary focus on academia as a relational economy that subtends academics as individuals, rather than on relationships running between academics and the outside world—such as research participants. In this rega…
Weaponised Positionality? Coercive Disclosure in the “Publish or Perish” Academy
This paper brings anthropological scholarship on reflexivity and positionality in conversation with debates around issues of self-exploitation in the neoliberal university, to argue that the publication pressures early career anthropologis…
Book Review of Frontiers of Belonging
Book review of: Lems, Annika. 2022. Frontiers of Belonging: The Education of Unaccompanied Refugee Youth. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Rethinking the Role of Payments in Research
Navigating payments in ethnographic research provides insights into social dynamics within ethnographic research contexts. Drawing from research with financially vulnerable queer male sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya, this article explores th…
Opinion Piece for The Ascona Transformation Charter
This opinion piece discusses the relevance of The Ascona Transformation Charter in the Peruvian case.
The Symbolic Violence of the Unspoken
This paper explores the silence of my traumatic experience, the feeling of vulnerability, and insecurity that affected my fieldwork and the writing process. Drawing on the concept of “auto-reflexivity”, I address the “double violence”, exp…
ACTRACT. The Ascona Transformation Charter
In this 21st century, the enormous scale and extent of social inequalities and ecological devastation prompt us to revisit the relevance and positionality of anthropology as a discipline and a societal project. how then to address systemic…
Testimonies of Violence during Ethnographic Research
This article looks at how anthropologists deal with the effects of witnessing violence. Although anthropologists work in interaction with human beings, they rarely discuss the consequences of these encounters on their mental equilibrium. H…
Reaffirming the Role of Anthropology in Transformative Change
This brief response to reviews of the Ascona Charter asks how it resonates with and connects diverse realities, concerns, and experiences of transformation. The Charter responds to a collective call from students and engaged scholars for a…
Unveiling Vulnerability
This article explores the process of “unveiling” researcher positionality during fieldwork in Swiss psychiatric spaces and in academia, whilst the researcher herself has a personal connection to the topic as a family member of someone wit…
Foreword
This foreword discusses the ongoing tradition of self-reflection and critique within anthropology, focusing on its impact on PhD students. It highlights how contemporary debates about representation, cultural performance, and decolonizatio…
Ethnographic Intimacy
In recent decades, anthropologists have increasingly recognised the researcher’s vulnerability as an inherent and indispensable element of ethnographic field research. This article shares my ethnographic fieldwork experiences navigating th…
Mass Voilence, Self-Censorship, and the Diasporic Web
Conducting research among populations affected by mass violence, especially when such violence takes place in colonial contexts, raises ethical and methodological challenges that require reflexivity. Drawing on fieldwork conducted among th…
Escaping the Game of Representation
In my doctoral research, I work on memory practices of youth collectives in Quibdó, capital of the department of the Chocó (Colombian Pacific). Chocó is a territory marked by many stigmas, and Afro-Colombian youth in Quibdó is considered O…
Art-based (Teaching) Methods as Performance in Ethnography, Restitution, Dissemination
Despite the urgency of developing and promoting reflexivity and innovative, art-based methods as an alternative to the text-centredness of science in general and anthropology in particular – as a means of data collection and dissemination …
Migration, Representation, and Reflexivity.
Contemporary anthropology increasingly confronts challenges of representation amid evolving cultural, social, and political landscapes. This special feature investigates how anthropologists engage in multimodal practices—from academic writ…
Book review of The Afterlives of Extraction
Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology