Teaching Hub

Diversity in Field Research

In their recent posts, Jo Weaver and Chris Lynn considers how field work effects the family and how it’s difficult to teach because it depends more on relationships than technical know-how.

In “Talking about Race with ‘White Person Bias,'” Weaver notes that social tension shapes teaching and field research, and she asks researchers to re-examine their authority.

Last year, when I received a student review that claimed my teaching suffered from ‘white person bias,’ I took the comment very seriously because I regularly teach about social inequality and social justice in the south. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to engage racial difference in an overarching cultural context of racial tension meaningfully, respectfully, and in a way that is useful to all parties involved. Although I thought I was doing this pretty well, my student’s comment reminds me that I have a long way to go.

Read the rest of “Talking about Race with ‘White Person Bias.'” 

Lynn’s “Family Matters: We Talk the Talk, but Do We Walk the Walk?” explains how researchers balance fieldwork and family and the circumstances that might limit their work.

As academic anthropologists, my colleagues and I talk diversity all the time, but it refers to more than heritage, socioeconomic status, or gender. Jo Weaver and I have convened a session at the upcoming AAA conference about ‘Problems and Priorities in Biocultural Research’ . . . but our session is really as much about diversity as it is bringing non-research design-related issues to the fore. What other biases influence who can become an anthropologist?

Read the rest of “Family Matters: We Talk the Talk, but Do We Walk the Walk.” 

 

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