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.”