Sarah Winkler-Reid
Humans are amazing learners. Speaking, reading, dancing, driving, fishing, knitting, building things, fixing things. Learning what is required to be a (particular kind) of child or a (particular kind) of adult. All are complex multistep processes that take time to learn and are often supported by practices of education: explicit instruction, guidance, adjustment and deliberation. Everywhere we turn, we can observe processes and practices of learning and education, and only a minority of these are happening in formal education institutions. Furthermore, the learning that does occur in these institutions often differs from the formal learning aims (Blum 2016, 2019; Varenne 2007).
For example, during my PhD fieldwork in a London high school, I was struck by the immense learning achievements of the young people I spent time with, 15- and 16-year-olds preparing for their end-of-year General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) national examinations. This is not because all of them, or even most of them, would excel in their exams – among the students there was a spectrum of orientations towards formal schooling, ranging from active resistance and apathy to intense commitment. However, I had the privilege of observing firsthand the way young people created and maintained relationships, friendship groups, and a hierarchical social order through the sheer force of their actions. Through talk, judgement, evaluation and feelings, peers actively and tenaciously shaped themselves and each other according to particular ideas of what it means to be an acceptable person (Winkler-Reid 2023).
In other words, students were involved in intense peer learning and education practices as part of growing up and becoming particular kinds of adults. While these methods were effective, the official business of schooling – primarily aiming to transmit authorized, static knowledge from teachers to students, and for them to be able to display this knowledge through assessment – was much more hit-and-miss. This contradiction, between the successful, relational and expansive learning occurring between peers, and the limitations and exclusions of formal institutionalized education premised on a ‘transmission model’, is one that has been identified within anthropological scholarship on learning and education (Blum 2016). As I will discuss in this introduction, it is also a recurring theme in this volume as contributors both interrogate current modes of anthropological education, and detail practices that challenge the transmission model and create alternative spaces of learning, both within and outside institutions.
Although some argue about which term is the more encompassing (Blum 2019; Varenne 2007), I will treat learning and education as coupled, helping to illuminate different aspects of intertwined processes. Broadly understood, learning enables a focus on processes and outcomes, what is learnt and how it is learnt, and centralizes learners as agents rather than focusing on the forces acting on them (Blum 2019). Education encourages attention to how we learn with others, intentional activity, reflections on this activity and the sociality of the education that people give each other (Varenne 2007, 2019). As Hervé Varenne argues, education covers the ways ‘people, everywhere, unceasingly, and always in concert with others, work at changing themselves and their consociates through often difficult deliberations’ (2007: 1562). Tim Ingold further proposes understanding education as a way of ‘leading us out into the world’, so we can learn with others and explore different ways of knowing and being. In this way, he argues, education is anthropology’s fundamental imperative (Ingold 2017). Regardless of the focus they take, these scholars agree that learning and education are ubiquitous, fundamental to sociality, and essential to being and becoming a particular kind of person among others. And while learning and education happen everywhere, the form they take differs greatly.
Anthropologists have long been interested in processes of learning and education (White 2023). From the 1930s, a number of ethnographies focused on ‘socialization’ or ‘enculturation’ practices, and questions of the ‘transmission of culture’, with issues of learning implicit in these accounts. This scholarship tended to focus on the activities of adults, and assumed socialization as a straightforward, one-way transmission, with children as vessels into which culture was poured (Froerer 2011). From the 1970s onwards, anthropological research also focused more specifically on learning processes in a broad range of contexts (ibid.), although Blum notes these studies primarily focused on young learners (Blum 2021). Contemporary research is often orientated towards the perspective of the learner (Froerer 2011), and this can be situated within a broader shift in child- and youth-centred anthropology towards a focus on children and young people as capable social actors in their own right, and active participants in their own learning, thus challenging past assumptions that adults’ ideas will be uncritically reproduced in socialization and learning processes (Froerer 2011; Hirschfeld 2002; Montgomery 2011; Stryker 2016).
Through this wealth of past ethnographic research, key themes have emerged: that learning is fundamentally social and often part of other social processes not explicitly designated as learning; that there is huge variety in the settings and contexts of learning and education, including who is involved, what kinds of knowledge, skills and beliefs are shared and learned, and who is considered a learner; and finally, that while learning might involve explicit and deliberate direction and instruction it often occurs without these, through observation and participation (Blum 2016; Froerer 2011; Lancy, Bock and Gaskins 2009).
These expansive ways of understanding learning in anthropology are at odds with the dominant ways they are practised in the ‘industrial model’ of institutionalized education (Blum 2016). Learning here is understood as a mental, individual process: the internalization of external information, with education the one-way transmission of authorized knowledge from one generation to the next (Blum 2016; Ingold 2017; Lave 1996). These forms of learning and education also rest on a particular understanding of the learner as an individual, separate and separable from others, and deficient, ‘lacking’ knowledge that will be supplied by the teacher (Ingold 2017; Lave 1996; Winkler-Reid 2023). The result, as Susan D. Blum argues, is
The more we take ‘learning’ out of context and put it, cleanly and abstractly, into an institutional framework and ask students to perform in isolation, the less possible it is to learn. This now universal system of institutionalized schooling not only destroys joy and curiosity, and creates dropouts and failures, winners and losers. It also often fails to achieve even the goals we set, however assessed and however defined. (Blum 2016: 3)
Paolo Freire has called this ‘banking education’, with education imagined as ‘an act of depositing, in which the students are depositories and the teacher is the depositor’ (Freire [1970] 2005: 72). Similarly, Tim Ingold, building on the work of John Dewey identifies a dominant transmission model of education, which aims to ‘transcribe pre-existing content from head-to-head’ (2017: 17). Although transmission education was identified by Dewey over a hundred years ago, and banking education by Freire over fifty years ago, it continues to structure much education practice today. Abstraction and decontextualization are still often considered ‘the hallmark of good learning’ (Burgos-Martinez 2019; Kamp, Withagen and Orth 2019; Lave 1996). Furthermore, in recent years these forms of education have been re-emphasized in politically driven education policy. For example, in UK school education, successive Conservative coalition and Conservative governments between 2010 and 2024 required a return to traditional modes of instruction and curriculum, and placed renewed emphasis on summative examinations as assessment (Alexander 2020; Gewirtz et al. 2021).
This complex relationship between learning and institutional contexts of education has been explored as part of anthropologies of education, which started to emerge in different parts of the world from the 1950s (Anderson-Levitt 2011). While diverse, a central strand of this scholarship has been a focus and cross-cultural comparison of how people teach and learn across a range of contexts, including both informal and formal education (Henze 2020). In terms of educational institutions, schools have been a central focus, with mass schooling a key project of colonialization and the formation of nation states; currently over 90 per cent of children attend school globally (Gilliam and Markom 2024). As ethnographic research on schooling shows, school plays an important role in processes of exclusion and inclusion, and the reproduction of power and inequality (Henze 2020). Schooling often involves the explicit and implicit shaping of subjects and citizens, and the creation of hierarchies of belonging; schools are also sites where these ideals, categories and meanings are contested, negotiated and made sense anew, and where students bring their own preoccupations, values and interests to create peer structures, often away from adult eyes (Alexander 2020; Gilliam and Markom 2024; Sancho 2015; Tanu 2017; Winkler-Reid 2023).
There has been significantly less focus on higher education institutions in the anthropology of education, although, like schools, as field sites they are ‘central to contemporary struggles over race, gender, sexuality, class, international migration, and neoliberalism’ (Gusterson 2017: 435). Furthermore, universities are central sites of knowledge production, and in recent years have become key players in urban development, local and national economies, and commercial endeavours (Gusterson 2017; Winkler-Reid 2024; Wright and Shore 2022).
However, despite this long and rich anthropological scholarship on learning and education, focused and explicit attention to these subjects in the mainstream of the discipline has been lacking (Blum 2019; Gusterson 2017; Levinson 1999; Varenne 2007). Drawing comparisons with other ubiquitous and vital aspects of human experience, such as food, childhood and bodies, that were previously considered so mundane there was nothing anthropologically interesting to say about them, Susan D. Blum asks ‘half seriously’, ‘why don’t anthropologists care about learning (or education or school)?’ (2019: 642). Reviewing various leading mainstream North American anthropology journals, she finds a distinct under-representation of articles focused on learning, education, schools or universities. Thus, as Blum argues, although there have been sporadic calls over the last forty years for learning, education and schooling to be brought to the fore as subjects of sustained focus in anthropology (Gusterson 2017; Levinson 1999; Spindler 1973; Varenne 2007; Wolcott 1982), these have yet to ‘take’.
This volume aims to address this call by centralizing anthropology’s role in questions of learning and education. As discussed above, this focus requires a recognition of the tensions between the ubiquitous, diverse, social and effective processes of learning and education that happen everywhere, and the powerful, global forms of institutional education reproducing authorized knowledge and paradigms, which perpetuate exclusion and privilege, and are premised on individualized learners and decontextualized learning. As I will discuss in the next section, these tensions are equally apparent in higher education, including anthropological education.
If learning and education have been sidelined in the mainstream of the discipline, even less attention has been paid to ‘anthropology as education, as opposed to the anthropology of education’ (Blum 2021; Mazur-Stommen 2006: 274; White 2023). This is surprising considering that teaching takes up a significant proportion of working time for many anthropologists. Twenty years ago, David Mills, Dorle Dracklé and Iain R. Edgar wrote in the introduction to their volume on European anthropological education (stemming from the incipient EASA Teaching Anthropology Network):
Amidst the diverse professional lives of European social anthropologists, teaching and training are important common denominators, to which we devote a great deal of time, energy and creativity. Yet this work is not always a cause for pride or even debate, but instead can become a ‘fugitive activity’ . . . We pay surprisingly little ethnographic attention to the ways in which we impart, embody and reproduce our own anthropological skills and perspectives to our students. (Mills, Dracklé and Edgar 2004: 2)
Although there have been a growing number of valuable resources and publications on teaching and learning anthropology since then,1 the ongoing lack of mainstream attention to such an important part of the discipline remains puzzling (White 2023). This puzzle was one of the starting points of this volume.
Transmission modes of education continue to be the norm in higher education, including anthropological education. In this educational mode, classrooms and lecture theatres are spaces for the transmission of authorized knowledge. Teachers decide what students should learn, assign readings, give lectures, and hope that students will internalize this external knowledge. Often, this is followed by marking student assignments and feeling demoralized that this process did not really work, or bemoaning that students ‘don’t care’ (Blum 2016).2
These forms of hierarchical, authoritative education are deeply implicated in persistent forms of coloniality (Barnett-Naghshineh and Pattathu 2021; Bhambra, Gebrial and Nişancıoğlu 2018; Judge, Fukuzawa and Ferrier 2021). Indigenous and Black feminist anthropologists have been at the fore of long and deep critiques of anthropology, highlighting the many forms of epistemic violence, injustice and coloniality inherent in disciplinary knowledge and research practices, as well as offering alternatives (Bolles 2013; Harrison 1997; McClaurin [2001] 2024; Smith 2021; Wilson 2020). As these critiques have illuminated, epistemic coloniality continually reproduces a hierarchy between Western rational, objective, scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge. This recreates a world of extractible and exploitable objects of knowledge, justifying and enacting exclusions and violences against bearers of other kinds of knowledge (Gatt 2023; Tsosie 2017).
These forms of dominant knowledge are then reproduced through transmission forms of education. As Olivia Barnett-Naghshineh and Antony Pattathu write, in anthropology classrooms this often takes the form of learning ‘about an “an Indigenous Other” through the mouthpiece of a European “knower”’ (Barnett-Naghshineh and Pattathu 2021: 5; Berg 2021; Gatt 2022). While to some degree theoretical debates in ‘dominant anthropologies’ (Restrepo and Escobar 2005) have grappled with how to hold space for difference without defaulting to domination and erasure (Fúnez-Flores 2022), this reflexivity has been less apparent in classrooms. As Sara Bafo and Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan highlight in relation to British social anthropology:
The core interest in diversity within the discipline might be imagined as an enduring impetus to see, understand, and manage from afar through the white gaze. Whilst there have been ongoing critiques of this orientation and efforts to disrupt the white gaze in ethnographic research, the discipline continues to create teaching and learning spaces where whiteness is taken as the norm. (Bafo and Dattatreyan 2021: 50)
As scholars highlight, whiteness intersects with cis- and heteronormativity, patriarchy, classism and ableism in the classroom, and a significant effect of this is that students who do not fit within these norms experience exclusion, marginalization and silencing in their anthropological education, made to feel ‘they are not cut out for anthropology’, rather than ‘anthropology is not cut out for them’ (Berg 2021: 70; Bafo and Dattatreyan 2021; Diallo and Friborg 2021).
While this form of anthropological education remains dominant, it has been and continues to be challenged with students at the forefront of critiques of the classroom and demands for change (Bafo and Dattatreyan 2021; Camufingo 2021; Diallo and Friborg 2021). There are also many examples of teachers and students educating otherwise, a number of which can be found in this volume. These examples show that the classroom can be a space of great efficacy, both for the reproduction of hierarchy and exclusion, and for confronting these. As Barnett-Naghshineh and Pattathu write, classrooms are spaces ‘where racialization and coloniality get made and remade through affect and emotion but can also be a space for decolonial reckoning, where colonial histories, racism and enduring forms of colonial violence are brought into student’s awareness’ (Barnett-Naghshineh and Pattathu 2021: 4).
Outside the classroom, powerful examples of learning and education as reckoning and transformation can also be observed. As I first drafted this introduction in the spring of 2024, students around the world, including at Newcastle University where I work, were occupying their university campuses in solidarity with the Palestinian people and to protest Israeli state occupation, apartheid, and the genocide in Gaza (Dar 2025; Dasha et al 2024; Engelberg 2024; Kenway and Maher 2024). Many of these camps have been met with ‘brutal repression’ from university senior managers, law enforcement and security (Nanz 2024). The encampments build upon a history of student activism to urgently protest injustice. With teach-ins, libraries and a non-hierarchical space for ongoing interactions between students, staff and members of the local community, they also represent sites of learning, solidarity and creativity (Kenway and Maher 2024). In these encampments students ‘form and sustain collective action, engage in research, produce knowledge, and enact social practices of resistance’ (Fúnez-Flores 2020: 52). Through these practices they are highlighting connections between past and present colonial projects, capitalism, violent oppression and how educational institutions are implicated in these. For example, students have used their research skills to make visible university involvement in weapons companies and draw attention to their institutions as significant political economic players, rather than simply benign education providers (Dasha et al. 2024). Each encampment has demands of their own university management, often around calls to disclose, divest and academic boycott (Al Jazeera 2024). These students are enacting an alternative vision of education ‘as something you do with and for other people’ (Kenway and Maher 2024: 390), a vital example of the power of educating otherwise.
In this section, I have discussed dominant forms of transmission education in higher education, and the valuable and growing scholarship that challenges these modes of education and their colonial underpinnings, offering alternative models for transformative learning. For teachers (including myself) confronting their own blind spots and complicity in these dominant forms of education, these represent important opportunities for ongoing learning. The contradictions between the reproduction of hierarchical and colonial forms and regenerative alternatives are key themes through this volume. In the following section, I explore how these concerns emerged through the conversations that gave rise to this volume.
The co-editors of this volume came together with a shared desire to explore questions of anthropological learning and education, and to bring them to the centre of the discipline. We wanted to gather anthropologists to interrogate the many ways in which education, including anthropological education, perpetuates violence, exclusion and privilege, and to explore the possibilities and pathways of knowing and being that anthropological education can open up. These conversations and events were supported by the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK (ASA).
We came to this shared purpose with a range of experience in trying to do things differently in relation to learning, teaching, education and universities. Research-wise this included a focus on educational institutions, school (Winkler-Reid 2023) and university (Ivancheva 2023; Wright and Shore 2022), and theoretical explorations in learning and education (Ingold 2017). In relation to teaching, this included courses and a textbook co-written with students (Dennis and Dawson 2022), experiments with pedagogical practice (Ingold 2022; Gatt 2022), and challenges to neoliberal higher education (Reclaiming our University 2016 – Ingold as part of a collective of students and staff at the University of Aberdeen; Fotta, Ivancheva and Pernes 2020). Outside higher education, it included involvement in alternative spaces of education, such as a project engaging teenage girls as experts in their own lives rather than deficient learners in need of intervention (McBride et al. 2024; Winkler-Reid 2023), the use of anthropological methods and theories for corporate training programs (Sear 2023), and involvement with an online platform providing free social science and political training courses in Arabic (‘Al Sharq Academia’, Elsayed E. Abdelhamid, this volume).
Building from this combined experience, we identified five key areas deserving focus, with different co-editors taking the lead in convening conversations and organizing group activities that brought anthropologists together to share their practices and engage in collective thinking (with this co-author helping to coordinate the overall process). We called these ‘studios’ to highlight them as meeting spaces of practice, collaboration and creation. The topics and convenors were:
The ongoing nature of these multiple conversations enabled cross-cutting themes to emerge and be reflected on through the course of the discussions. These discussions were infused with an interrogation of educational institutions as sites of power, and the ways that practices of learning and teaching can reproduce privilege and exclusion. At the same time, all studios produced contributions that vividly detailed and often modelled alternative practices of anthropological education and learning that challenged the transmission model and created regenerative spaces within and outside institutions.
For example, Caroline Gatt, co-convenor for Studio 1, ‘Anthropology as Education’, reflected that many of the contributors in their studio recognized the disjuncture between different practices of anthropology. As they discussed in the studio, while scholars are seeking to recognize, make space for and work productively with difference in theory and research, this has been less the case in classrooms. A key question explored in this studio was how to find some kind of coherence between these key practices of anthropology – or at least ways of doing it that do not contradict each other. Relatedly, contributors in Studio 2, ‘Decolonializing the Academy?’, started from a recognition of the powerful and irrevocable ways the world, and education within it, has been shaped by colonial rule, categories and epistemologies, including the coloniality present in anthropological teaching. Drawing from her fieldwork in Brazil, Camila Ferreira Marinelli quoted Indigenous scholar Alana Manchineri recalling the invisibility and silencing of Indigenous knowledges in the curriculum during her undergraduate degree, and highlights the damage wrought by ‘epistemic monoculture’ (Part II, Chapter 18). Contributors to this studio also shared a range of education practices in different contexts through which students and teachers interrogated ongoing coloniality and sought to find ‘otherwises’ that could enact different presents and futures, and could recognize ‘entangled knowledges’ (Edgar Xakriabá in Marinelli, this volume).
In Studio 3, ‘Academic–Student Collaborations’, Simone Dennis similarly argued that while anthropology takes the exploration of difference as its central remit, in the classroom this is often through the transmission of authorized knowledge which aims towards the unquestioned propagation of sameness. As Dennis argues, even though teaching in higher education may take the form of a dialogue, students are guided towards the transformation of their understandings, so they more closely replicate those of the teacher. In this implicit aim towards sameness, there is often no room for ‘student knowing’ to disrupt ‘authorized knowledge’. Challenging this, she co-convened her studio with undergraduate students from the Australian National University (Stella Burgess, Evie Haultain, Rowena McPhee, Beth Weaver and Sarah Pilgrim) and co-wrote the chapter in this volume with students from the University of Adelaide (Cindy Bennetts, Mikayla Black, Emily Boyer, Ella Marie Di Stasio, Monica Macmullin, Jude Martin, Cabe Munneke, Nick Nicmanis-Everingham, Nicolas Orr, Bethany Petros, Rhea Rao, Georgia Stephens, Ebony Werner, Keely Emms, Paola Tine and Chenyu Zong). In this chapter, students critique representations of the ‘desirable and visitable exotic elsewhere’ used to advertise anthropology degrees, and investigate the conditions through which these images are made, the institutions from which they come, and their own position in relation to these. Reporting back on her studio, Dennis also recognized that students often expect to receive some version of ‘authorised knowledge’. As she argued, we need to acknowledge the deep comforts as well as discomforts for students in being spoken to authoritatively – the sense that they are ‘getting what they are paying for’ and being taught by ‘experts’ – and actively work with these expectations in teaching.
Another example of student–academic collaborations shared in Studio 3 highlighted the possibilities of using the materials and spaces of higher education as a productive tension that students can both work with and against. Paul Boyce (tutor on the module) and Natasha Jenks (student on the module) shared on behalf of the whole class a recently completed module at Sussex University, ‘Anthropology in the World’. As they described, the co-conception and co-teaching on the module (between students, tutor, and other invited participants) led to a range of critical perspectives on anthropological pedagogy and, more widely, its disciplines and norms. As they elaborated, this co-creation of critique was ‘constructed both through anthropology and through a critique of anthropology’. In one activity, the class used Lego blocks to articulate structural orders in learning and the classroom. This Lego model depicted ‘headless’ students ‘under the whip of canonical structures and teaching’ and enabled them to critique the marginality of diversities of experience; for while neurodiversity, disability, race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality featured as ‘guest stars’, they were not systematically woven through pedagogy. As Jenks highlighted, this module enabled participants to question what knowledge is and how it exists within the institution, to refocus on experiential knowledge and the lived experience of the institution, and to take seriously what it means to be a student.
Participants in Studio 4, ‘Anthropology and the University’, further explored the institutional conditions within which degree-level anthropology is taught, bringing together scholars who are involved in research on higher education. Co-convenors Mariya Ivancheva and Cris Shore noted that even though the history of anthropology as a discipline is closely intertwined with that of the university, there has been relatively little anthropological research that focuses on higher education. Reflecting the tension explored in this introduction between the dominant and the otherwise, the studio was split between contributions from a range of disciplines that focused on the conditions of contemporary neoliberal higher education and those that concentrated on practices of reclaiming the university from these dominating forces. These contributions contextualize the institutional conditions of anthropological education, including the changing labour relations, which position teachers in varying degrees of precarity and insecurity, and further show how anthropology ‘as a way of engaging the world’ can contribute to understanding and activism against the current conditions of higher education.
Also exploring the institutional context of anthropology in higher education, Studio 5 ‘Anthropology Across Disciplines’ (co-convened by Sarah Quillinan and Andrew Dawson) considered how anthropology should be taught and imagined in relation to other disciplines. In the context of a political economy of teaching and learning in which enrolments often entail income, many anthropologists must consider how to make what they teach appealing to students outside of anthropology majors. The studio asked, should we be emphasizing the discipline’s distinctiveness, or leaning into how anthropological training can help to support and bolster effective learning in other disciplines. The studio took the form of a roundtable, with speakers taking different positions in relation to these questions. However, as Cynthia Sear and Andrew Dawson explore in their chapter in this volume, despite these different perspectives, all speakers evoked some kind of journey, movement or obstruction of such. Tracing a history of the journey metaphor in anthropology, including how it is used to promote anthropological education and considering what is both represented and concealed through this metaphor, Sear and Dawson argue that other metaphors might better help us to build a more fit-for-purpose vision of anthropology and anthropological education than individual self-betterment.
Reflecting on these conversations on anthropology, learning and education overall, Tim Ingold (co-convenor of Studio 1) expressed surprise and frustration that despite our open-ended starting place of education, so many of the discussions had focused on educational institutions. As attendee David Mills suggested in the subsequent discussion, this may reflect the way education as a concept has been so captured by institutions that it is hard to imagine it otherwise. However, Mariya Ivancheva (co-convenor of Studio 4) (2023), drawing on her research on an ‘alternative’ higher education project, the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, also highlighted how institutions sanction particular educations as valid forms, and this sanctioned education often holds importance for people previously excluded from formal education. As Ivancheva argued, we need to consider different histories and the way the reproduction of institutions can be forms of resistance as well as domination. Thus, as will be explored further in this volume, diverse possibilities of educating otherwise can be found both within and outside of educational institutions.
This volume builds from these collective conversations and is divided into five parts, one for each of the studios, with each part edited by the studio co-convenors. These parts take different forms and include longer chapters, shorter essays, reflections, a zine, ethnographic fiction and visual images. This range of contributions represents our aim to diversify beyond the usual chapter format, and to harness different modes of analysis and expression, and the insights they can provide. We encourage readers to engage with the volume in a way that makes sense to them: reading from start to finish, or reading one section as a whole, or just dipping into the diversity of contributions.
Sarah Winkler-Reid is a senior lecturer in Social Anthropology at Newcastle University. Her research explores education, labour and ethics in contemporary Britain. She has examined this through a focus on young people’s daily lives in school, and now through a focus on construction and urban development in the North East of England. She is the author of Individually Ourselves: Personhood, Ethics, and Everyday Life at School (Berghahn Books 2023).