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The afterlife of CoPED: Entanglements and impacts of a participatory learning field school in Sicily
Annals of Anthropological Practice
Abstract
This paper critically explores the afterlife of CoPED, an international interdisciplinary participatory action field school in eastern Sicily from 2015 to 2022. Drawing on fieldnotes taken during the program reflection sessions, small group discussions, informal conversations during meals, and post‐CoPED debriefings with community partners, I consider the long‐term impact of the field school on the different types of participants—students and faculty from three Universities and members of Participatory Presidium of the Simeto River Agreement and other residents, as well as what anthropology has contributed to the program. The article briefly outlines the background of CoPED and its pedagogical commitments, pointing to some of the benefits and challenges that CoPED practices create for the community and for participants. Then, I explore the benefits, costs, and pressure points of CoPED, from material to organizational, to training and mentoring. The article concludes with a reflection on the complexities of long‐term field school collaborations to suggest the roles that anthropology can and does play in shaping the participants and the field in this interdisciplinary context.
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In this paper we define “The Memphis Model,” or the type of praxis‐oriented, critically engaged anthropology developed and used by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Memphis. This model draws inspiration from the Grit and Grind ethos of the city of Memphis, along with its deep cultural and political traditions of grassroots activism for social justice. Here, we define how this is done in practice. The Department of Anthropology continually brings together current students, faculty, alumni, and community partners in coalition to develop approaches to address emerging social justice issues throughout the city, country, and world. This paper draws on one specific example, the Welcome Home Memphis Initiative, a long‐term partnership with community housing agencies, alumni, faculty, and students to counter exploitative housing practices, to explain the process of the Memphis Model.
Here I argue that anthropologists, whether we want it or not, affect the localities and the people at our fieldwork sites. These effects can be short, medium or long‐term, depending on the place and the circumstances. Short term help may mean helping to pick up fruit or vegetables for dinner or lend a hand during the harvest. Mid‐term engagement may mean to set up a school for local teachers wanting to learn anthropological methods or participate over the years in a single project helping with help, funds, or both. Long‐term projects may include setting up museums and helping support them through foreign donations or working with locals through the mediation of a foreign or world‐wide institution such as the World Health Organization or the United Nations. There are specialty areas, such as medical anthropology, which could seem to have the in‐built purpose of achieving long‐term effects, but most other anthropological work does not fall within these categories and anthropologists can choose when and how to commit to local welfare depending on their circumstances and those of their hosts. Here I discuss the ways in which different anthropologists have chosen to engage with locals during and after fieldwork.
While limits of natural resources and climate change are forcing communities all over the world to redefine relationships with their own living environments, this challenge can be interpreted in several ways, depending on a broad variety of different values and beliefs. Not all communities worldwide share the same understanding of values such as love for humankind, sensitivity for other forms of life on earth, care for the breathable air and drinkable water, and appreciation for the soil we plough and build upon. As a matter of fact, too often these values are threatened by other social values, such as monetary efficiency and economic growth, which push societies in a quite different direction. For instance, the ecosystem service concept, with its emphasis on how humans can better take advantage of natural ecosystems, is an attempt to address the environmental crisis while maintaining a utilitarian and human-centric perspective.
This paper argues for the need and shows the possibility for planning researchers to address environmental issues while framing the concept of ecosystem services within a broader value-centered framework. Drawing from Complexity Theory, Deep Ecology and a relational approach to Ecology, this paper proposes the use in planning practice of the concept of Ecological Device that is inclusive of the Ecosystem Service one. An Ecological Device is intended as a project for eco-systemic improvements whose emphasis is not on the maximization of benefits for humans but is on the creation of multispecies and multi-actors functional and emotional relationships (entanglements). In particular, this paper presents one effort to shape Ecological Devices by a long-term, community-university partnership in the Simeto River Valley (Sicily, Italy) in the context of an annual, action-research summer school called CoPED (Community Planning and Ecological Design). The authors, who are also the founders and instructors of the summer school, show the possibilities for ecological devices generated through a highly pragmatic and engaged approach to research to address environmental technical issues as deeply interconnected with social and political dynamics.
Despite a rich history of collaborative and engaged scholarship – and the recent “participatory turn” in anthropology – few anthropology departments train students in the philosophy or methods of collaboration. Graduate training is typically characterized by conventional classroom-based lectures and individualized projects, while participatory research is thought of as something scholars can do later in their careers. The 2013 Health Equity Alliance of Tallahassee (HEAT) Ethnographic Field School disrupted this paradigm. The Field School used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) framework to train graduate students and community stakeholders in applied research methods through participation in an established community/university research partnership, examining race, racism, and health outcomes. The Field School was comprised of a racially, economically, and educationally diverse, intergenerational, multicultural, and multiethnic group of participants. Reflecting on this experience, we challenge the myth of the “lone ethnographer” and argue for a reorientation in anthropological methods training towards transdisciplinary, participatory, and collaborative ethnographic methods
This article contributes to discussions of a public anthropology by bringing participatory action research (PAR) into dialogue with anthropology. PAR appears uniquely compatible with the goals of critical ethnography. Deeply concerned with global/structural inequality, it is also attentive to the power relations inherent within the research encounter; its point of departure is the kind of collaboration that the new (critical) ethnography proposes. However, despite these obvious affinities, few anthropologists have engaged PAR. At a time when more and more anthropologists are advocating forms of collaborative research practice, I argue that these two approaches to research can offer each other a great deal and that juxtaposing them is productive. Tracing the stages of her own fieldwork in post-Soviet Russia, the author argues that PAR offers the ethnographer a stance, or a framework to affect public anthropological engagement in the field. Further, it offers a means by which we can bring critical anthropological insights to collaborative projects for social change.
Argues for the scientific and practical value of participatory action research (PAR) and advocates its incorporation in the social sciences. The authors define participatory action research and place it in the context of more widely practiced research methods. Two case studies illustrate the process: one with Xerox Corporation in New York State, the other with the Mondragon cooperative complex in the Basque country of Spain. In Xerox, PAR focused on specific cost reduction and job preservation objectives. In Mondragon, PAR was used to explore and rethink a range of problems and to devise new organizational strategies. The use of PAR as an applied research strategy and for advancing social theory is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper aims to serve as a four-part introductory primer on the “go-along” qualitative interview methodology for studying the health issues of neighborhood or local-area contexts. First, I describe the purpose and different types of implementation of go-alongs. Second, I discuss its advantages for studying how place may matter for health (particularly in terms of the participants) and how it may facilitate researchers’ understandings of local knowledge as well as the social and physical context. Third, I consider the method's strengths and limitations for population health research on neighborhoods and local areas. Fourth and finally, I discuss how go-alongs may be used in tandem with other qualitative and quantitative approaches for multi-method research. Informing this discussion are my own experiences with a particular type of go-along interview—“walk-along” interviews—during a study of social capital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin neighborhoods.
Public anthropology is a collective aspiration shaped by generally shared values and intentions within significant sections of social and cultural anthropology. The impetus behind the creation of the journal Public Anthropologist originates in this realm of ongoing discussions and actions inspired by the idea of pushing engagement and participation beyond academic borders. Given that the traditional triadic structure’s assessment standards and their financial and political backers are being reshaped by broader social forces beyond the academy and that the audit culture of accountability, that is replacing earlier standards, has significant problems, we need ask: Where do we go from here? In these changing times, how can anthropologists be more relevant to the broader society in the hope of escaping the worse aspects of the audit culture? We need raise our public profile, we need make clear to the larger society anthropology’s value in addressing the problems that concern them.
Undergraduate and graduate students in many areas of study (business, healthcare, education, law, and communications, for example) have multiple opportunities to receive firsthand experience in their discipline through internships. Within anthropology, "field schools" or study abroad programs often serve the purpose of internships in terms of providing the basic training students would need to learn how to do fieldwork. As an undergraduate and M.A. student at the University of Florida in the early 1990s, I attended three study abroad programs with an anthropology focus (in Mérida, Mexico; Brunnenburg, Italy; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil); only one program (in Italy) was billed as a "field school," but all three provided excellent ethnographic training that would serve me well for future fieldwork.
Chameleon: A saurian reptile of the genus Chamæleo, family Chamæleonidæ, small lizard-like creatures, distinguished by a prehensile tail, long tongue, eyes moving independently, and covered each with a single circular eyelid, but esp. by their power of changing the colour of the skin, “varying through different shades of yellow, red, gray, brown, and dull inky blue” (Carpenter Zoology 1847). From their inanimate appearance, and power of existing for long periods without food, they were formerly supposed to live on air. These attributes made the name famous and familiar to many who knew nothing else of the animal.
Although geographically removed from anthropological schools such as those of Manchester and Chicago, Australia represents a major center for anthropological education and expertise. The Australian National University (anu ) alone holds one of the largest concentrations of anthropological expertise anywhere and has over one hundred PhD candidates engaged in its Anthropology Higher Degree Research Academic Network (anu 2012). Together with peers from other Australian universities, these candidates enter a competitive work environment after completing their degrees, in which few valuable academic positions as lecturer or research fellow are available. As a consequence, many of those graduating with a PhD in anthropology have to think creatively about how to progress in their careers and how to balance their academic ambitions with the pragmatisms of life. This was what happened to me; having studied at a regional Australian university in which anthropology has become an often undervalued and low priority subject, I found that my chances of an anthropological appointment in the region where I lived were slim.
My options for work would have to be found elsewhere, in a different city, region, or nation, beyond the discipline of anthropology, or in non-academic sectors. At this stage of my life, moving was not a viable alternative, and I therefore had to consider how I could best employ—and further develop—my skills and experiences beyond the anthropological discipline. Raising my dilemma to my former head of school at the university where I gained my PhD, I was encouraged to I contact the head of the School of Architecture and Built Environment. Quite a few social science graduates had previously been employed in this school, leading to a sarcastic observation from some that the school was offering a “social science graduate program.” The advice I was given had unexpected consequences and opened doors I had not previously seen as entry points to my life as an anthropologist.
What had I imagined my professional life would be like? My vision of life after the PhD resembled an image pointing me in a general direction carved out of my ideals more than a map borne out of pragmatic strategies and career ambitions. Then as now, I strongly identified as an anthropologist, and I wanted to use my more than ten years of anthropological training to contribute, somehow, to contemporary understandings of human culture and society. More specifically, I empathized strongly with the human values embedded in anthropology and the discipline’s moral ethos—or its political purpose—to “rediscover the humanity in the peripheral subject” (Westbrook 2008: 11). As to my professional credentials, I believed they resided in my experience of conducting ethnographic fieldwork as well as the theoretical knowledge I had developed and my regional expertise. Thus I presumed that future work would correspond with the theoretical themes of refugees, exile, diaspora, identity, belonging, (trans)nationalism, human rights, war and conflict, the methodological premise of ethnography, and the regional challenges facing the Asia Pacific. I was therefore surprised when shortly after sending my cv to the head of the School of Architecture and Built Environment I was approached with an offer of research work. What was it that I, as an anthropologist, could bring to the fore? How could my phenomenological approach and ethnographic experience expand knowledge in disciplines that, at least on paper, appear removed from the anthropological enterprise?
These questions are at the core of this article, in which I draw on my experience of working in the disciplines of architecture and construction management to explore what skills and knowledge anthropologists hold that enable work within and across...
This paper aims to demonstrate the value of participatory action research (PAR) for advancing scientific knowledge as well as for solving practical problems. The article supports the argument through brief summaries of three PAR cases in industry: Norwegian shipping, Xerox Corporation, and the FAGOR group of the Mondragn cooperatives. While noting the practical gains achieved through PAR, the author concentrates particularly on the advances in substantive knowledge and theory that would have been unlikely to emerge out of more orthodox sociological research. The author suggests finally that wider use of participatory action research can have a stimulating effect upon the future development of sociology.
Mules and men (p. 1)
- Z N Hurston
- Dee
CoPED 2022: Active San Biagio. Streaming video
- G Minolfi