The inaugural meeting of the Educere Network invites you to participate in a lively hands-on event where we shall practically consider the relevance of anthropology, and its primary method participant-observation, to education, care and
transdisciplinary research. We hope to explore entangled, meaning-matter, processes of learning and knowing (Barad 2007). Bringing into attention an embodied ethic of awareness, extended at once to living beings, materials and things,
we will work together to support an environment for care-full participatory learning.

Participant-observation is understood here neither as data collection nor the descriptive documentation of social facts but a symbiotic process of educating. It entails the training of attention, movement, sensory-spatial orientation;
it is a way of taking turns in leading each other out into the world (Ingold, 2018) and learning how to live well. To practice anthropology, then, is to explore and learn with and from people and to pursue skills and attitudes such
as care, compassion, curiosity or playfulness.

During the workshop we engage in a wide range of practices such as basketry, dance, contemplative practice, performance, to name a few, while reflecting on the following questions:

• What and how do we learn with and from our research participants: whether they be people, non-human organisms, materials, things or landscapes?
• How does the method of participant-observation resonate with other methods of enquiry and/or pedagogical practices?
• How can sensitivities, attitudes and skills generated through participatory research support a dialogue with other academic and non-academic fields of inquiry/activity?

As part of the book launch for The Anthropology of Sustainability, leading anthropologists consider this question - offering unconventional answers and a radical new paradigm for anthropology in the 21st century. Join us for a
roundtable discussion with Henrietta Moore, Veronica Strang, Laura Rival, Marc Brightman & Jerome Lewis.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/what-will-it-take-to-ensure-a-future-liveable-earth-the-anthropology-of-sustainability-tickets-45757512953?aff=eand#

join our panel 'ME02 Walking Stories: doing and making when out and about' at the up-coming RAI2020: Anthropology and Geography at the British Museum/SOAS on the 4th-7th June 2020.

Convenors: Elizabeth Rahman (University of Oxford) & Thomas Smith (Cardiff University)
Discussants: Jan Masschelein (KULeuven) & Shonil Bhagwat (Open University)

Short abstract:
The panel scrutinises how the land and outdoor pursuits evoke conversations, reflections, narrations and instructions that help us 'notice' features salient to our engagements. We interrogate 'walking ethnography' and explore practices aimed at knowing and respecting the places in which we dwell.

Long abstract:
This panel focuses on stories told when out and about. It explores how the land evokes conversations, reflections and narrations and how these take place when walking, climbing, boating, sliding, jumping, running or otherwise moving through the landscape. This includes oral histories, biographies, mythologies or anecdotes and instructions for engagement and practice. Stories may be moralising, involve environmental education and include compound knowledge sets, integrating ecology, with climate and the social and physical sciences. Stories may be related to the sourcing of foods, fruit, fish or game or materials for artisanal work. Our focus extends to the making of things in situ, such as vegetable fibre bags for transporting gathered fruits. Instructions may be related to recreational or sports activities, including those considered 'traditional'. In this panel, we are particularly interested in making the link between heritage and intangible heritage - techniques and practices of engagement, perception and 'noticing'. Such 'noticing' might occur when instructors, educationalists, or others well-versed in a particular landscape, direct the attention of those less well-versed towards environmental features and discrepancies. For example, in directing young people to notice features of water movement when canoeing, or palpating the aptness of fibres sourced for artistic work. Stories may also be folktales or legends describing geomorphorming or land genesis. This panel seeks to interrogate the 'walking ethnography', to explore how both formal and casual practices attempt to meaningfully engage children, youth, peers and the 3rd age in knowing and respecting the places in which we dwell.