This piece is part of a series by participants in the Spring 2024 Open Knowledge Fellowship, coordinated by the Mina Rees Library. Fellows will share insight into the process of converting a syllabus to openly-licensed and/or zero-cost resources, as well as their experiences teaching undergraduate courses at CUNY.

Fufu Seref (they/them) is a PhD candidate in Anthropology of sexuality and race. As part of their dissertation research, Fufu worked in the nightlife industry in Berlin, Germany. Their research aims to understand the perception of safety and communal care among queer people of Muslim descent, whom Fufu calls kanakish queers. Fufu has taught at multiple campuses across CUNY since 2016. These courses range from Introduction to Anthropology, to Masculinity in the Middle East, to Forced Migration in Europe.

Teaching Anthropology with OER by Fufu Seref

The six-week Spring 2024 Open Knowledge Fellowship was a great collective push to creatively rethink education while exploring new tools and resources. One of the perks of this fellowship is that we were to be compensated for learning to build our course websites. Every course design implies a pedagogy, and the act of peer-reviewing the course sites therefore served as a collective exploration of varying teaching methods and philosophies. A shared commitment to breaking away from institutional gatekeeping and  to resisting oppressive structures was a good reminder that we were not alone. Though this post mainly focuses on teaching anthropology, the Open Knowledge Fellowship is a good reminder that each discipline carries an emancipatory power, even Astrophysics.[1]

Anthropology originally developed through the colonizer’s desire to understand the colonized. The discipline’s founding questions around understanding the “others” of humanity give us hints to engage with oppression in a unique way. This engagement has been used and abused by various historical entities and the colonizing bodies, from the Dutch East India Company of the British Empire to the CIA. The discipline’s institutional boundaries developed within this larger historical context, yet it is imperative to continue to push the discipline to challenge the oppressive practices, policies, and knowledge that it is built upon. A strong critical focus on inequality in contemporary anthropology research is a positive sign of self-awareness within the discipline. This branch of Anthropology bears a particular potential value for further integration into public education.

Despite the self-awareness among its practitioners, the standard anthropology curriculum has arguably been designed to reproduce the “discipline” instead of focusing on the students’ intellectual development. As with many disciplines in academia, the curriculum caters to a promised (yet often unrealized) academic career in anthropology. And finally, the curriculum increasingly depends on the academic publishers’ financial decisions.

Open Educational Resources (OER) tackles some of these obstacles. If our syllabi can become a public resource, then our teaching can center the students and the public rather than academic professionalism.

Since my first class at Hostos Community College in 2016, my emphasis has been on the dynamic between the individual and its surroundings. Our class discussions on “other cultures” and other time periods always quickly move to self-reflection by two main claims: 1) We are all situated in our socio-political environments and are not merely failing or successful individuals, 2) Another world is not only possible, but other worlds have also always existed. Not just my teaching, but contemporary anthropology aims to shake the “common sense” by revealing and theorizing about the systemic oppression embedded in the “normal.” Critical anthropology, I believe, is a practice of unlearning. The discipline itself should inform its pedagogy. Accordingly, many colleagues have been working relentlessly to shift their courses into this direction. 

A relative emancipation from institutional gatekeeping can push us to a playful attitude. While anthropological research methods are ever evolving and experimented with, it is indeed necessary. I use the term playful to emphasize play’s unique power in engaged learning and its exploratory nature to balance the grim rigidity of a standardized introduction syllabus. I know a colleague who includes dating and intimacy in their syllabus instead of gender and kinship to discuss community attachment and collective accountability rather than distinguishing polygyny and polyandry. I discuss borders, care and connection to my “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology” syllabus to address economy and state. TikTok videos accomplish more in conveying lived complexity of Gender than peer-reviewed articles. After all, social commentary is everywhere, plus there are enough open resource academic articles to accompany them. 

Discussions on copyright regulations with my Open Knowledge fellows were implicitly about the relationship between the creator, distributor and the “consumer” of the artifact. Each academic or creative work gains a meaning (and life) via the conventions and regulations around its circulation. The relative higher respect we pay to the works behind the academic paywalls might partly amount to the value we assign to the “wall” itself. The rigidity of the institutions’ walls factors in their respective prestige. Let’s be honest, this prestige does not translate for an average introduction to anthropology students. At least it doesn’t grant engagement or relevancy. 

Unlike several other disciplines, Anthropology matters as long as it is relatable to its audience. It is never a job title, it is a disciplined engagement with the human condition. Its pedagogy, though, limits the ways of engagement. While acknowledging the importance of the foundational questions and themes of anthropology, an increasing number of educators are following alternative genealogies of contemporary themes. A shift to OER and OS can be a starting point for educators to break away from rigid boundaries of the academic conventions and the publishers’ financial decisions. Not a revolution, but a space for original genealogies in closer collaboration with the students and the contemporary socio-political realities. 

[1] For more, check out Dr. Fatima on https://www.youtube.com/@dr.fatima

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