This piece is part of a series by participants in the Winter 2026 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.
Reina Gattuso (she/her) lives, teaches, and writes in New York City. She’s a teacher at Hunter College, a contributing writer to the cultural learning platform Curationist, a PhD student in cultural anthropology, and a student of kathak dance.
It is contradictory to say that anthropology is for everyone, because historically it decidedly has not been. When teaching anthropological history, we grapple with the fact that colonial officials looking to catalogue and control the people they claimed to rule were key to the founding of anthropology as an academic discipline – and as a weapon to inflict discipline. So, how can learning anthropology help CUNY students and our broader community (including those of us who call ourselves teachers!) access the liberatory and transformative education we all deserve?
For me, this starts with participant observation, anthropology’s classic tool. Participant observation is when we participate in…and observe…the world, in order to learn about and develop our understanding of human social life. How does the society I’ve been plopped down into function? Are all cultures like this? How could the world look different? From the time we’re babies learning to communicate with our caretakers – experimenting to see how many times the grownups will pick up the food we playfully drop on the floor – all human beings do participant observation. And all human beings are experts on our own social lives.
At its most democratic, then, anthropology is simply a set of tools and resources that helps us make sense of what we already intuit, and that helps us situate our observations in relationship to the vast diversity of human life.
This is where Open Knowledge comes in. If participant observation is an inherently democratic method, we need equally democratic ways of accessing the knowledge created by others, and sharing our contributions in turn. Fighting exploitative and profit-oriented practices within academic publishing is particularly important when we consider how much of the knowledge that makes up the anthropological “canon” was stolen from the communities being “studied” in the first place. CUNY students are often descendants of these communities, so forcing students to pay for that same knowledge continues a cycle of colonial and capitalist violence (one of the many reasons we need a free and open CUNY!). Our students’ right to knowledge that is lifegiving to them is deeper than any institution can gate-keep; our job as education and culture workers is simply to facilitate folks’ access to what is already, and has always been, theirs. Just as, moving forward, consensually produced and shared knowledge ought to belong to everybody.
There is actually an abundance of Open Educational Resources available for anthropological learning. We can get creative about the kinds of materials we draw on, and the kinds of knowledge we consider authoritative, to encourage students to ask how we come to know what we know – and affirm that we are all knowledge makers.
In our course, we dream about what a city can be with imaginative materials from the folks over at Anthropology for Kids (because we’re all kids at heart!). We access OER textbooks created by fellow teachers and learners on platforms like Manifold and Pressbooks, including developing our visual analysis skills and learning about modes of economic exchange. We analyze public domain archival materials, such as the British colonial People of India photo book, to learn about histories of race and racialization – and we use our imaginations (“How might this person have felt about being photographed? What might she have dreamed about? How could we research to learn more about her life?”) to think about the gaps in the archives. We engage other open-access projects, for example learning about cultural knowledge systems and the violence of colonial epistemicide through the Aztec Codex Mendoza (this links to the platform Curationist, which I also write for!). Finally, we benefit greatly from the efforts of other anthropologists to make their work more accessible – for example, we’re able to learn about gender and sexuality through an Open-Access journal published by the wonderful feminists at Feminist Anthropology.
Our course is centered around students’ fieldnotes – their written observations of daily life – which we examine together in order to derive central anthropological concepts. For example, what does running late for class because we had to care for a relative, and then the train broke down, tell us about reproductive labor and infrastructure? And more importantly, how can the concepts of reproductive labor and infrastructure help us move toward a world where we can all access the caring support, and free public transportation, we need? If the concepts don’t help us meet our needs – we should teach different concepts!
So, for the Open Knowledge Fellowship final project, I made a CUNY Commons site that can function as a container for collective student-authored ethnography of New York City. If students in subsequent classes are interested, we can continue adding our experiences – if they’re not interested, the site can remain a neat template for other folks looking to facilitate collective ethnography, adaptable to their local context.
This last part – about the site only truly coming to life if students wish to engage with it – is, to me, key to OER. The process is what is important; ‘openness’ is about getting rid of cost and copyright barriers, but it is first and foremost about creating spaces where we can open our minds and hearts, and really hear each other. The project only works if it works for a particular group of learners – like any collective project – and that’s okay!
Something else I am thinking about is that another part of openness is being real with students, especially about the fact that we, the “teachers,” do not have all the answers (or really…any of “the answers”). Which is just fine – because education is for all of us, together. So here is the question I wake up with everyday and pray to understand: What could learning feel like if we let go of coercion and punishment and the hoarding of resources (financial, intellectual…) and made a commitment, first and foremost, to one another? I don’t know – but CUNY students, and all our brilliant and precious communities in New York City, teach me.
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