Abstract
This article is an ethnographic account of a course I designed and taught in my university to mostly non-humanities, engineering and science undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds. In it, I consider the possibility of a pedagogical approach to teach what it means to construct a field in anthropological terms during a classroom based teaching module. I suggest that one can approach the construction of a field within the classroom by using disturbance as a pedagogical tool. Drawing from Anna Tsing’s formulation of “disturbance as an analytical tool” I demonstrate how we can construct a field pedagogically by disturbing the certitude of the known and by reimagining the modes of seeing and hearing the familiar. The ethnographic elucidation of this paper is essentially work produced from this class – images created from within the university, influenced by a question asked by students and accompanying soundscapes produced by students’ themselves – which demonstrates the possibility of constructing a field by, in a sense, hearing images and seeing sounds. 
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Highlights
Disrupting the FamiliarAnthropology in its forays into ever new terrains of inquiry, whether of the human and the non-human (Barad 2003, Bennett 2010), the material and the symbolic (Kohn 2013), the known versus the unknown, the atmospheric and the earthly (Povinelli 2016, Tsing 2017) has constantly carved methodological innovations to enable these tropes of inquiry
Can we teach the art of constructing a field while being confined to a university classroom within a teaching semester? How can we pedagogically approach the fundamental anthropological project of ‘noticing’ all that is special around us? Noticing for the intricacies and details that may be hidden in plain sight? This paper, in presenting a case study of a taught course, argues that the realm of constructing a field in the anthropological sense can be pursued if one breaks the certainty of the known by using disturbance or disruption as a pedagogical tool
This paper further argues that these disturbances or dissonances can be created by reimagining the modes of looking and hearing all that is around us
Summary
Disrupting the FamiliarAnthropology in its forays into ever new terrains of inquiry, whether of the human and the non-human (Barad 2003, Bennett 2010), the material and the symbolic (Kohn 2013), the known versus the unknown, the atmospheric and the earthly (Povinelli 2016, Tsing 2017) has constantly carved methodological innovations to enable these tropes of inquiry. These methodological interventions, in response to the specificity of a context creates a conceptual frame that helps understand the context with depth and clarity and brings to light a possibility of thinking about the seemingly known and the familiar in absolutely unexpected and novel ways. It is well acknowledged how a training in the discipline of anthropology allows us to recognize the extraordinary in the everyday (Stewart 2007), the special in the mundane and the latent in the manifest (Rosaldo 1989).
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