Pedagogies of the Senses Multimodal Strategies for Unsettling Visual Anthropology

Abstract

AbstractDrawing from our experiences teaching the subdiscipline of visual anthropology, we coin the term pedagogies of the senses to refer to a series of teaching strategies aimed at unsettling anthropology's visual archive through sonic displacements, figure–background reversals, and redactions. We argue for an attention to how experiments with the senses in the visual anthropology classroom have the capacity to actively interrupt colonial visual regimes, disrupt universalizing assumptions regarding the nature of knowledge transmission, and, in so doing, foster opportunities for a more inclusive classroom engagement by centering affects that are often sidelined.