Drawing on anthropological conceptions of pilgrimage, our ethnography of professional development at an Israeli Holocaust Memorial follows German teachers on journeys to Israel. Seeking transformative and transferable experiences to combat anti-Semitism in schools, teachers experienced the voyage as a secular pilgrimage rooted in Christian traditions of guilt, confession, and absolution. As teachers' emotional encounters in Israel simultaneously forged communitas and challenged official historical–pedagogical visions, their practices abroad elucidate prevalent Holocaust education discourses in contemporary Germany.
Drawing on a more-than-human world perspective for anthropology and education, I (re)examine a study of juvenile baboon social learning conducted almost 50 years ago. Major scientific disciplinary twists and turns over the decades are examined in order to (re)interpret specific affiliative behaviors, communicative events and public performances. I identify and describe a “Baboon Nursery School” participation structure that provides the context for behavioral practices that reproduce and perpetuate the troop's social hierarchy.
Attending college, for many immigrant families, is a critical step in achieving the American Dream. This essay, written as a reflection and response between professor and student, explores the conflicting messages young community college students negotiate and process as they move through the City, revealing how knowledge learned in the college classroom is imbued with value beyond that knowledge that they have learned in their homes and neighborhoods. It shares how a research interest from their professor in the knowledge and practices their families have to teach was a point of processing and potential reconciliation of these conflicts related shifting identities, and notes the potential therapeutic value of the embodiment of heritage practices as part of ethnographic research and beyond.
While China embraces disability inclusion rhetorically, segregated special schools continue to proliferate in recent decades. What kind of space are special education schools? How do actors in such spaces negotiate stigma and marginality for a better future? This research pairs historical, policy and ethnographic research to examine special education schools as transient spaces of marginality and potentiality in China. It illustrates how inclusion needs to go beyond the entanglement with place towards relationality and being.