Co-Lab! Teaching public anthropology co-laboratively
Co-Lab! Co-laboration and Public Anthropology in Teaching
Research-based seminars are an important part of the teaching program at our Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology. As professors and lecturers, we consider these teaching formats particularly valuable. Why?
In research-based seminars, in addition to reading and discussing texts by other authors, students develop their own research questions within the thematic framework of these courses and carry out small-scale research projects. In doing so, they experience Anthropology as an empirical discipline: ethnographic research methods such as interviews and participant observation are tested, and theoretical knowledge is applied in the field of empirical research. Students learn that ethnographic research is not merely about verifying theory through data, but about attempting to generate and (further) develop theory from empirical material.
This anthropological mode of research is summarized under the term ethnography. It is not a purely methodological technique that can simply be applied; rather, it is a particular form of analytical attentiveness: “the way in which you attend to the relationships in the world around you” (Harvey 2011).
Encounters with the “world out there”
Projects developed in the course of our research-based teaching address current social issues and have a direct connection to specific places and groups of people outside academia. Within this framework, students often experience their first direct encounters with research partners and other non-university actors. They are challenged to communicate their research interests to different publics, to discuss their perspectives, and to establish research relationships.
Encounters with the “world out there” are by no means easy: they reveal the complexities and conflict potentials of everyday life and provoke methodological as well as research-ethical questions. How is it possible to find a common language with research partners? How can constructive criticism be voiced? To what extent can our research contribute to addressing current social problems? How is it possible to collaborate with people who have different political views, without abandoning one’s own (political and ethical) standpoint? How can the results of anthropological research be communicated and made useful beyond academia?
Follow the chemical fibre!
One of the research-based seminars offered during the summer semester 2025 was titled Chemo-Ethnography: Textual and Textile Engagements with the Consequences of the Chemical Fiber Industry in Wolfen. The interdisciplinary seminar, led by Professors Bettina Göttke-Krogmann (BURG) and Asta Vonderau (MLU), was open to master’s students of Anthropology as well as of the Textile Design study program. This seminar focused on the chemical fibre that was invented in the chemical industry site Wolfen in 1934 and became indispensable in many areas of social life.
By ethnographically following the chemical fibre, interdisciplinary student groups conducted on-site research engaging with multiple histories of chemical fibre—such as transformations of industrial labour or its toxic legacies—as well as its potential futures, including possibilities and limits of recycling and sustainable life in former industrial sites.
Experimentation with and learning from discipline-specific methodologies—such as reading texts, ethnographic observation, and weaving—were at the centre of the seminar. Can textile design enable a multimodal ethnography that operates in the spirit of Public Anthropology? Can (chemo-)ethnography open up new pathways for design? What new insights into the consequences of industrialism and ways of dealing with these consequences in times of the Anthropocene can such interdisciplinary collaboration enable?