Kiran C. Jayaram is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of South Florida. His current research focuses on the anthropology of higher education in India and the Dominican Republic. Previously, he worked on political economy and mobility in the Caribbean. His publications include two co-edited volumes (Keywords of Mobility, 2016; Transnational Hispaniola, 2018) with articles in publications such as the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Teaching & Learning Anthropology, Critique of Anthropology, Radical History Review, Caribbean Quarterly, and the International Journal of Educational Development.
He co-founded the Transnational Hispaniola Collective and served in executive positions within the Haiti-Dominican Republic Section of LASA and also in the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, including as Acting Editor-in-Chief of their journal.
Session Description
Globally, social scientists in recent decades have increasingly examined how their disciplines have privileged scholars from the North Atlantic over others. To address this imbalance, anthropologists developed the concept of world anthropologies. However, few of these works have addressed structural and cultural differences related to training new anthropologists. In the anthropology of education, studies of curriculum and teaching have focused on K-12 school engagements and on university student experiences globally. Science and technology studies have pointed out the cultural aspects of scientific practitioners. As a result, scholarship on anthropological training worldwide fosters the incomplete notion that student education consists almost wholly of technocratic formation and individual fieldwork, thus marginalizing the work of university professors, the classroom context, and political economic and institutional dynamics. This paper provides a corrective by analyzing the teaching practices, course readings, assignments, and interactions in anthropology programs at universities in the Dominican Republic as well as the future use of anthropological training by students. Using ethnographic research in classrooms, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis, we describe how students are trained in anthropology within two different institutions. These findings will contribute to discussions on world anthropologies, anthropologies of education, and science and technology studies while providing a blueprint for a more equitable and productive academic environment across the globe. This research builds on the PIs’ previous work on Caribbean anthropologies (Jayaram) and on curriculum and classroom setting (Braunstein).