Transforming the 'Field' through an Inclusive, Public-facing, and Globally Oriented Ethnographic Pedagogy

In this time of the global pandemic, a major challenge to teaching field-based subjects, including but not limited to anthropology, is the difficulty of organizing in-person, on-site ethnographic field activities for students (e.g. the instructor brings a group of students to visit a field site). This is particularly the case in East Asia, where students continue to face considerable barriers to in-person, group-based, and beyond-university learning due to the ongoing ‘Zero-COVID-19’ policies. This short position paper proposes to create transferable tools, methods, and skills that will create alternative forms of ethnographic field learning activities, especially ones that will directly challenge the traditional place-based definition of ‘field’ as well as ones that will support students to overcome the barriers of learning during the pandemic time. In so doing, the paper explores innovative field-based teaching approaches that will (1) bring the field sites to the classrooms, (2) cultivate long-term and sustained community engagement with ethnic minority and diasporic populations in Asia, and (3) disseminate teaching outcomes to multicultural populations in and beyond the local Asian societies