Teaching Statement

For a full copy of my Teaching Statement please contact me through the contact form or my email address anna.schirrer@columbia.edu

See an excerpt here:

“The air in the room thickened in silence. A socio-cultural anthropology seminar on politics of care and reparations was proceeding according to the plan. I had asked my students to think about Marcel Mauss’s classic anthropological text on ‘the spirit of the gift’ focusing on themes such as reciprocity, debt, and theft in relation to claims to reparations for historical injustices. They were expectedly confused. Mauss himself did not consider the question of theft in his theory about the gift, so how would they? I wanted to harvest their confusion, leading them to gradually recognize the congruence between three seemingly unrelated ideas: ‘a gift’, ‘theft’, and ‘debt’. The following week, I introduced the students to a text offering a critical take on Mauss’s seminal text through ideas about debt and deferral. Now the confusing aspect of our discussion the previous week made sense to them.

My seminar took off. Buzzing with questions a student eagerly asked “Aren’t you supposed to give back something you took?” Another responded “Are feelings of obligation a kind of care?”, and a peer said, “It’s not a feeling, it’s a debt that is owed!” Responding to this vital text pairing, the students were energetically engaging complex questions about care, reciprocity, debt, and obligation. The situation described above crystallizes one of my three core commitments as an instructor, which is to support my students’s zest for learning by providing them with a robust textual grounding. The other two are as follows: to cultivate conscientious global citizens by structuring our discussions around anthropology’s disciplinary commitment to reflecting on the researcher’s positionality, and to remove barriers for full class participation by encouraging collegial exchange. Over the last five years, I have taught and assisted in teaching and mentoring undergraduate and graduate students in socio-cultural anthropology. My classroom experience has made it clear to me that my aspiration in teaching anthropology is to strengthen students’ understanding of social difference and how they are themselves entangled in those differences.”