EDI in our teaching
Dr Ivan Tacey's research and teaching is committed to exploring the impacts of equality, diversity and inclusion on minority groups worldwide.
As a lecturer on the
BA (Hons) Anthropology course, he currently leads the MX Module Decolonizing the Social Sciences which responds to contemporary calls to decolonise the social sciences. It reads the history of social science through the lens of post-colonial, black and indigenous intellectuals. The module draws upon Post-Colonial, Indigenous, Black, and Southern schools of Anthropology, Criminology and Sociology to critically rethink key issues in the social sciences. The module builds upon recent muti-modal approaches to examine how Black, Asian, and Indigenous movements in literature, art, cinematography and music have paved the way for new ways of thinking that challenge colonial science and thought. This opens pathways towards the democratisation and decolonisation of knowledge. Key topics of study on the module include Decolonizing Methods in the Social Sciences, the challenge of Afrofuturism and an Anthropology of the Otherwise to the Social Sciences, Decolonizing Place, Indigenous Criminology, Decolonizing Place, Post-Colonial Literature and Theory and Decolonizing our Relations with the Natural World.
Dr Tacey also brings in inclusive multi-modal approaches to ANT5002/ANT6002 Gifts, Crises and Commodities: A contemporary guide to Economic Anthropology a module he co-teaches with Dr Brian Campbell. Stated simply, multimodal approaches seek to communicate social science lessons through a range of exciting, interactive technologies. These include movies and various forms video, photography, illustrative artwork (including graphic novels), theatre and drama, music, fiction, interactive web apps and augmented reality technologies. As part of their assessment for ANT5002/ANT6002 students are asked to produce a boardgame that teaches players key anthropological insights on economic behaviour. Multi-modal coursework is great for students, because as graduates they are likely to be asked by employers to become creatively proficient with various kinds of media, and to share their expertise in attractive and engaging ways. More importantly, multimodality helps students who, due to various conditions, may struggle with conventional pedagogies but excel when permitted to explore a subject in alternative ways.
