Shared Values in Research Assignments

Statement on Shared Values in Department Research Assignments

The disciplines of sociology and anthropology are devoted to the study of difference, power, and inequality, both in the communities we call home and the places that feel most foreign to us. In engaging the institutions, identities, practices, norms, and relationships that form our world, we seek to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Therefore, we interrogate frequently the very ideas that our own society takes for granted, asking when and how these elements of our social life emerged, why they seem natural, as well as what implications they hold, and for whom. 

Similarly, we assume a posture of critical curiosity relative to lifestyles, forms of expression, politics, social organization, and values that might seem foreign to us so as to analyze and offer unique insights that might not be possible from within that cultural space. Because we work with people, questions of power and positionality are central to the kind of research we do and the analyses we produce and debate.

SOAN courses seek to provide students with the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological training required to effectively and ethically conduct sociocultural analysis and interrogate its implications. Therefore, while SOAN faculty exercise autonomy and creative freedom in their course development, reflecting a range of pedagogical approaches and independent perspectives, we design and facilitate curriculum according to certain shared values. These include:

• Recognition of the value of experiential learning and of engaging with lived culture in real-world contexts through direct experience.

• A commitment to ethical engagement with the communities and subjects with whom we collaborate that reflects respect, informed consent, and appreciation for the implications of shared knowledge endeavors/projects.

• An awareness that productive intercultural engagements often come with a degree of ambiguity, discomfort, and challenge, as we negotiate values and worldviews that are unfamiliar and challenging to our own.

• A critical curiosity and empathy toward other perspectives and experiences.

• An attentiveness to our own social location, and how it may shape our research and collaborative processes with others.

• A commitment to our disciplinary norms and institutionally recognized right to academic freedom of inquiry and expression.