career opportunities (JHL education), study abroad appeared to be driven more by personal romantic views of things the students seek to learn about—the people and culture of a destination. This made me focus on the role of affect, especially romantic sentiment, of the students.
I value collaboration with people I meet in the field. To work together is a way to give back something—documents collected through fieldwork and their analyses from anthropological viewpoints—to the field site. It is also a way to include viewpoints and draw on the expertise of the people in the field site in the research, and to share authorship of knowledge production during research, which has often been claimed solely by the ethnographer (Clifford 1988). Moreover, because many of the people I meet in the field are professionals, working with them often means interdisciplinary collaboration. For example, I have worked with a school administrator, who is also a linguist, of a JHL program where I was doing fieldwork (Doerr and Lee 2012; 2013; 2016; Lee and Doerr 2015). This project is also an interdisciplinary collaboration with a study abroad director I met in the field, who is also an international educator and anthropologist.
I found it fruitful to approach the issue of romance in study abroad from two different viewpoints—that of the cultural anthropologist, and that of the study abroad practitioner/international educator. I feel that anthropology’s current focus on affect and the ethnographic method can offer critical tools for study abroad, and the focus on study abroad can offer anthropology the opportunity to analyze affect in new ways.
Hannah Davis Taïeb: I have been working in study abroad since the year 2000, most of that time as resident director of CIEE’s Contemporary French Studies program in Paris. My studies, however, were not in the field of international education, but in anthropology, and I did anthropological fieldwork in Morocco in 1988–89, focusing on conceptions of self for unmarried women in a middle-sized town. My interests at that time involved the relationship between conceptions of self and political economy (looking for the links between changing conceptions of the self and of self-control and the fact that women were remaining single longer and entering the labor market). I was also preoccupied by the question of boundaries, of transnational cultural forms and the creating and blurring of boundaries by social actors (Davis 1989), and the projection onto others of our fantasies and desires (Davis 1990, 1993, 1998).
As I learned the profession of international educator, the anthropological approaches that had shaped me were always in the back of my mind. It seemed natural to me to set up classes based on participant-observation, and I launched classes comparing the French and US educational systems. Questions of culture, in constant discussion within the field of study abroad, I saw in terms of long-standing anthropological debates, and I could never feel comfortable when definitions of cultural difference came across as essentialist. Critical anthropological approaches and my own sociopolitical slant also led me towards educational forms that were dialogues or partnerships. I set up seminars that brought French and American scholars and professionals together,1 co-taught bilingual classes and workshops with mixed student bodies,2 and set up classes integrating volunteering with a critical shared questioning of notions such as solidarity, service, and diversity.3
When I met Neriko Musha Doerr, I saw that we shared common analyses of how study abroad works, and that an explicit return to the anthropological approach could enrich my own professional life. What “culture work” are we doing, are we part of, as practitioners in our fields? How is the movement of American and other students around the world contributing to changing discourses of culture and diversity? What is being achieved when global discourses combine with international organizations that talk more and more about difference, but in more and more standardized ways?
At the same time, as an international educator and program director, the pedagogical, practical, and also ethical questions are never far away. What is the next step with each particular student, professor, program, partnership? What are the paradoxical or contradictory aspects of our mandates, and how can we negotiate them? How can the anthropological perspective inform our own views of our field, inform our decisions, give depth to our practice?
Five years have passed since our first meeting in Paris where this project emerged. This volume is a result of our numerous email exchanges, skype sessions, and in-person meetings whenever either of us crossed the Atlantic, in which our knowledge, theoretical orientations, analytical perspectives, practical concerns, aspirations for the future of study abroad, and personal affective investments diverged, bounced off of each other, converged, and generated something new. This project is a milestone of our own continuing journeys for both of us.
Neriko Musha Doerr received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Cornell University. Her research interests include politics of difference, language and power, and study abroad and alternative break experiences. Her publications include Meaningful Inconsistencies: Bicultural Nationhood, Free Market, and Schooling in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Berghahn Books), The Native Speaker Concept (Mouton de Gruyter), and Constructing the Heritage Language Learner (Mouton de Gruyter), and articles in Anthropological Forum, Compare, Critical Discourse Studies, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Journal of Cultural Geography. She currently teaches at Ramapo College in New Jersey, US.
Dr. Hannah Davis Taïeb is an international educator, teacher, and writer who was the director of CIEE’s Contemporary French Studies Program in Paris from 2003 to 2015. She has a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University; her thesis, concerning unmarried women and changing conceptions of the self, was based on fieldwork in a middle-sized city in Morocco. After working with a research team in Lyon, Hannah settled permanently in France in 1992, where she first was the co-editor of a multilingual, multidisciplinary review, Mediterraneans, then taught intercultural and interpersonal communication at the American University of Paris before entering the field of study abroad in the year 2000. While at CIEE, she ran Franco-American seminars, joint classes and study trips on subjects like disability, religious diversity and secularism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, chaplaincy and religion in prison, and special education. Independently, Hannah continues to teach about popular culture and métissage, disabilities, and religious diversity, co-teaches a Franco-American intercultural communication class, and runs volunteer and exchange activities with a Paris youth club.
Notes
We are grateful to Natalie Zemon Davis, Cori Jakubiak, Yuri Kumagai, and Karen Rodriguez for their critical feedback on an earlier draft and to the editor and the anonymous peer reviewers at Berghahn Books for very helpful and stimulating comments we have endeavored to take into account. The text’s deficiencies are wholly our responsibility.
1. Hannah Davis Taïeb has led Franco-American seminars on themes such as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, religion in everyday life through a reflection on the role of chaplains in prisons and hospitals, and disabilities.
2. Hannah Davis Taïeb has co-taught classes with Verena Aebischer of the University of Paris Nanterre (Paris X), with a joint student body including my Intercultural Communication students and her Social Psychology students; co-led workshops with Ita Hermouet of the Institut Catholique d’Enseignement Supérieur in La Roche sur Yon, with a joint student body of my study abroad students and French students bound for study abroad in the United States; and co-taught classes with Jérémy Arki at the University of Paris Diderot (Paris VII) with a class that was open to my own study abroad students and also to Paris-Diderot students.
3. Hannah Davis Taïeb is co-teaching a class entitled Community Service Learning: Social Justice/Solidarité, Diversity/Diversité, in which American students engage in tutoring French youth from a youth club in a low-income, diverse neighborhood. The class also involves joint discussions of topics such as race and “service”, and an independently funded voyage by four French high-school students from the club to US universities.
References
