A Grounded Model of How Educators Earn Students’ Trust in a High Performing U.S. Urban High School

This article presents a grounded model of how educators earn students’ trust in a high performing U.S. urban high school. This long-term anthropological project set out to understand the beliefs and practices of experienced teachers and staff members nominated by students as helping them feel like they belonged in school. Analysis of study data revealed a process of mutual discernment whereby adults and young people were reading one another as they explored the possibilities of entering into learning partnerships. For the educators, study data led us to infer that their trust building strategies were largely based on imagining the student discernment process, and responding to a set of unspoken queries about them that, over time, they seem to have learned were often on the minds of students (e.g. “Why are they here?” “How much do they respect me?”). The grounded model and practice-based evidence presented here summarize the strategies and approaches educators used to respond to these unspoken queries and communicate to students various aspects of their selves and their stance, including their motivation, empathy and respect for students, self-awareness and credibility, their professional ability, and finally, their commitment to helping students and investing emotional labor in them. Throughout, data are also presented regarding how students perceived and experienced these strategies, and ultimately how they interpreted and appraised their relationships with educators, as trusting relationships were developed.

The effects of scale: How Western agency-anxieties mold affect theory, and how Pentecostalism and neuroscience teach us to think differently

This paper offers a critique of affect theory using the analytical concept of scale that is made concrete through an ethnography of Pentecostal Christianity and an exploration of current neuroscientific thinking. Affect theory is one recent form of a Western philosophical concern about the loss of agency in modernity, what I call “agency-anxiety.” Affect theorists tend to privilege the sense of freedom gained by immediate and individual experience over the constraints of more extended experiences and collectivity. That is, affect theory often scales its analysis tightly. This paper responds with an ethnography of Pentecostal practice and exploration of work in neuroscience that describes an analytic space in which broader scales can be useful as well. Ethnography scaled beyond the instant reveals that the Pentecostal ideal of surrendering to God in a moment of abandonment often results from a “fake it until you make it” approach; in other words, from extended, effortful, willful practice. This practice leads to the formation of habits and dispositions that allow the attainment of spontaneous rupture. Likewise, neuroscience can scale out its analysis by focusing on dispositions, moods and habits, rather than simply a more immediate view. Further, “scale effects” and emergent properties in scale-to-scale relations undermine reductionism. Finally, because Pentecostals are generally right wing yet also exemplify ruptural practice, it seems that outside of a particular conjuncture, the tightly scaled eruptive moment of affect is by no means per se a productive or (politically) progressive formation. As such, making scale an explicit analytical category might help us to see agency, change, and structure more clearly.

Culture: by the brain and in the brain?

Since the 1990s, several disciplines have emerged at the interface between neuroscience and the social and human sciences. For the most part, they aim at capturing the commonalities that underlay the heterogeneity of human behaviors and experiences. Neuroanthropology and cultural neuroscience, or the "neurodisciplines of culture," appear different, since their goal is to understand specificity rather than commonality and to address how cultural differences are inscribed in the brain. After offering an overview of these disciplines, and of their relation to endeavors such as cultural psychology and social neuroscience, this article discusses some of the most representative studies in the area in order to explore in which ways they are relevant for an understanding of culture.

Neuroscientific and neuroanthropological perspectives in music therapy research and practice with patients with disorders of consciousness

A growing understanding of music therapy with patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) has developed from observing behavioral changes and using these to gain new ways of experiencing this research environment and setting. Neuroscience provides further insight into the effects of music therapy; however, various studies with similar protocols show different results. The neuroanthropological approach is informed by anthropological and philosophical frameworks. It puts emphasis on a research with and not just on human beings concerning the subject/object question within a research process. It examines relational aspects and outcomes in the context of working in an interdisciplinary team. This allows a broader view of music therapy in a reflective process and leads to a careful interpretation of behavioral reactions and imaging results. This article discusses the importance of the neuroanthropological perspective on our way of obtaining knowledge and its influence on therapeutic practice. It is important to consider how knowledge is generated as it influences the results. Data from two cases will be presented to illustrate the neuroanthropological approach by comparing quantitative PET data with qualitative results of video analyses.