Inviting discomfort: foregrounding emotional labour in teaching anthropology in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract

This article examines the potential and limitations of Megan Boler's ‘pedagogy of discomfort’ in a post-apartheid yet heavily racialised South Africa. Taking an ‘ethnographic sensibility’ to anthropological teaching, this paper sketches the social and historical context of discomfort produced by everyday classroom practices at a historically privileged university. This paper argues that new patterns of thought, if achieved at all in the course of learning through ‘discomfort’, are deeply embedded within uneasy social relationships.

Keywords:

• difference
• emotional labour
• higher education
• pedagogy of discomfort
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

This paper was made possible by the South African Department of Higher Education foundation training grant that sponsored the Innovative Pedagogy Colloquium and the Regional Writers Workshop 2011.

Notes

1. In this article I use ‘race’ as a constructed concept. For the same reason, I use the South African racial classification of ‘white’ and ‘black’, as these are used in everyday speech as well as official documentation.

2. The content was similar to the prior year, and the structure in line with all UCT's anthropology courses.