Abstract
This meditation on the pedagogy of fieldwork-based courses is based on the author’s experience as an instructor for Cornell’s oldest fieldwork course, a collaborative class anchored in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, but open to a wide interdisciplinary audience. In recent years, it has been located in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, known for the Zapatista rebellion, the richness of the state’s natural resources, its indigenous poverty, and the increasingly fraught issue of Central American migration. The chapter addresses the purposes and practices of public scholarship in the humanities and the challenge of creating meaningful international models of engagement and fieldwork practice in local communities.
Readers can follow up on topics addressed here with key references in the bibliography.If we do not trespass (not necessarily violently), if we do not go beyond our cultural norms … we can never be free. To free ourselves is to trespass, and to transform… To trespass is to exist. To free ourselves is to exist.
—Augusto Boal (xxi–ii)
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Castillo, D.A. (2016). Engagement and Pedagogy: Traveling with Students in Chiapas, Mexico. In: Puri, S., Castillo, D. (eds) Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-92834-7_13
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