Africa at Noon

media release: Every Wednesday at noon — since 1973! — African Studies Program faculty, students, and community members have gathered for AFRICA AT NOON, a one-hour weekly lecture series bringing diverse African research from scholars around the world to a campus and community audience.

Due to technical limitations, we are currently unable to support hybrid events. All Africa at Noon series will be 100% virtual or 100% in person in Room 206 this semester until further notice. Apologies for the inconvenience.

“Experiential Learning in Humanitarian Studies: Ethics and Discomfort of Student Research Visits to Uganda," by Jessica Hawkins.

Jessica received a BA in European Studies with German and Italian from Lancaster University in 2005 and completed her Masters in International Development: Poverty, Conflict and Reconstruction in the Global Development Institute (GDI) at the University of Manchester in 2009. She followed this with a PhD in Development, Policy and Management at the same Institute. She started a lectureship at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, The University of Manchester in August 2014. She is now a Senior Lecturer in Humanitarian Studies, researching pedagogies of humanitarianism, state formation and histories of displacement and the camp.

TALK DESCRIPTION

This paper considers the ethics and discomfort experienced when taking students of humanitarian studies on research visits to Uganda, a post-conflict country of protracted displacement. For those students studying this and related topics, they are faced with the prospect in their future careers of possibly having to engage with people who have experienced some form of conflict. Through working on location in the aid sector, or careers in academic research or working in advocacy, whether in the Global South or North, these students need to be better prepared to meet the demands and needs of these populations. The general literature on field visits demonstrates their potential for positive impact, yet rarely do they discuss those visits which are deemed necessary for students of conflict and humanitarianism.Through an application of Kolb’s (2015) experiential learning cycle to the process of teaching, the paper argues that student research visits, when carefully organized, planned and executed, bring pedagogical benefits to the complexity of teaching humanitarianism. The cycle enables educators to provide students with teaching which enhances their theoretical knowledge whilst ensuring these academic programmes instill the ethical consideration of working in these sectors. Boler’s (1999) pedagogy of discomfort is deployed as a conceptual tool at all stages of the cycle to prepare students and faculty for the research visit. Through a four stage process, the experiential learning cycle further helps to overcome the pitfalls of conflict tourism or voluntourism which many academics and students in the field wish to avoid.