In Spring 2026, I designed and taught Migration and Social Justice, a 200-level undergraduate course at Middlebury College, moving from transnational migration theory, care, and labor to borders, camps, illegality, climate displacement, and migrant solidarity.

Instead of a single midterm paper, I designed three shorter ethnographic prompts, each assigned after students encountered a central framework but before class discussion had solidified its meaning:

• Migration in everyday life: Students noticed migration in scenes of care, service, emotional labor, remittances, or transnational distance, accompanied by a simple multimodal component.

• Legality beyond the border: Students traced how (il)legality is produced and lived through documents, rules, waiting, and bureaucratic encounters. Because this prompt could involve sensitive stories of status and vulnerability, the multimodal component was not required.

• Climate displacement or solidarity: Students developed either a place-based analysis of climate change and displacement or a relational analysis of migrant solidarity in practice, using a visual form to clarify relations, barriers, movements, or asymmetries.

Students could work from their own lives or from ethnographic or documentary films, moving from close observation to conceptual interpretation while protecting confidentiality and citing readings precisely.

The final paper extended this practice to object-centered oral history. The assignment assessed the process of observation, rapport, interpretation, multimodal form choice, ethical reflection, presentation, and revision through four stages:

• Visual narrative workshop: Two comic-making workshops with cartoonist Dan Nott and Andy Kolovos of the Vermont Folklife Center gave students a practical model for visual narrative grounded in relationship. Inspired by The Most Costly Journey, co-edited by Kolovos, the workshops emphasized that representational choices carry ethical and political stakes, not just aesthetic ones (Bennett et al. 2021).

• Proposal and interview plan: Students identified a participant, explained their rapport, developed object-centered questions related to migration, anticipated sensitive topics, and described concepts from the course that might help them analyze the case.

• Recorded interview: After confirmed, students interviewed the participant about a specific object tied to a migration-related story, treating the object as a carrier of social relations, a trace of mobility or constraint, and a site where larger structures become visible.

• Final presentation and submission: Students submitted an analytical essay, an ethics note, and a multimodal representation, usually a comic sequence or illustrated storyboard. Before submission, they presented work-in-progress in a conference-style format, rotating through the roles of presenter, discussant, and chair, and noting a revision they would make in response to peer feedback.

This piece argues that such assignments make ethnographic analysis assessable as a situated process rather than only as a final written product, since students must show where they stood, what they noticed, how they represented it, and what responsibilities followed from those choices.1 The next section, co-written with students from the course, shows how that movement unfolded from within their own analytic practice, as ordinary routines, rooms, networks, and objects became evidence of migration’s structures and stakes.2

From Ordinary to Analytical: Student Work and Co-Written Reflection

By Lena Chow, Sally Hajhamad, PawThoKaMae, and Chloe Work, with works by Simon Hall, Mica Bodkins, and Yasmeen Topiwalla

When students are asked to draw, map, or sequence an observation, they have to stay with its social, material, and relational organization, instead of using theory to settle the scene quickly. The visual work slows the movement from lived scene to analytical category, making students remain with repetition, proximity, obligation, exposure, repair, and loss, through which migration is often experienced. Across the examples that follow, this slowing helps students see the ordinary as a site of structure; space and material arrangement as forms of power; contradiction as analytically productive rather than a problem to resolve; and representation as an ethical practice.

PawThoKaMae’s work shows how transnational care can disappear into routine. She had watched her mother fold laundry during phone calls from Thailand her entire childhood. “Phone calls were normal. Laundry was normal. Karen spoken across the room was normal,” she explained. In the reconstructed scene, her mother’s uninterrupted folding holds family crisis, kinship remittance responsibilities, and household labor in the same repeated gesture. “My mother never stopped folding. Not during the conversation about the motorcycle accident. Not during the conversation about hospital bills. Not when her grandmother’s voice grew audibly distressed. Not when she said, quietly, ‘I already sent everything.’ At some point, it was just part of the background noise of my childhood. Something so familiar that I had stopped noticing. Stopped observing.”

Her spatial sketch holds the call, the laundry, and children’s positions in the room together. “I only then realized that what I had always considered an ordinary moment was actually carrying the weight of migration, responsibility, and care labor. Academic texts can help with the process of understanding concepts like migration, remittances, and transnational obligations, but they couldn’t show me that those concepts also existed in our living room.” The assignment changed where theory could be found for PawThoKaMae.

Sally Hajhamad’s second prompt piece showed how refugee vulnerability is organized through space. Her vignette returned to a scene from when she was ten years old, sitting across a mahogany desk from an immigration lawyer in a navy suit, translating for her mother:

I remember breaking into tears the moment we stepped outside the building because I refused to let him see that he affected me. I once thought the problem was just that he was cold and patronizing. Now I can see that his behavior was part of a larger system that requires refugees to fit their lives into predetermined categories just to be considered eligible…. That office was a physical representation of power. The lawyer’s authority also came from where he sat and how we were positioned in relation to him. This was beyond the power he had over our asylum case.

Lena Chow’s work demonstrates how solidarity becomes ethnographically difficult when its affective force and uneven risks have to remain in the same frame: “Ethnographic work depends on the conditions of mutual trust and curiosity.” That same attention to relation structures her analysis of a migrant solidarity organization’s Rapid Response Network. “When I first saw the videos online of neighbors singing and surrounding the house on the Dorset Street [in Burlington, by ICE], I found it heartwarming and felt hopeful. And then I went back to it after thinking through horizontal and vertical solidarity and the reality vs. performance of humanitarian aid, and felt confused…. Committing to drawing arrows and dividing actors into groups further revealed to me that risk and privilege were unbalanced by race and citizenship within the solidarity network. The protestors were almost all white citizens. These allies were arrested and released within hours. Three migrants were detained for over a week.” Lena’s diagram shows solidarity as a relation structured by care, but also by unequal exposure: “I learned that this irresolution can be analytically important, rather than an argumentative failure. Something uniquely recognized through ethnographic and multimodal assignments.” The diagram’s value was precisely that it did not allow solidarity to resolve quickly into either celebration or critique.

Chloe Work had lived with Yasmine for four months, carrying the Palestine map necklace in her pocket when they went swimming, watching strangers approach, compliment, refuse, or recognize them through its shape. Her final paper traces the necklace across inheritance, intimacy, public recognition, and political refusal: from Yasmine’s grandmother in Palestine, to the jeweler at the Aida Refugee Camp market, to airports and checkpoints where Yasmine hides it. “In some settings it was a political statement, in others a source of comfort, a connection to identity, or even a liability… I had witnessed this without seeing it…. Because we were friends, I assumed that I already understood this object’s significance: a beautiful keepsake from her grandmother and a ‘fixed’ symbol of her connection to Palestine. It wasn’t until our interview, my studying migration in this course, that I understood how fluidly its meaning shifted.” However, neither proximity nor framework was sufficient on its own: “I would argue that any analysis of her necklace or migration experience would be incomplete without a true understanding of who she is…. I had to come to terms with the impossibility of capturing her as a person, so I pivoted to capturing the most important and easily-interpreted aspects of her story. In some ways I traded the enormity of her character for the accessibility of her message.” The visual form pushed Chloe to enact this trade-off rather than sideline it.

Other final papers and prompt pieces extended these questions through different analytical registers. Simon Hall’s project followed a friend’s Rubik’s cube as both object and analytic form. Working from M’s own comparison between migration and solving a cube “one side at a time,” he transformed her story into a handmade Rubik’s cube-inspired visual narrative, using its faces and turning structure to represent movement, adaptation, and the ongoing negotiation of split identity.

Mica Bodkins and Yasmeen Topiwalla turned to places marked by climate loss: a Vermont roadside house moving from forested home to storm-damaged ruin to cleared absence and Wagner Park in New York City before, during, and after a resilience project remade the waterfront’s social life.

The ordinary is where social relations feel natural enough to be misrecognized as personal, yet unequal enough to demand analytical attention to structures. These assignments helped students slow down at that threshold. Staying there, rather than rushing past it toward a conceptual claim, is what makes an ethnographic account answerable to the processes and conditions of relation, memory, interdependence, and representation through which that account becomes possible.

The Pedagogical and Disciplinary Stakes

As a junior scholar who entered the profession as GenAI tools were reshaping student thinking, research, and writing, I have been present in conversations where colleagues propose oral exams or closed-book assessments instead of take-home research papers, and weekly reading quizzes instead of discussion posts. Although these conversations are useful, the pressure underneath is to abandon the student-centered, experiential, and process-based pedagogies my peers and I were trained to build against older models. We were taught to push students not to absorb and memorize content, but to inquire, experiment, revise, and become accountable for how they know what they know. It feels especially exhausting that many of us had barely begun to practice these alternatives before being asked to relinquish them as a defensive response to the rapid corporate insertion of GenAI into higher education.

In these moments of frustration, I turn to anthropology’s record of analyzing, writing, and teaching otherwise. After all, neither anthropological analysis nor its assessment has ever been reducible to polished conceptual text. In Experimenting with Ethnography, Ballestero and Winthereik (2021, 4–6) frame ethnographic analysis as an embodied, material, and experimental practice that takes place before arguments settle into prose. In the same volume, Douglas-Jones (95–96), Gan (106), and Waltorp (141) extend this claim through drawing, diagrams, and multimodal sorting, showing how such practices help researchers stay with the inchoate, attune to relations as they form and dissolve, and unsettle the premature certainty that familiarity can produce. If anthropological analysis happens through suspension, relation, and form-making, then assessment can also be located there.

Essays published in SCA’s Teaching Tools in recent years bring the same sensibility into the classroom: Fikry (2022) treats students’ unease about whether family, “hanging out,” or everyday surroundings count as worthy material as part of learning ethnography as theory-building; Bhandari (2023) stages object-centered oral history through material culture, memory, interview, consent, and form; and Vidali (2025) shows that multimodal and transduction assignments require students to account for how medium, affordance, and design shape ethnographic meaning.

The assignments in this piece embrace that lineage, rather than the defensive project of making coursework “AI-proof.” By slowing the movement from scene or object to concept, they relocate assessment from the polished final answer to the situated process through which analysis happens: noticing what initially seems ordinary; staying with what does not yet make sense; choosing how to represent it; and accounting for what those choices reveal and obscure. This process, through which a student comes to understand why an ordinary moment matters, is the part of ethnographic learning most difficult to outsource. Staying in the scene, in that sense, is not simply a method for teaching migration. It is a way of defending anthropology’s ongoing wager that knowledge begins not in the final polished text, but in the difficult, partial, and ethically charged labor of learning how to see.

Further Reading

De León, Jason. 2015. The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press.

McGuire, Randall H. 2020. “The Materiality and Heritage of Contemporary Forced Migration.” Annual Review of Anthropology 49: 175–91.

Soto, Gabriella. 2018. “Object Afterlives and the Burden of History: Between ‘Trash’ and ‘Heritage’ in the Steps of Migrants.” American Anthropologist 120 (3): 460–73.

Undocumented Migration Project. Accessed May 11, 2026. https://www.undocumentedmigrationproject.org/.