Event Details

Anthropologist and educator Dr. Hervé Varenne will discuss his new book, Educating in Life: Ethnographies of Challenging New Normals (Routledge 2019), which approaches “culture” as the source people tap to handle overwhelming challenges, such as how do parents face their growing child’s autism? How do mothers who have walked across a desert deal with having two sets of children in two nation-states? How do girls from Bangladesh make a life in Detroit? What prompts women to partner with horses in “equine therapy” to improve their lives? This talk explores the rising of “new normals” against powerful “old normals,” and the consequences of having to make a life when the work of other people keep old normals alive and inescapable. Dr. Varenne argues that people, everywhere and everywhen, educate themselves to their conditions and find sensitive responses to these conditions.  Sponsored by Anthropology