This paper examines methods of teaching introductory anthropology to non-anthropology students in the context of digital culture and post-pandemic social realities. Drawing on courses taught between 2018 and 2025 within the Documentary Filmmaking master’s program at Babeș-Bolyai University, it explores how anthropology can be made relevant to film students shaped by constant online interaction, social media, and artificial intelligence. The study presents a pedagogical model based on experiential learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, and international filmmaking teamwork involving students from Romania, the United States, and Italy. Emphasis is placed on “hands-on” projects that encourage direct engagement with people and communities beyond digital environments. Student feedback indicates that anthropological methods and skills were transferable to filmmaking practice and other professional contexts. The paper argues that experiential and collaborative approaches can make anthropology accessible and meaningful for digital-native film students.
This research investigates how the gentrifying actor Rivus, a real estate project that encompasses the urban regeneration of the former Carbochim industrial platform, reinforces the middle-class imaginary in Cluj-Napoca by manufacturing consent through its communication strategies. The study examines how the urban regeneration project influences public perception of the middle class and legitimizes the middle-class imaginary by exploring the instrumentalization of nature, cultural identity, practicability, unity, work, and innovation in Rivus digital narratives. Through qualitative content analysis, the research examines a series of materials from the Rivus project s social media platforms to identify recurring themes and discursive patterns. The research results illustrate Rivus strategy of helping to construct, strengthen, and reinforce the idea of the middleclass imaginary, capitalizing on the real estate and innovation ideals characteristic of the city of Cluj-Napoca. By doing this, the project not only normalises and complies with the neoliberal views of prosperity and those entitled to it but also undermines the inequality, exclusion, and social costs associated with gentrification. As a consequence, based on the Rivus project case study, the current paper identifies and highlights some of the techniques used by real estate developers in modeling the middle-class imaginary and its public acceptance.
As civil society initiatives, repair cafés make an important contribution to the circular economy and to social change. With more than 3,500 worldwide, the number of repair cafés in practice is high, but the conceptual basis for their analysis is still underdeveloped. Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which emerged in the 1980s from the sociology of science and technology, is today one of the key theories of the knowledge society. It differs from other theories in its close conceptual interweaving of human and technical elements, and its focus on relationships and constellations that make an actor act. However, ANT has so far given little attention to the topic of repair. This paper explores the potential of ANT for the analysis of repair cafés as technology-related social phenomena. With its lens on changing constellations of actors that mutually influence each other, ANT is found to be a powerful analytical approach for understanding the characteristics of specific repair initiatives, their challenges and success factors. This is relevant more broadly to the relationship between technology and society, including with view to the adoption of circular economy practices across society.
Based on the view that praxis evolves in the dialectical relationship between theory and action, the article contributes to a Marxist understanding of knowledge production and its adaptation in the field of urban studies. It elaborates on our insight into the politics of research as praxis by focusing on its main precepts: 1) knowledge production as a social process, i.e., how is it created within a network of social relations that evolves to pursue action (for housing justice in this case); 2) the embeddedness of researchers in the material realities they address, taking a critical standpoint to the ruling classes and increasing consciousness about the fact that action (eg. for housing justice) should be part of revolutionary struggles targeting the capitalist political economy regime as a whole; and 3) how researching real estate development, as a core element in the Post-Fordist accumulation regime and a vehicle of reurbanization that uses urban space for profit-making, answers the need of housing justice activism for extended knowledge that can underpin more radical transformative actions.
This essay offers a concise review of ethnographers ’longstanding concern with the geographically and temporally bounded character of classical participant-observation fieldwork. It begins by outlining the archetypal construction of fieldwork before examining two contrasting positions on the generalizability of ethnographic data, positions that illustrate the wide spectrum of attitudes held within the discipline. Building on a Geertzian perspective, the essay reconceptualizes generalizability as a mode of theory production aimed at rendering intelligible the conceptual structures that organize social action. I argue that this form of theoretical generalizability is best advanced by engaging three influential critiques of ethnographic practice focusing on the deconstruction of fieldwork’s taken-for-granted premises, the challenge to single-site generalization, and the move beyond reductive inductive–deductive dichotomies.
