Teaching and Learning Urban Anthropology in Bosnia-Herzegovina

In the summer of 2019, two professors led seven students from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, in a high impact immersive learning course in urban anthropology in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They spent a week each in three different cities: the multiethnic, cosmopolitan capital of Sarajevo, the industrial and predominantly Muslim city of Zenica, and Mostar, an ethnically divided city that is also a tourist destination and home to the country’s largest corporations. Professors wanted students to understand that there are multiple ways of experiencing and representing urban cultures. They led classes on multimodal ethnographic methods and stressed the importance of place in ethnography. Students were also encouraged to apply their personal and academic background and interests to each of the cities. In this paper, they outline the course, provide reflections, and make the case that establishing a uniform structure for teaching multimodal anthropological methods while allowing for flexibility and student interests in assignments will result in better learning outcomes. Finally, we explain how the course leaned into the practice of “teaching uncertainty” as featured in Current Anthropology (2017) and encouraged students to see the ways in which uncertainty shaped the lives of Bosnians but also students’ own lives and cities.