Teaching a Decolonial Visual Anthropology: An Introduction to a Collective Student Manifesto for Producing Creative Work

by Dada Docot (Purdue University)

I first read poet Tristan Tzara’s 1918 “Dada Manifesto” when I was taking the class of Filipino conceptual artist Roberto Chabet at the College of Fine Arts, University of the Philippines. Chabet spoke about the works of dadaist artists that defied formalism and challenged the sociopolitical conventions of their time. Tzara’s anti-manifesto manifesto was both energizing and confusing as it decried the labor and necessity of writing one, while it also laid out the social conventions that the dadaists were breaking and critiquing. Since reading Tzara’s manifesto, artistic movements’ ideologies expressed through their respective manifestos have always captured my interest. Various artistic movements, including the dadaists, challenge the status quo by bringing into the world change through their art and ideas. What if the classroom could also be a site for producing a manifesto that reflects the spirit and challenges of our era? What ideas might be centered and upheld in a manifesto for producing anthropologically informed creative work?  

I decided to take up this challenge in my graduate-level course, “Visual Anthropology,” taught in Spring 2024 at Purdue University, and offer my reflections on my process here to help others who would like to take up the challenge as well. I opened my course with an acknowledgment of the broader discipline’s controversial history as one intimately tied to espionage, betrayal, and extraction. As anthropology embraces multimodality, I have also written about how tools in the anthropological toolkit signal researchers’ access to power and privilege. Of course, anthropology has also changed immensely since then, as many anthropologists have sought to address and correct the harms it has caused in the past. The course takes up some of this work, centering the written and creative works of anthropologists and other creative producers who engage with, and advocate for, marginalized communities. With the intention to avoid re-traumatizing students in my course by (re)exposing them to historical anthropological harm, my course instead begins with a two-week venture into theoretical perspectives that highlight redress and possibilities. Through these texts, my course turns away from the visual anthropological pedagogical canon and instead, orients students towards the ways anthropologists and other researchers decolonize knowledge production. Also in the second week, students in my course watch the comedy documentary, Qallunaat! This film creatively critiques historically extractive practices in anthropology as experienced by the Inuit people.  Through introducing these texts and visuals to students, the course invites students to consider how their creative production in the course can address social issues, healing, and repair.  

During the third week of the course, we proceeded to discuss Ethics by engaging several powerful manifestos written by Louise Boilevin et al., Patricia Alvarez Astacio et al. and The Combahee River Collective. Boilevin et al.’s Research 101: A Manifesto for Ethical Research in the Downtown Eastside, for example, presents illuminating perspectives from the side of the studied/researched on the ways they would like to be treated, addressed, and compensated by researchers. Upon reading the assigned course materials, students drafted a personal manifesto for producing anthropologically informed creative work. After a discussion on these personal manifestos, students worked together in class to create a unified manifesto that would guide their work throughout the course. Beyond merely stitching their manifestos together, students engaged with each other’s individual thoughts, learned from each other about themes that are important to each of them, and distilled the variety of opinions of the collective into a cohesive whole. Pedagogically, the exercise of writing, sharing, and putting the manifesto together opened space for students to express their identities, to learn about each other’s positionalities, and finally, to cultivate empathy and understanding of their differences. Students in the class referred to their individually written and collective manifestos throughout the semester as we examined various topics, highlighting the impact of this creative project in their anthropological thinking and analysis. In these times of polarized worldviews, manifestos could potentially serve as a document through which we can collectively ground our thoughts, actions, and outputs in collaboration.  

To read the manifesto by the students in Dada Docot’s visual anthropology course, please visit Dimensions: An Ephemeral Manifesto on Creativity.

Cite As

Docot, Dada. 2026. “Teaching a Decolonial Visual Anthropology: An Introduction to a Collective Student Manifesto for Producing Creative Work.” American Anthropologist website, October 6.