This chapter suggests that teaching students an ethnographic approach could be an important way to explore how societal issues could be understood through their disciplinary knowledge. As higher education institutions have increasingly... more
This chapter suggests that teaching students an ethnographic approach could be an important way to explore how societal issues could be understood through their disciplinary knowledge. As higher education institutions have increasingly come under criticism for failing to equip students for a fast changing and unpredictable future, the role and purpose of the future university has come under debate (Barnett and Bengtsen, 2018). In response, discourses about entrepreneurial mindsets, attitudes and competences have flourished. These discourses have further anchored the structures and management of the institutions in line with neoliberal ideology. In fact, it seems that neoliberalism has captured some of these concepts and used them to further entrench neoliberal strategies. For example, the entrepreneurial university has become equated with the corporatization of the university (Shore and Wright, 2017) and teaching entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial competences have become integrated across the university as being about encouraging students to create business ventures. Interestingly, in Scandinavia, entrepreneurship researchers and educators have been working with a broader definition of entrepreneurship that is about creating different kinds of value. In Denmark, this broader perspective on entrepreneurship and value has led to the development of a changemaker model that has been the basis for some teaching in the Humanities at Aarhus University. In this model, ethnography is used to explore how social practices are formed and shaped. Using ethnography in teaching helps students engage with their disciplinary knowledge.
