Education Through the Anthropological Lens - A Conversation with Zineb Mouhyi, Corina Enache, Patrick Alexander and Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard

A recent guest, Prof. Tony Chemero highlighted that anthropology is one of the more underestimated and often excluded of the ‘cognitive sciences’. I completely agree and since I discovered it in the early 2000s when I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex, I have personally experienced anthropology not as a subject discipline, but rather as a way of approaching the world and cognition itself. That's why this week I was so happy to bring together four amazing anthropologists who care deeply about educational transformations to explore these questions.Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard, PhDPascale is a social psychologist, trainer and facilitator, researcher and CEO of Learn to Change, Change to Learn, bridging theory and practice working in the area of collective intelligence, cooperative and transformative learning, with 30 years of professional practice. Pascale’s PhD (2021) focused on ‘Conversation as a learning ecology’ and how professionals develop through engaging in online professional learning communities. She has co-authored several handbooks of which the European Reference Framework of Competences for a Democratic Culture (RFCDC), (Council of Europe, 2018) and the TASKs for Democracy handbook, (Council of Europe, 2015) dedicated to student and teacher competence. https://pascalemompoint.com/Conversation as an Ecology of LearningEducation for change: https://share.google/8K1PEdbaYIgbRuRqFDeveloping intercultural education in schools: https://share.google/Of1MSlVTmedxoQ9GmA European framework for Democratic citizenship in education: https://share.google/8QSEiz5cAmg3HQjHzCorina Enache Corina is the founder and system worker at Kotka (which means ‘eagle’ in Finnish and ‘female cat’ in Polish!) a consultancy helping living things grow well. She is also the host of The Human Show podcast. Corina’s work sits at the intersection of leadership development, organisational development, and anthropology, and unfolds through learning, dialogue, and real-time practice. She draws on experience across international corporate environments, consulting, academia and European projects, and work with different ways of knowing — thinking, sensing, and intuition — while staying close to what is actually happening in the system.https://www.linkedin.com/in/corinaenache/ https://kotka.world/ https://worldpodcasts.com/the-human-show/ Patrick AlexanderPatrick is a social anthropologist specialising in education, childhood and youth studies. Patrick’s research and teaching interests include the sociology of schooling, youth and youth subcultures, gender, ethnography, and social theory. He is Reader in Education and Anthropology in the School of Education, Oxford Brookes University, as well as Research Lead for the School of Education, and Director of the Centre for Educational Consultancy and Development (CECD), where he leads consultancy and contract research activity in the field of education.Patrick is a Fulbright Scholar, Fellow of the RSA, HEA, Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), and a Fellow of International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). Patrick is also Research Fellow at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford and Editor of the journal Teaching Anthropology (https://teachinganthropology.org/ ).https://www.brookes.ac.uk/profiles/staff/patrick-alexander https://patrickgalexander.org/about-3/  Zineb MouhyiZineb is a mother, daughter, writer, educator, scholar-activist, and PhD candidate in Anthropology and Social Change at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Zineb was also the co-founder of ⁠YouthXYouth⁠, a global organisation that she set up with Valentina Raman, to convene youth-led action around transforming education systems.Young People are Reclaiming their Education and Making New Worlds Possible - A Conversation with Zineb Mouhyi (Ep185)Sarah Pink (2025). ⁠Futures Anthropology for the Polycrisis⁠. Anthropological Forum, 1–18.