An Anthropology of Learning: On Nested Frictions in Cultural Ecologies

by Cathrine Hasse

This book has one explicit to present a new theory of cultural learning in organisations which combines practice-based learning with cultural models - a cognitive anthropological schema theory of taken-for-granted connections - tied to the everyday meaningful use of artefacts. The understanding of culture as emerging in a process of learning open up for new understandings, which is useful for researchers, practitioners and students interested in dynamic studies of culture and cultural studies of organisations. The new approach goes beyond culture as a static, essentialist entity and open for our possibility to learn in organisations across national cultures, across ethnicity and across the apparently insurmountable local educational differences which makes it difficult for people to communicate working together in an increasingly globalized world. The empirical examples are mainly drawn from organisations of education and science which are melting-pots of cultural encounters.

Paperback

First published December 29, 2014

About the author

Cathrine Hasse has a long expertise in studying the relation between learning and culture in organizations with a special focus on universities and technical laboratories as workplaces. She is trained as an anthropologist and a cultural psychologist and her main study object (material-conceptual cultural learning processes) have through many years of academic work steadily increased her insight in a wide variety of engineering activities and physics at university level as well as schools. In recent years, these insights have been contextualized by knowledge of how culture influence material-conceptual learning processes in physics, AI and robotic engineering in a number of European countries. She is, and has been, coordinator of EU-projects, as well as projects financed by the Danish Research Council. She is also a member of several advisory boards and as well as a present and former member of boards of educational institutions. She has contributed as an evaluator of several university disciplines (including the interdisciplinary structures at Linköping University). Her present academic work is concentrated on how people in Europe are affected by new technologies such as robots, drones and AI. She did her PhD. on "cultural learning processes" in a physics institute where she followed a group of young male and female physicists' students in their first years of study. This project developed into a longitudinal study. She has followed the same group of students for more than 6 years. In her next project The Cultural Dimensions of Science she compared university institutions in Denmark and Italy and after this project she became the co-coordinator of an EU project, financed by EU 6th framework programme, UPGEM (Understanding Puzzles in the Gendered European Map) and is now the coordinator of the REELER (Responsible and Ethical Learning in Robotics) project (reeler.eu). In her research work she takes a special interest in the relations between culture, learning, concept-making, new materialism, posthumanism, gender and education. She is presently the coordinator of a project on the relation between workplace learning and technological literacy funded by the Danish Strategic Research Council. She is the author of several books on cultural learning processes, education, robotics and AI and methodology, and has an international as well as Danish bulk of peer-reviewed journal articles in her portfolio, just as she is an active conference speaker on a number of conferences including conferences with broad interests in the development of Science and Technology Studies (STS) postphenomenology, cultural psychology, learning theory, as well as the future of universities.