Arjun Shankar

Arjun is a teacher, writer, researcher, and mediamaker. He is currently getting his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Anthropology and Education and his dissertation research weaves together education NGOs, the Kannada film industry, sericulture, educational aspiration, and everyday suffering into a single story of rapid change and development in villages surrounding Bangalore. He is a co-founder and current co-director of camra, a collective of researchers and educators committed to participatory, experimental mediamaking (www.camrapenn.org). He recently completed two short collaborative documentary films on the pan-African Rastafarian movement in South Africa. He is also a director of the Center for Curiosity, which engages in transdisciplinary research into the concept of ‘curiosity’ with the specific purpose of creating curricular tools for teachers and students. He encourages teachers at all levels to “think with multimodality”, making the audiovisual part of classroom instruction as well as classroom assignments.