My research spans the fields of:
- Anthropology of Childhood and Education
- Indigenous and Marginalized Societies
- Aid and Development Studies
- Human-Environment Relations (including response to environmental change)
- Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology
Research Groups and Projects (click for more information)
Childhood, Child-Parent relationships and Education among indigenous marginalized communities
"Parents' goals regarding their children's development not only structure what children should learn but also how they should do it" (Lavi 2021)
In my work among the South Indian Kattunayaka, traditionally classified as hunter-gatherers and officially recognised as one of India’s poorest populations, I examine notions of childhood and education in light of local core social values.
Parents' role in child development, and particularly the processes through which children learn the skills, behaviors and values they will need as adults, have long since fascinated psychologists and educators. Yet, most theories of child development focus on middle-class Europeans and North Americans of European ancestry, and too often the processes described are assumed to be universal. Over the last decades, a growing number of scholars have strongly argued for the need of a context-sensitive approach to child development and learning processes.
Through the case of a Kattunayaka forest-dwelling community, I offer an alternative view of child-development, learning and teaching, which prioritizes social skills above – and as a pre-condition of – academic/practical ones. I discuss the implications of such view to the evaluation of parenting, and more broadly, of formal education for marginalized indigenous communities.
In my work, I demonstrate how parents negotiate between conflicting senses of parenthood expected from them by authorities on one hand (for example, development workers, school staff and educators) and their families on the other. What is often described by teachers as parental carelessness and lack of responsibility is in fact a deliberate and thoughtful avoidance from ordering others, which in turn encourages the development of children’s autonomy. Kattunayaka parents have their own - subtle but very effective - ways of directing children to the knowledge and behaviour they deem important.
My work also demonstrates the significant challenges faced by Kattunayaka children in mainstream schools, as a result of a clash in home and school value systems and social stigma. This dissonance results in either high levels of withdrawal from school or an alteration of children’s sense of their own autonomy and as a result, their sense of their selves.
Recognizing and legitimizing a variety of learning methods (including autonomous child-led ones) and socially-centered views of intelligence and of child development can ease children’s school experience and thus might work to improve their academic skills as well. Moreover, learning social skills such as those promoted by Kattunayaka parents might be relevant not only to Kattunayaka children but to a much wider audience. In fact, it is important to acknowledge that Kattunayaka methods of learning are in no way unique to Kattunayaka. While in formal education contexts we tend to think of learning as book-and-teacher-centered, children everywhere (and not only children) learn through observation, play and participation. Children everywhere learn while interacting and watching others, and can thus benefit from skills of contact-making and being-with-others as demonstrated by the case of the Kattunayaka.
The experience of aid and development interventions
This research was part of my PhD titled: "‘Developing’ Relations: Rethinking the experience of aid and development interventions, a case study from the Nayaka of South India" (2018, University of Haifa) which has been carried out under the mentorship of Nurit Bird-David.
The work of ‘the aid industry’ involves intentional interventions aimed at generating social, economic, and political change among those deemed ‘underdeveloped’, often by attempts to replace existing local norms and practices and promote assimilation into the state’s dominant society. In recent decades, many marginalized small-scale societies, including those previously classified as hunter-gatherers, became the ‘beneficiaries’ of aid and development initiatives conducted by governmental and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). My research examines the experience, perceptions, interactions and impact of development interventions on such community in South India.
My work concentrates on the complex and entangled experience of ‘development’ in general, and in particular among a community formerly classified as ‘hunter-gatherers’. It examines how people, targeted as ‘beneficiaries’, perceive and engage with development interventions conducted in their hamlets, and explore the relationships that form the social environment of those subjected to development initiatives.
My focus is on people’s view of their social and physical environment and of their own position within it, as they increasingly consider themselves as active participants in larger-scale nation states. The aim of this work is to elucidate how such views shape the understandings and actions of those termed as ‘beneficiaries’ in varied situations, and how this in turn affects the projects and the actors involved.
Through an examination of daily reality of development projects and their aftermath, I explores the gaps between the ideas motivating development projects, their materialisation when delivered to the hamlet, and the ways in which they are received, understood and take shape in the long term. My study reveals why, even in a case of collaboration and positive communication between different actors, great frustration is often expressed by both ‘developers’ and ‘beneficiaries’ regarding the outcomes of development projects. It also highlights why such projects are often used differently than expected even by ‘beneficiaries’ who happily welcome them, and do not feel that they resist or misuse them.
Offering an alternative approach to the examination of development projects in general, this study is relevant to broader contexts beyond the research of hunting and gathering peoples. It offers new implications for understanding the experience of life under development of many people worldwide who are commonly classified as poor, passive, weak or grateful beneficiaries. It also demonstrates the serious consequences of the authorities’ obliviousness to local senses and practices and the effect that this has on the lives of beneficiaries and the fate of development initiatives.
Forest Schools in the United-Kingdom
I hold a Level 3 Certificate in Leading Forest School and Outdoor Learning. I volunteer as a teaching assistance at two primary schools in Cambridge, UK.
In addition, I provide consultancy and lectures to Forest School teachers and practitioners about practices of learning and knowledge transmission among forest-dwellers communities.
I am interested in exploring the relations between the outdoor settings, the Forest School educational approach (for example, enabling child-led learning) and children's response, in particular, regarding children's social and emotional development.
Based on my research among forest-dwellers communities, I constantly engage with the question whether alternative models of learning, social values, and parenting practices, could be applicable to other cultural context and enrich our children's social development.
Citizen Science tools to support community-based research in India
My project titled: "Making local knowledge matter for landslides and flooding preparedness" is part of the Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) group at the Department of Geography, University College London (UCL) led by Muki Haklay and Jerome Lewis (UCL Anthropology).
Extreme Citizen Science (ExCiteS) is a situated, bottom-up practice that takes into account local needs, practices and culture and works with broad networks of people to design and build new devices and knowledge creation processes that can transform the world. I work with the Extreme Citizen Science: Analysis and Visualisation (ECSAnVis) which aims to develop geographical analysis and visualisation tools that can be used, successfully, by non-literate people and any other community in a culturally appropriate ways, that further fit their needs and social practices.
Through collaboration with Keystone Foundation, and Kattunayaka communities in South India, this project uses tools developed by ExCiteS in order to provide a geographical analysis and visualization platform and data that will enable to monitor trends and change over time in the deep areas of the forest. In addition, ethnographic work provides insights into people’s notions of their environment and particularly of landslide and flood events. This project is aimed to provide communities with the tools to conduct their own environmental data collection and research. It is also expected to generate new data of hydrologically-driven processes and their hyper-localized mechanisms and impacts and to help establish a better collaboration through a mutual and respectful discussion between scientists and local institutions, authorities and in particular local communities, which are often excluded from policymaking and research.
Forager Child Studies Interdisciplinary Group
I am a co-founder of the Forager Child Studies, an interdisciplinary research group that studies the pasts, presents, and futures of hunter-gatherer children and childhood (producing over ten peer-reviewed papers since 2016). Together with Sheina Lew-Levy and other members of the FCS group, we produced several review papers on how forager children learn subsistence skills (Lew-Levy et al. 2017) and social skills and gender norms (Lew-Levy et al. 2018) as well as on children engagement with school education (Ninkova et al. accepted) and on hunter-gatherer children in archaeology (Milks et al. 2021).
Read more on our work in our group website (https://foragerchildstudies.wixsite.com/home)
We are currently working on five research tracks.
(1) Children’s work and play: In a cross-cultural analysis made up of secondary data, this project seeks to explore how ecological and cultural factors influence children’s participation in play and work activities across the lifespan.
(2) Children in the archeological record: Using a systematic protocol, this project examines how children’s activities are identified in the archeological record.
(3) Forager children’s experience in school: Using eHRAF and existing literature, we are collaborating with HG-EDU to investigate forager children’s experiences in schools.
(4) Children's use of tools: Funded by PLAYTrack seeds, this project uses eHRAF to examine how children use tools in play and work.
(5) Children's foraging returns: Using a systematic protocol, this project examines cross-cultural variation and regularity in children's reported foraging returns.