Gareth Barkin

I’m a cultural anthropologist and university administrator whose scholarly research is focused on practices surrounding neoliberalism and the representation, international education, and assessment of intercultural skills. 

Administration

I am the Dean of Operations here at the University of Puget Sound, where I also serve as a distinguished professor of anthropology and Asian studies. From 2018-2022 I was the chair of the Department of Sociology & Anthropology and from 2013-2022 I was director of the Luce Initiative on Southeast Asia and the Environment (LIASE) Southeast Asia Symposium, as well as the field school program leader for Indonesia. I was a founding member of Southeast by Northwest, a collaborative association of Southeast Asianists in the Northwest Five Colleges consortium. I directed the Pacific Rim Study Abroad Program in 2015 and helped redesign the program in 2022. I am a fellow at Universität Passau in Germany and Atma-Jaya University Yogyakarta in Indonesia. I am a founding member of the Pacific Alliance of Liberal Arts Colleges (PALAC), representing Puget Sound.

My background and expertise as an administrator includes: 

• Curriculum Design and Innovation (I collaborated on the development and led the implementation of the Grow core curriculum)
• Data-Driven Curricular Management
• Faculty and Operations Budget Management
• Experiential Pedagogy Design and Administration
• Faculty Evaluation and Faculty Hiring
• Academic Culture-Building and Leadership
• Academic Affairs Operations Workflow Management
• Educational Technology and Course Management Software Administration
• Program Assessment (Academic Departments and Curricular Initiatives)
• Program Accreditation
• Study Abroad Program Design and Research
• Summer Term Programming Administration
• Library and Information Systems Administration

Research

As a scholar and researcher, my expertise is focused on several areas: 

• The anthropology of media and technology
• Experiential learning and intercultural skills acquisition
• Study abroad and neoliberalism
• Indonesia and Southeast Asia area studies 

My research is focused on practices surrounding the representation of culture in and of Southeast Asia. I have studied mass media production in Indonesia, and how producers negotiate religious cleavages and social division to associate national, regional, and spiritual identity with consumption. My current research explores short-term study abroad at U.S. universities, focusing on cultural representation and intercultural skills development and assessment in an increasingly market-driven pedagogical arena. Recent publications can be found on my Academia page.

See an updated list of my publications

^{Above: visiting Borobudur during one of my collaborative, short-term field programs in Indonesia, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and the U.S. Embassy, Jakarta. Rather than the epistemologically extractive approach taken by most study abroad programs, these experiences bring together Indonesian and Puget Sound students on a level playing field, both in the classroom and while conducting collaboratively designed ethnographic assignments.}

Teaching

My teaching brings together a general interest in cultural anthropology and Asian Studies, through courses like Introduction to Anthropology, Asia in Motion, and Ethnographic Methods, with my specific research focus, through courses like Muslim Cultures and Communities, Visual & Media Anthropology, and Indonesia & Southeast Asia in Cultural Context. I have also enjoyed teaching our year-long Senior Thesis course, which involves extensive library research supporting a substantive social research project involving quantitative and ethnographic methods.
 

I take an active pedagogical approach to both classroom and field-based learning, focusing on the application of concepts and theory from scholarship in both discussion and real-world environments. I have published on experiential interventions in study abroad practice, as well as ethical, decolonized approaches to international education through collaborative engagements with partners and host communities. As a professor at a liberal arts institution, teaching is the most important focus of my career and I take great pride in helping students to make new connections and see the world in unexpected ways. Although my current position as an academic dean does not leave time for teaching, I hope to return to the classroom in the coming years.