Transformative Anthropology as Wayfinding

The Ascona Charter, Transformagrams, and Future-Forming Social Science

In a time marked by ecological collapse, widening social inequalities, institutional fragility, and what many describe as a polycrisis, anthropology is being called to re-examine not only its objects of study, but its purpose, orientation, and responsibility toward the future. The Ascona Charter for Transformative Anthropology emerges as a powerful collective response to this call. Rather than treating anthropology as a detached observer of crisis, the Charter positions the discipline as an engaged, ethical, and future-forming practice.
My own work in Transformative Anthropology, and the development of the Transformagram Learning Model and Transformagram Approach to Integral Human Development and Wayfinding, offers a concrete example of how the Charter’s values and commitments can be operationalized in research, teaching, and pedagogical design. Together, they illustrate how anthropology can function not only as critique, but as orientation.

Transformative Anthropology: From Analysis to Orientation

Transformative Anthropology, as articulated in the Ascona Charter, moves beyond documenting social worlds toward actively engaging with transformation—within communities, institutions, and the discipline itself. It recognizes that anthropology is never neutral: our methods, questions, and teaching practices shape futures, whether intentionally or not.
The Charter calls for the reappropriation of values that have been hollowed out by neoliberal academic regimes—care, respect, reciprocity, integrity, and non-extractivism—and for their reintegration into how we work, teach, and relate. This is not a moral add-on, but an epistemological shift. Knowledge is no longer something extracted and evaluated solely through metrics; it is relational, situated, and consequential.
In this sense, Transformative Anthropology is inherently future-forming. It asks:

• What kinds of futures do our research practices enable or foreclose?
• How do our teaching methods cultivate agency, responsibility, and hope?
• How can anthropology offer direction without imposing domination?

The Transformagram Learning Model: Teaching as Transformative Practice

The Transformagram Learning Model responds directly to these questions. Grounded in ethnographic methods—particularly autoethnography, reflexivity, narrative inquiry, and multimodal knowledge production—the model treats learning as a process of orientation, not simply content acquisition.
In alignment with the Charter’s internally oriented values (care, respect, collaboration, freedom of expression, diversity), the Transformagram classroom is designed as a relational space where students are accompanied rather than evaluated from above. Learning becomes a shared journey in which lived experience, positionality, and critical reflection are recognized as legitimate sources of anthropological insight.
Students are not trained merely to analyze crises “out there,” but to understand how they are implicated within them, and how knowledge can be mobilized ethically and creatively. This approach embodies the Charter’s insistence on slow science, academic freedom, and the nurturing of reflective spaces in an increasingly precarious academic landscape.

Non-Extractivist Epistemologies and Transformagram Wayfinding

At the level of work processual values, the Ascona Charter emphasizes integrity, non-extractivism, critical reflexivity, multiplicity, and polyphony. The Transformagram Approach operationalizes these principles through what I describe as wayfinding.
Wayfinding, drawn from anthropological, Indigenous, and navigational traditions, refers to orientation through uncertainty without relying on rigid maps. In Transformative Anthropology, wayfinding becomes a methodological stance:

• We do not impose predetermined outcomes.
• We attend to signals, relationships, and emergent meanings.
• We navigate complexity through reflexive attunement rather than control.

Autoethnography plays a key role here—not as self-indulgence, but as a non-extractive method that foregrounds accountability, relational ethics, and epistemic humility. By situating the researcher within the field of inquiry, Transformative Anthropology resists the illusion of objectivity while cultivating integrity and reciprocity.

Integral Human Development and the Anthropologist as Wayfinder

The Transformagram Approach to Integral Human Development expands anthropology’s scope from social analysis to human flourishing across personal, relational, institutional, and planetary dimensions. This resonates strongly with the Charter’s societal commitments: addressing structural inequalities, engaging with alternative visions and practices, confronting power asymmetries, and sustaining hope as a collective duty.
In times of polycrisis, people do not only need explanations—they need orientation. Transformative anthropologists, in this sense, act as wayfinders:

• Holding space for complexity without paralysis
• Translating lived experience into shared meaning
• Connecting micro-level narratives with macro-level structures
• Supporting communities in imagining and inhabiting alternative futures

Through teaching, community-based anthropology, narrative mediation, and participatory research, transformative anthropologists help cultivate directionality—not by prescribing solutions, but by strengthening capacities for ethical navigation.

Hope as Duty: Anthropology for Future-Forming Worlds
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The Ascona Charter’s insistence on hope as a duty is perhaps its most radical proposition. Hope here is not optimism or denial; it is a practice of responsibility. It requires us to design pedagogies, research methods, and institutional cultures that do not reproduce extraction, precarity, or despair.
The Transformagram Learning Model offers one pathway for doing so—by integrating ethnographic rigor with transformative pedagogy, and by treating anthropology as a lifeway rather than a discipline confined to critique.
In this convergence between the Ascona Charter and Transformative Anthropology, we see a vision of the social sciences not as spectators of collapse, but as future-forming companions in uncertain times. Anthropology becomes a practice of wayfinding—attentive, ethical, plural, and oriented toward the collective task of navigating toward more just, livable, and meaningful futures.

Crafting Peace Through Autoethnography: Reflexive Pedagogies for Navigating Difficult Times articulates the Transformagram Pedagogy I have developed and implemented in courses in medical anthropology and conflict resolution at Creighton University. This pedagogical approach demonstrates how autoethnography, reflexivity, and narrative mediation can be mobilized not only as research methods, but as practices of care, orientation, and ethical engagement in contexts of illness, conflict, and institutional uncertainty. As such, it constitutes my contribution to Transformative Anthropology within the Interface Commission of the Swiss Anthropology Association, offering a concrete example of how teaching can function as a future-forming intervention—cultivating wayfinding capacities, relational responsibility, and hope in times of polycisis.

In Crafting Peace Through Autoethnography: Reflexive Pedagogies for Navigating Difficult Times, Dr. Riva shares her autoethnographic method that employs a transformational pedagogy for conflict resolution and peace studies. Riva recollects her autoethnographic process, connecting her theoretical framework to lived experience. The transformagram learning model is presented as a stepwise approach with a scaffolded template. Students’ transformagram portfolios are showcased, offering examples of the transformational process.

Conflict narratives emerge from autoethnographic and duoethnographic methods that become tools for activating the inner compass, providing directionality for homing in to better-formed storylines and potential flyways. In this creative and reflexive space, story mandalas shapeshift, opening a transformational passageway. Conflict wisdom is enkindled through narrative conflict resolution approaches that increase connectivity and narrative coherency, giving rise to mediatorship.
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The transformagram learning model provides a pedagogy that accompanies students as they navigate difficult times. Ample theories, stories, and examples provide peace study scholar practitioners with a model that can be applied to traditional higher education classrooms as well as online learning platforms.

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