I am an anthropologist in UBC’s educational leadership stream, and my work centres on one question: how do students learn to think and work like anthropologists? In the classroom, in curriculum design, and in the open tools I build, I try to answer it by giving students hands-on, accessible, and sometimes playful ways into anthropological knowledge production and ethnographic practice. Much of this work lives on Open Field (ethnography.ca), an open-access platform I design and maintain. It hosts open educational resources and interactive tools for teaching and doing ethnography. These include Multimodal Ethnographies, a textbook-style resource on techniques such as sketching, mapping, walking, and sound, and Anthro Chronicle, a collaborative multimedia timeline of anthropology’s history with more than 170 entries. The Ethnographic Vignette Printer prints ethnographic vignettes on receipt paper for students to read, annotate, and sort together. Drop-in Dialogues helps students find their footing in unfamiliar theoretical conversations through short excerpts from talks by leading anthropologists. FieldWeaver and a pair of ethnographic mapping tools are for charting the people, things, and places that make up a fieldsite. Several of these resources are built with students as contributors and all are designed for other instructors to reuse and adapt.

My teaching draws on Universal Design for Learning, hybrid and multi-access course design, student-generated instructional materials, and community-engaged experiential learning. I was a member of UBC’s inaugural UDL Fellows cohort. My projects have been supported by UBC’s Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund, the OER Rapid Innovation Grant, the Sustainability Education Grant, and the Hybrid Teaching Pilot Grant. I also speak regularly with colleagues and students about accessibility, open education, and what becomes of learning in the age of generative AI.

I received my PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Minnesota in 2018, with a dissertation on how bloggers in the Persian blogosphere craft selves through writing. Before joining UBC’s Department of Anthropology, I taught at the University of Minnesota and Macalester College, and I have also taught the graduate qualitative methods seminar at UBC’s Sauder School of Business.

I am a linguistic and media anthropologist with an interest in the anthropology of science and technology. My regional expertise is Iran, Persianate societies, and the Middle East, and methodologically I specialise in digital and online ethnography.

My doctoral research, based on fieldwork in the Persian blogosphere, examines how people change in the process of making and receiving media. It asks how, in a ubiquitously mediated world, the creativity of media practices turns inward to fashion selves, and how those selves in turn affect social, cultural, and political transformation. Drawing on ontological ideas from two very different traditions, Perso-Islamic mysticism and Iranian internet culture, this work questions assumptions that inform much media-anthropological thought. It contributes to a wider movement in anthropology concerned with how humans exist in worlds that extend beyond us.

More recently, I was a co-investigator on a SSHRC Insight Grant (2021–2026). The project used machine learning and computational grounded theory to study the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on work and employment through social media. My current writing is increasingly in the scholarship of teaching and learning, on teaching ethnographic writing, theory, and methods.

Shiva, A. (2026) Teaching Ethnographic Writing through Vignettes: An Experiment with a Digital/Material Tool. Teaching Anthropology Journal 15(1): 87–95.

Shiva, A. (2026) Beginning in the Middle: Teaching Theory as Orientation. Teaching Tools, Fieldsights, March 26.

Shiva, A. (2025) Expanding Open Anthropology: A Classroom-to-OER Approach. Poster, Open UBC Showcase.

Shiva, A. (2021) Remote Teaching and the Revival of Time-tested Styles and Tools. Culture (Newsletter of the Canadian Anthropology Society) 15(1).

Sajjadiani, S., Shiva, A., and Seidel, M. (2021) Pandemic Work: Developing a Computational Grounded Theory of Exogenous Category Shocks. Academy of Management Proceedings. doi:10.5465/AMBPP.2021.12818abstract

Shiva, A. (2016) Understanding Users: The Extensions of Expectant Systems. 2016 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings: 120–133. doi:10.1111/1559-8918.2016.01080

Open educational resources (all at ethnography.ca)

· Drop-in Dialogues (2026)

· FieldWeaver and Ethnographic Mapping Tools (2025–26)

· Ethnographic Vignette Printer (2025)

· Anthro Chronicle: An Interactive Timeline of Anthropology’s History (2024–25)

· Multimodal Ethnographies (2023–24)

2026: Dean of Arts Award for Educational Leadership and Innovation, UBC

2025-2026: Faculty Wellbeing Champion, UBC Wellbeing

2024: Killam Teaching Prize, UBC

2022, 2023, 2024, 2025: Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award, Anthropology Students’ Association

2021: Open Educational Resources Champion, Alma Mater Society of UBC

2021: CASCA Award for Teaching Excellence, Canadian Anthropology Society

Website: ethnography.ca