Paper short abstract:

Drawing upon my experiences as a scholar-activist, this presentation explores strategies by which anthropologists can grapple with both global and local socio-ecological crises both within and outside the university.

Paper long abstract:

In part this presentation draws upon my journey as a radical anthropologist inside and outside the university over the course of several decades teaching and acting as a scholar-activist. I entered the world of anthropology in 1970 around the time that anthropology was reinventing itself. I am a child of The Sixties who started to become radicalized, not within the bowels of the university, but the corporation while working as an aircraft engineer. I embarked upon a career in anthropology to comprehend the world around me and perhaps in some way to be part of a collective effort to improve it. While my career shift was an effort to escape the corporate world and find a locus for critical pedagogy and scholar-activism, in reality, while universities have always had ties with elite actors, under neoliberal or late capitalism they have become increasingly corporatized around the world, including Australia. This presentation explores strategies by which anthropologists can grapple with both global and local socio-ecological crises both within and outside the university. These include forming closer ties with kindred disciplines in HASS, making greater efforts to make macro-micro or global-local linkages in examining societies and institutions, becoming more involved in anti-systemic movements (including efforts to democratize and de-colonialize the university), and finding spaces outside the university where more critical praxis occurs than presently does so in the rarified ethos of the corporate university.