Paper short abstract:

This paper will reflect on the methodological, epistemological and indeed political challenges and opportunities associated with a project on technology infrastructure recently begun by a team of anthropologists working within the technology industry. Working outside of the academy requires extensive collaborations that push broader issues of authorship and contextualization at stake for both archaeology and anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Every year, far more anthropology PhDs are produced than academic posts, and as a result an increasing share of anthropological work takes place outside the academy. Anthropologists working in industry have a different set of constraints and possibilities than do our university-based colleagues. These surface tensions in traditional ways of working, but also open up interesting methodological possibilities. Multi-party collaboration, for one, is a requirement. This is a "mode two" model of knowledge production , to use the frame from New Production of Knowledge, where partnerships proliferate and might themselves be the outcome. Similarly, when one works in the context of a multinational corporation, the idea of multi-sited ethnography takes on additional urgency, placing strain on professional identities and notions of regional expertise.

This paper will reflect on the methodological challenges and opportunities associated with a recent project on what we are calling "consumerisation processes." The research question is to examine what kind of work notions of "the consumer" does in shaping technological infrastructures and systems of relationships between technology firms, national governments and multilateral institutions. In the course of launching such a project we have had extensive debates about the merits or drawbacks of sending a large amount of students out into fieldsites to do perform smaller pieces of research--a model very different from researcher-research assistant relationship. Such debates reveal broader issues of authorship, contextualisation and collaboration at stake for both archaeology and anthropology.