Contribution short abstract:

Anthropologists working outside the discipline will need to build better relationships with those working within the discipline if the continuing relevance of anthropology is to be assured in an increasingly interdisciplinary future.

Contribution long abstract:

Attempting to do anthropological work in spaces outside the discipline is in many ways an uncomfortable position to occupy, but it can also offer useful insights and opportunity for critical reflection. This contribution to the proposed round table reflects on my own journey from a first degree in social anthropology through PhD research in rural sociology to a university career in the interdisciplinary fields of social policy and development studies. In each of these fields, anthropology struggles for recognition, particularly alongside positivist economics and political science, raising important questions about (i) the need to challenge increasingly narrow understandings of what constitutes valid knowledge around understanding and shaping social change; and (ii) what anthropology as a discipline needs to do in order to ensure not only its survival as a viable subject area but also to broaden its relevance, influence, and appeal.

Contribution short abstract:

The provocation reflects on the incommensurability and overlaps of undertaking professional care work and conducting research in grassroots migrant/refugee care settings. How can these mirroring spheres speak to each other to inform more equitable and inclusive research and care practices?

Contribution long abstract:

Professional care work with asylum seekers, often undertaken under the wider umbrella of humanitarian care, migrant/refugee collective care practices and Anthropological research share common ethics, grounded in principles ranging from 'doing no harm' to 'doing good'. However, these rarely enter into open, collaborative dialogue. Drawing from fieldwork conducted with self-organised migrant communities and humanitarian workers in central Athens where these diverse spheres interacted in the everyday, and my own journey from researcher to humanitarian employee and back again, the provocation intends to unpack institutional and methodological barriers, focusing on mutual learnings and potential cross-pollinations that could facilitate more collaborative, inclusive and equitable research and care provision.

Focusing on the 'bridging' capacity of solidarity (Rakopoulos 2016), both as a thinking lens, a form of action and a way of social relating running across them, it moves beyond conventional academic criticism to highlighting emergent forms of mutual identification and less visible practices of exclusion. These situated observations of practice-making offer the grounds to reflect on how we could transcend experienced 'malaise' by adopting practices that promote recognition and healing, mobilising their 'de-othering' potential and actively engaging in matters of justice.

Contribution short abstract:

What happens if we turn anthropology inside-out? What would it take to research in an anthropological way that managed without the label and its disciplinary institutions? And what might one learn from doing so?

Contribution long abstract:

An emotional affiliation to ‘anthropology’ as an academic identity does many things. It offers an ontological foothold, a feeling of intellectual belonging, and a (mostly) shared set of ethical commitments. But could we manage without this epistemological label and the accompanying disciplinary infrastructure? And if so, what does that tell us about disciplinarity in the social sciences? In this paper, I reflect on my own attempts at turning the history, politics and sociology of social anthropology inside out.

The story of social anthropology is one of modernist experimentation, intellectual worlding and bureaucratic institutionalisation. The three are difficult to disentangle. Disciplinary formations are always contingent , always emergent, and could always be otherwise. If we are to rely on academic identity politics, we have to acknowledge – and trouble - the performative and contrarian aspects of this affiliation work.

Contribution short abstract:

The contribution reflects my journey as an anthropology lecturer working as a short-term consultant for a development organization in Bangladesh. It scrutinizes how careers are made at the intersections of academia and the development industry.

Contribution long abstract:

The proposed contribution will reflect on my journey as an anthropology lecturer working as a short-term consultant for a development organization (INGO) in Bangladesh. I wish to discuss how that experience, outside anthropology/ academia, contributed to my subsequent work and thinking in anthropology on questions of indigeneity and identity politics at a time when people ordinarily held up an essentialist view of what constitutes an indigenous people. My role as a reviewer (along with some grassroots activists holding high positions in the development industry) of a “development” project targeted to the marginalized “indigenous” people living in some northwestern parts of Bangladesh, (increasingly labeled IPs or Adivasis with capitalization in various NGO project documents), was limited to the see and evaluate the effectiveness of the project (in relation to some expressed objectives and goals). But it opened up the possibilities for me to witness a process of identity construction that I wouldn’t have known, had I not been involved with the project. The work outside academia, at a rather early stage of my career, provided me with the problematique of my doctoral dissertation. My subsequent engagements with the development field culminated in several research agendas and publications that dealt with both academic debates and public debates/ activist concerns/ engagements on indigeneity. The contribution will scrutinize how careers are made at the intersections of academia and the development industry and what it may involve theoretically, methodologically, and ethically.

Contribution short abstract:

Anthropologists of education are uniquely positioned to generate relevance for anthropology in “an unwell world” because, and not in spite of, their marginalization within the university, discipline of anthropology, and the field of education.

Contribution long abstract:

Anthropologists of education often find their research marginalized within the university, the discipline of anthropology, and within the field of education. At the broadest level, departments of education are often considered the intellectual backwater of the university due to their focus on practice and, as historians of higher education have argued, their association with women and children. Within anthropology, there are similar biases regarding a focus on practice and, I argue, children. Finally, in education as a field, quantitative research focused on policy reform overshadows the insights of long-term ethnographic fieldwork focused on the complexity of educational inequalities. Each of these contexts require anthropologists of education to become skillful translators of their research who can make the case for anthropology’s relevance and robustness. In this roundtable, I argue that anthropologists of education are uniquely positioned to generate relevance for anthropology in an “unwell world” because of their marginalization and (sometimes) successful attempts to combat it.

Contribution short abstract:

Being an anthropologist in a department of development raises the question of what balance is necessary between critical distance and the ability to input the insights of disciplinary knowledge and practice into policymaking, particularly when there are contending methodologies and epistemologies.

Contribution long abstract:

While development policy and practice have long been the focus of anthropological analysis, there has been a less sustained focus on the role of anthropology in development. For many anthropologists, there is an important role in the critical distance between policymaking or practice, and ethnographic methods and analysis. On the one hand, this stems from a problematic history of anthropology and colonial knowledge production. On the other, it produces a kind of absence of the anthropological voice in the debates about development.

Anthropology of Development has often sought to maintain a critical distance to the work of development that is not as easily maintained when being in an interdisciplinary department oriented to addressing the issues of development. The question then becomes of what it means to be in greater proximity to the “room where it happens” – where the decisions are made around development policy? What is the balance necessary between academic distance and the ability to input the insights of disciplinary practice and epistemology, when there are contending methodologies and epistemologies?

Contribution short abstract:

"We don't know, if we need someone like you here." Not an encouraging sentiment in a new job. Maybe a 'someone' like an anthropologist is 'outside' even purportedly traditional anthropological spaces incl. museums, which brings opportunities and challenges.

Contribution long abstract:

What IS, DOES or SHOULD an anthropologist? I contend the job-market has 'us' as forever outsiders, which implies having to constantly reinvent what anthropologists do and why.

Upon starting as research lead to investigate digitising museum spaces, my boss told me that their team had never had 'someone like me' on. Moreover, my project initially sought a 'psychologist', instead of someone doing ethnographic works.

There are positions directly addressing anthropologists. However, anthropologists might spot fields of application for their anthropological methods that benefit from 'outsiders'. I stuck my nose where it did not 'belong' into other museums projects to get a feel of its internal logics and what this new community 'stood for'. As such, I was rewarded with validating comments on how anthropological takes on communication, inclusion etc. provided helpful nudges to alternative workways. This is much-needed professional validation and eye-opening: Anthropological jobs might not be 'demanded' but still 'needed' or beneficial.

My simple point: Apply anywhere. Ethnographic work and an anthropological lens may be applied in contexts that challenge anthropologists’ legitimacy throughout. Yet, Anthropology has potential to grow outside itself to benefit communities/organisations, individual researchers (broadening applicable fields for their skills, what they want to work meaningfully) and institutions. And Anthropology? As a discipline, it needs to stay topical. It should find fields of application which require its 'services' based on 'local needs and concerns'. You identify those, if you 'stick your nose into new places', and reflect, from your outsider's perspective, how (if) you can contribute.