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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.