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Paper short abstract:

The New Ethnographer aims to create a space for academics to discuss unwellness in conducting fieldwork and writing. Five years on, with the publication of a textbook, we reflect on the (lack of) changes in academia that continue to facilitate a growing mental illness epidemic in our field.

Paper long abstract:

When The New Ethnographer launched in 2017, we aimed to create a space for academics to discuss their unwellness in relation to conducting fieldwork, planning research, and writing. Five years later, with the publication of a textbook by ourselves and our contributors, we reflect on a lack of change in academia that continues to facilitate the growing mental illness epidemic in our field. Speaking to anthropologists specifically, we address and explore the specific structural challenges inherent in anthropology that continue to exacerbate unwellness in our discipline. These include a continued silence on the relationship between institutional care and the practice of fieldwork, the neoliberalisation of the academy and its impact on mental health, and the relationship between therapeutic skills and anthropological research.

Our project seeks to contribute to changing the way that ethnography is taught and practiced by centring equity, diversity and inclusion in the training and practice of ethnography, and providing perspectives that might resonate with a wider and more diverse audience – what should not be considered but is often hailed as an alternative approach to knowledge production. Because our approach is conversational and inclusive, we draw on the work of our contributors to highlight the work we have done and the challenges we continue to face five years into our project as we have grown with it. In this paper, we share the work we have done so far and address the challenges facing us, particularly in reference to industrial unrest in the HE sector.