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- Convenors:
-
Jamie Coates
(University of Sheffield)
Elisabetta Costa (University of Antwerp)
Roger Norum (University of Oulu)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how spaces “outside” of anthropology—both in terms of disciplines and institutions/departments—can offer some of the most fertile ground for anthropological inquiry. At the same time, we argue that these spaces and contexts are also vulnerable to different forms of “erasure.”
Long Abstract:
Today, most anthropologists find employment outside anthropology departments. Whether working in area studies, subject fields, interdisciplinary centers, or other disciplines, anthropologists frequently move across both geographic and disciplinary boundaries. This mobility highlights both the value and adaptability of anthropological approaches, and the current academic job market, which often leads scholars trained in one discipline to look further afield for work. Anthropologists working outside their home discipline often face challenges regarding job stability, recognition, metricization, and organizational representation. Similarly, when non-anthropologists engage with anthropology, they encounter hardship, at times needing to justify their anthropological legitimacy or being stymied in career advancement. In this panel, we examine how spaces “outside” anthropology serve as highly productive arenas for anthropological work, while also recognizing that these spaces are susceptible to various forms of erasure or marginalization. Examples include audit cultures that squeeze anthropological work into other disciplinary categories, or the mistaken belief that applied research, area studies or particular fields indicate insufficient disciplinary expertise, relevance, or scientific heft. Such exclusionary academic practices not only fail to support anthropology and anthropologists but also erase emerging, and potentially innovative research directions and ongoing collaborations. As academic careers become increasingly varied, complex, and precarious, the space outside anthropology has become an important and common, but overlooked critical junction for our field. This panel aims to be radically inclusive, inviting all who are interested in exploring how anthropological approaches thrive at the margins and beyond the boundaries of the discipline, however narrowly or broadly those might be framed.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
Based on examples working in and engaging with the UK Government, the paper focuses on the potential and actual use of anthropology across three interlinked areas: (i) data generation and analysis, (ii) policy making and implementation, and (iii) understanding and shifting of institutional cultures.
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines the use of anthropology and ethnography in the UK Government, based on longstanding experience working in and engaging with UK Government. The authors are all trained anthropologists who are working in the British Civil Service.
Anthropology has a long history of contributing to policymaking and anthropologists are increasingly working in government. Nonetheless, the prioritisation of quantitative analysis across government often means that the discipline is still often misunderstood and overlooked, leading to a risk that complex issues are reduced to ‘legible’ metrics and unintended consequences of policy decisions remain unexamined. Despite increasing interest in anthropology from policymakers and willingness to engage/apply methods etc. from anthropologists, there remains a lack of understanding about its value for and in policymaking, and wider barriers and blockages preventing its uptake due to prevalent cultures of ‘good practice’ in social research and analysis.
This paper, and the project that underpins it, will help focus the conversation and offer clear, achievable means by which to begin to better utilise anthropology. It analyses a suite of examples of what has and hasn’t worked. The analysis focuses on the potential and actual use of anthropology across three interlinked areas of Government: (i) data generation and analysis, (ii) policy making and implementation, and (iii) understanding and shifting of institutional cultures. The paper also presents a series of recommendations on the uses of anthropology in Government.
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper elaborates on the strength of anthropology in the public dissemination of research results. It also argues that anthropologists make particlarly good qualitative methods teachers. Anthropologists need to make themselves heard among those who decide the institutional fate of disciplines.
Paper Abstract:
In this paper, I elaborate on my experiences as an anthropologist who has always worked in multidisciplinary units but who nevertheless finds anthropology a core identifier and a significant asset in her professional toolbox. First of all, I elaborate on the strengths of anthropological training in research dissemination activities. Instead of anthropology being disregarded as anecdotal, my experiences with policy-makers and other non-academic stakeholders have been overtly positive: they have welcomed ethnographic insights and claim that this is exactly the kind of information that they need. Secondly, I elaborate on my experiences as a teacher of qualitative research methods arguing that anthropological training makes one not only knowledgeable of multiple data collection methods but also an expert on research ethics.
In my exprience, being an anthropologist among “others” has never been a weakness or an obstacle but rather an asset and a strength. At the same time, I am concerned of the future of the discipline in today’s world where anthropology departments are under threat and those in power often consider other disciplines more useful. Anthropology has a lot to offer in today’s world and ethnographic insights can help societies to a great extent. Yet, those in power do not seem to understand it, and it is crucial that anthropologists make themselves and their expertise loud and visible.
Paper Short Abstract:
We present here a research experience carried out for two years as an insider in an Italian cooperative, formed by cultural mediators of foreign origin, which managed a reception centre for refugees and asylum seekers in the city of Padua, Italy.
Paper Abstract:
This contribution intends to draw attention to the commitment of many anthropologists in facing the humanitarian crisis, finding employment in associations, cooperatives, institutions working in the field of reception of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers or for integration projects with communities of foreign origin. It should be considered, in this sense, how fostering the recognition of the “other” as “another human being”, the struggle against racism and the defence of universal human rights, modulated in cultural diversity, are still basic characterising elements of an applied social anthropology, on an educational level. We present here a research experience carried out for two years as an insider in an Italian cooperative, formed by cultural mediators of foreign origin, which managed a reception centre (“centro di accoglienza straordinario”) for refugees and asylum seekers in the city of Padua, Italy. During that experience, the organisation of intercultural civic education workshops, addressed to the centre's guests and managed through mediation, brought remarkable results.
Paper Short Abstract:
Anthropologists face challenges when publishing co-authored, cross-disciplinary work, particularly when it comes to career advancement and promotion. This didactic paper addresses how SSH researchers might better harness the benefits of co-publishing, giving due recognition to science that matters.
Paper Abstract:
Scientific authorship has been long imagined as a solo pursuit, bolstered by romanticized ideals of the genius scholar who toils away in solitude with quill, pipe, and armchair in pursuit of Eureka! moments. In recent years, however, co-authorship has established itself as standard practice across many disciplines, and has since been shown to frequently result in higher-quality publications and broader intellectual and societal impact (Didegah and Thelwall 2013; Abramo and D'Angelo 2015). Yet the turn to collaborative research and writing in anthropology and other SSH fields has been slower. In fields such as anthropology or or literary studies, co-authoring has long been a contentious practice, particularly when it comes to hiring and promotion evaluation processes, which traditionally favour single-authored work. This creates substantial barriers to multi-author research and to career advancement for those who dare to embrace it. Many anthropologists are ill-equipped for the ensuing challenges. In this didactic paper, we propose concrete ways for SSH researchers to maximize the benefits of co-authorship, while mitigating the negative consequences often associated with it. We show how collaborative research and writing across disciplines, when undertaken ethically and critically, fosters exciting and ground-breaking research, and contributes to a more inclusive research culture in which scholars are valued and evaluated in just ways. The paper seeks to challenge entrenched institutional and disciplinary biases against novel and productive modes of researching and writing and propose modes of engaging in impactful forms of scientific research and dissemination, and societal impact.
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper reflects on the experiences of the authors, a digital anthropologist and a visual anthropologist, who work in media and communication studies departments. It examines their contributions and the challenges they encounter in teaching, supervision, and research.
Paper Abstract:
Over the last thirty years, with the advent of the digital era, anthropology has engaged in a productive dialogue with the fields of media, communication and visual studies. A love affair has taken place between these fields (Pertierra 2018), and an increasing number of anthropologists interested in matters of digital (and digital visual) culture have found the departments of communications and media studies interesting spaces for their work. This paper presents and reflects on the experiences of the authors, respectively a digital and a visual anthropologist, both active within media and communication studies departments. Starting with some reflections on the key theoretical and methodological contributions of anthropology to the field of communication studies, the paper will then proceed to examine the key challenges that they both have encountered at institutional level as well at the level of everyday practice of teaching, supervision and research. Some of the questions addressed will be:
• to what extent can communication studies accommodate for the pace and time requirements of ethnography?
• How can they capitalize upon the knowledge ethnography produces and hence upon the presence of anthropologists in their departments?
• And, reversely, how can anthropologists interested in digital visual communication gain a more critical perspective on their discipline by working in a department of communications studies?
• And finally, how can anthropologists survive and capitalize upon their research tradition in institutions dominated by different (often quantitative) research methods, by a higher speed of production and by the systematic practice of group authorship?
Paper Short Abstract:
Anthropology’s role as a training ground for area specialists is under threat. This trend will limit cross-cultural research and marginalize area specialist anthropologists. This paper advocates for renewed focus on comparison, language, and making the unfamiliar familiar.
Paper Abstract:
Anthropology’s historic emphasis on ‘being there’ and cross-cultural comparison has long positioned the discipline as a critical training ground for area specialists. Through immersive fieldwork and the acquisition of practical language skills, anthropologists have been uniquely equipped to teach and translate knowledge about less familiar contexts. Consequently, many anthropologists have devoted their careers to rendering the ‘strange familiar’ within academic departments focused on regions such as the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. However, this tradition is now under threat. Across the UK, Australia, and beyond, student enrolments in non-English languages are in sharp decline, compounded by institutional mergers and program closures driven by marketization and populist policies that deprioritize cross-cultural understanding. These structural shifts have curtailed opportunities for anthropologists to conduct research in linguistically and geographically distant settings, fostering a trend toward studies closer to home. The result is a dual precarity for area specialists: economic instability due to shrinking funding and employment opportunities, and epistemological marginalization as anthropology struggles to justify its place in an increasingly utilitarian higher education landscape. This paper examines the evidence behind these trends and argues for renewed commitment to the core values of comparison, linguistic proficiency, and the practice of making the unfamiliar intelligible. By reclaiming these foundations, anthropology can not only preserve its unique contributions but also reassert its relevance in a rapidly changing world.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper reflects on my experience as an anthropologist studying social media in an interdisciplinary team. It examines how ethnography is understood in various disciplinary contexts and what we as anthropologists can learn from it.
Paper Abstract:
In 2023, one of my academic colleagues reflected on their experiences at recent events and conferences focusing on internet studies: “More and more people at these events talk about doing digital ethnography. If you ask people at a random panel if they use ethnography as a method, half the room would say yes.”
In these situations, I often wonder —do we all mean the same thing when we talk about ethnography?
A variety of methods incorporating ethnographic sensitivity emerged, particularly in the subfield of social media studies. These include approaches such as digital lurking, the walkthrough method, and ethnographic content analysis of online materials, among others. While I sometimes feel the urge to become a gatekeeper—positioning myself as the authority on what is or is not ethnography because, as an anthropologist, I should know —I see this experience as an opportunity to critically examine the boundaries and flexibility of a methodological approach foundational to my discipline.
This paper reflects on my experiences as an anthropologist conducting social media research while working in a sociology department as part of an interdisciplinary team alongside sociologists and media studies scholars. I explore why disciplinary differences sometimes seem inconsequential and, at other times, insurmountable.
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper explores the ongoing administrative and institutional efforts to move anthropological practice outside the auspices of the discipline, by focussing on the impact of audit culture on teaching and practicing anthropology in a post-socialist space, namely Latvia.
Paper Abstract:
The paper explores ongoing efforts to move anthropological practice outside the auspices of the discipline, by focussing on the impact of audit culture on teaching and practicing anthropology in a post-socialist space, namely Latvia. We argue that managerial culture is squeezing out European fundamental basic rights such as academic freedom. Anthropology is a particular victim here due to its broad range of interest, its transgressing of traditional disciplinary boundaries, its deep empiricism, and in the case of postsocialist areas that it “imports” concepts, ideas and material seen as both foreign and thus dangerous. Based on the adventures of anthropology (as discipline and as academics) in the administrative field we show how selected statistical sources, ratings, and modelling based upon the natural sciences combined with local scholarly traditions and relationships allow for the enacting and practicing of a neo-conservative and neoliberal policy, restricting academic freedom and the silencing of anthropology’s voice within the academic realm. This results in an increasing move to push socio-cultural anthropology in Latvia outside a ‘named’ anthropology, potentially obliterating its boundaries rendering it without identity. Demonstrating both administrative and institutional lack of sensitivity to the discipline’s autonomy, we show how this brings long-term insecurity and concerns for the future in terms of independent scholarly endeavour. Despite this trend, we show how determined efforts to regain certain lost autonomy through acts of polite and targeted resistance/engagement can have positive outcomes, even if it is then not long until the next episode requiring ‘firefighting’ appears on the scene.