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?