Paper short abstract:

The paper draws on my experience as a recent PhD graduate working in interdisciplinary projects in UK universities. In it, I want to draw attention to how changes in higher education are reconfiguring the ways in which early carer anthropologists can engage with and contribute to the discipline.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists have examined the epistemological and ethical implications of interdisciplinary work, particularly in fields in which the encounter with other disciplines has a well-established tradition, such as public health, international development and policy-making. Not enough attention, however, has been paid to the broader conditions under which anthropologists participate in interdisciplinary projects in the academia.

In the UK, cuts to higher education and the pressure on universities to compete under the Research Excellent Framework mean that research is increasingly carried out in the context of externally funded, multidisciplinary projects. Such projects have emerged as a fast-expanding area of employment for early career anthropologists, whose ethnographic skills are in high demand. For a growing number of us who remain in academia, our career no longer starts with traditional (and increasingly competitive) fellowships in anthropology departments, but on interdisciplinary research teams.

In such contexts, it can be a struggle to have our anthropological expertise recognised. We are skilled 'qualitative researchers', working outside anthropology departments -which struggle to secure large funding for cooperative projects- and under principal investigators from different backgrounds. These organisational conditions tend to limit our space to integrate anthropological epistemological insights into the process of data collection and analysis, which is made to fit into agenda-driven and impact-oriented research. Furthermore, they also mean that our work rarely finds its way to prestigious anthropological journals and anthropology departmental seminars, widening the gap between the traditional centres of anthropological knowledge and an outside world where the legacy of our discipline is rarely recognised.

Paper short abstract:

This paper engages with the practice of, and challenges to, ethnographic research in non-governmental spaces of intervention and advocacy work in the bastis (informal communities) of Dharavi in Mumbai, India.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists and ethnographers have increasingly been working in contexts and spaces outside the "traditional" domains of research on indigeneity, culture and otherness. This includes working professionally with non-governmental, governmental, and local and international organizations. Such collaborations involve creating new spaces and topics of engagement for anthropologists, but also challenge certain practical and epistemological groundings of the discipline. This essay draws from such engagements with social organizations, what I call "front-line" spaces, and engages with questions relevant to the professional practice of anthropology. My ethnographic research focuses on the everyday workings of women front-line workers in the bastis (informal communities) in Dharavi, Mumbai. I explore their relationship with the NGO, their communities, and the state. While I am concerned with certain "classical" questions of epistemology and power in anthropology (e.g., representation, Otherness), I also underscore and present new questions regarding the role and relevance of anthropology among other social sciences and the communities we work with. Particularly, this essay aims to tease out the nuances of collaborative work in spaces that are increasingly configured by neoliberal policies of NGO work. I seek to ask (and address) the question of how anthropology can contribute to grassroots social action, and yet remain critical of the contexts and modalities in, and through which, such action takes place.

Paper short abstract:

Tracing how archetypical anthropological notions such as “culture” and “ethnography” play key roles in contemporary discussions about “Islamic State,” I reflect on what happens when “the public” hijacks anthropology’s conceptual tools.

Paper long abstract:

How can anthropologists engage with the public when a "public event" such as "Islamic State" explodes on the scene? What happens when concepts considered anthropology's speciality (e.g., culture) and methodologies imagined as the discipline's trademark (e.g., ethnography of everyday life) suddenly become of public domain - debated and implemented by and through unexpected parties, institutions, agendas? In this paper I trace how archetypical anthropological keywords such as "culture" and "ethnography" are playing a key role in mainstream discussions about "Islamic State," and reflect on the theoretical and political "immobilising shock" resulting from a sense of having one's conceptual tools hijacked by "the public." Drawing comparatively on now classic anthropological discussions of post-9/11 "culture talk" (Mamdani), as well as discussions of the "public afterlife" (Fassin) of anthropological research, I attend to how (what anthropologists consider) anthropological concepts and methods are increasingly mobilised by terrorism experts and heads of state, political journalists and non-academic actors. In particular, I trace the peculiar inverse trajectories of "the public" and "anthropology" when a composite event like "Islamic State" emerges, with the former progressively moving toward "culture" as explanatory framework, just as the latter carefully moves away from it. Reflecting on what this disciplinary impasse reveals about the anthropological project, I draw on my research on North African migrations and trace how my interlocutors themselves discuss such troubled times often in terms other than "culture" and "religion," effectively opening alternative ways of imagining the very trajectory of anthropological (public) thinking.

Paper short abstract:

In my paper, I aim to share my experience of conducting an archival-ethnographic project in a historical institute. I would like to engage with methodological challenges of my project and with a question on what is the role of anthropologists and anthropology in different disciplinary settings.

Paper long abstract:

In October 2015, I began working as a research fellow in a historical institute, conducting a project on the far right in interwar and contemporary Central Eastern Europe. The project entails a combination of archival and ethnographic methods. In my paper, I present two aspects of this work, engaging with theoretical and methodological challenges that my new project brings as well as with a question on what is the - potential and actual -- role of anthropology and anthropologists in different disciplinary settings.

As to the first, I tackle the importance of "history and anthropology" approach, meaning not only a study aimed to integrate archival research with anthropological sensitivity to the complexities of cross-cultural relationships but a "joint" exploration of past and present developments. What I suggest is a reflection on the ways in which we can make a better sense of past and present phenomena and developments by studying them side by side and how they may provoke questions to/for each other.

As to the second, I consider anthropologists' interactions with other scholars. While the benefits of interdisciplinary dialog are taken for granted, I would like us to reflect to what extent such a dialogue may also lead to simplifications and detrimental compromises. In a way, it is question to what extent an anthropologist manages to sustain and promote anthropological expertise and to what extent what he/she does means performing a role "assigned" to anthropologists, according to often stereotypical views on what anthropologists purportedly know and do.