Paper short abstract:

As an urban anthropologist committed to understanding the lives of young people at the urban margins, in this plenary contribution I propose an honest reflection on the double hat as both an academic and a practitioner that I have held in the past few years.

Paper long abstract:

As an urban anthropologist committed to understanding the lives of young people at the urban margins, in this plenary I propose an honest reflection on the double hat as both an academic and a practitioner that I have held in the past few years. My PhD (2014-2019) consisted in an in-depth, multi-year ethnographic study of the lives of adolescents who enter large criminal organziations in the peripheries of Medellín, Colombia. As is to be expected with this kind of topic, I found myself engaging on a daily basis with informants who endure significant hardship. Struck by the societal urgency of the issues I came across, throughout my PhD I sought collaborations with international and local INGOs working on addressing inequality, violence and exclusion. I also turned to visual anthropology, co-producing several short films with young people which, I hoped, would make visible the issues and challenges they were going through. No matter how ‘good’ these attempts were looking on my CV, however, they still felt marginal. I felt a constant pressure to “do something”, and was unsatisfied with the standard academic path to impact. At the end of my fieldwork, I took up a full-time practitioner job in a humanitarian NGO working on delivering programmes that support this population. Now, upon return to full-time academia, I reflect on these interconnected experiences, what worked and what didn't, and I propose concrete ways in which the academic job market can better account for work that seeks to make ethnographic research immediately impactful.