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Paper Short Abstract:

Building on my User Experience Research and my lectures in the US and Europe, I propose to highlight ethical underpinnings and ethnography-informed decision making in designing the secondary literature and first-hand fieldwork training for a viable career path in Health Equity and Healthcare Tech.

Paper Abstract:

Students of anthropology training today primarily develop their career trajectories in non-academic sectors but often find themselves underprepared in establishing credibilities in a rapid changing economy in the West and non-Western world. How might we undo traditional anthropological pedagogy and do new applied lens to better prepare our students in today's challenge? What relevancy can we claim on reflexivity in reframing teaching materials and/or introducing new ones? Building on my own 3-year endeavor of a User Experience Researcher career path since the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as my guest lecture experiences in universities across the US and Europe, I propose to highlight ethical underpinnings and ethnography-informed decision making in designing the secondary literature and first-hand fieldwork training. In specific, I build a case study by an examination of how learnings of exploitative algorithms and lived human experiences could inform ethical standpoints and health equity designs in a virtual healthcare company. I argue that applied anthropology should be reframed as instrumental and pivotal to the everyday design decisions in the health tech industry, because this enables students to think and engage classic theories through a practical lens and design their fieldwork around everyday encounters with a goal of producing recommendations on health equity. Feedback from anthropology students has proved that such reframing allows them to think together their learnings and a viable career path in the health tech industry.