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Paper short abstract

Increasingly precarious academic structures compress ethnographic time and ethics. Drawing on doctoral fieldwork with a marginalised community, this paper shows how ‘finishing on time’ can undermine care, trust and accountability, and considers alternative models of funding and scholarly solidarity.

Paper long abstract

Anthropology’s commitment to slow, relational and ethically grounded scholarship sits uneasily in an academic landscape increasingly shaped by precarity, compressed timelines and market-oriented funding regimes. My paper explores how these conditions reshape anthropological knowledge and the ethical commitments that structure research practice. Through reflexive analysis of my doctoral research in the Australian PhD system, I argue that the contemporary PhD is misaligned with the temporal and ethical priorities of social research. Short funding cycles, coursework compression, performance metrics and precarious employment produce uneven access to time, training and care, privileging candidates with institutional, social and economic capital while narrowing what topics can be pursued and how deeply researchers can engage. These pressures are consequential in research with marginalised or traumatised groups, where trust depends on sustained presence.

Based on my fieldwork with Vietnamese boat refugees and their families in Sydney, Australia, I illustrate how institutional imperatives to ‘finish on time’ conflict with community rhythms, memorial cycles and obligations of care. These tensions are intensified by my own positionality as the child of Vietnamese-Chinese boat refugees, rendering exit from the field not only methodological but also relational. By foregrounding doctoral training as a site where disciplinary values are enacted or eroded, I invite reflection on the kind of anthropology precarious systems produce. I also propose some alternative models of funding, supervision and solidarity needed for the discipline to remain accountable in a fragmented world.