Paper short abstract:

I run a small consultancy firm titled Anthropology Applied Limited, registered in the UK. Based on years of ethnographic research in Albania and Kosovo and with translocal Albanians, who have been subjected to either national or international policies and law, I have advised, conducted training and/or produced reports for many international and national agencies. This presentation will raise ethical, methodological and economic questions arising from the conflict between the aim of maintaining an independent academic identity as a social anthropologist and the selling of a particular specialisation in one of the many powerful worlds outside academia. Reflecting on some cases in which my work was accepted and on cases that I rejected, or in which my work was rejected, I ask under what conditions selling complexity works and when it doesn’t.