Paper short abstract:

Moving from an educational anthropology department where I felt like the ugly duckling, to a design department where I was called "the anthropologist," I began to claim my disciplinary identity and found value in dusty theories when presenting them as new ideas in a different disciplinary context.

Paper long abstract:

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth."

Likewise, theories, ideas, and methods that have become naturalized or taken for granted can find new life in foreign settings. At home in my anthropology department, I was insecure in my identity as an anthropologist. My research was remarkable only because it ventured beyond the more familiar territory of studying institutions and formal education, and because it involved experimental methods from other fields.

When I began my PhD in a design department, I was defined not by my empirical interests, but by my disciplinary grounding in anthropology. During my Master’s education, I had rejected most of the seminal works of famed anthropologists as being outdated and too far from the contemporary subjects I was studying. A surprising turn came when a design team at a large health devices manufacturing company asked for help in bringing these anthropological concepts and theories into the analysis of their user data. My PhD work ultimately involved embedding classic anthropological ideas, like gift relations and reciprocity theories of kinship, into material objects to be used as elicitation tools for developing more nuanced understandings of user experiences, helping the diverse team to work transdisciplinarily.