Annals of Anthropological Practice最新文献

Rising numbers of anthropology majors are entering sectors in industry, in which qualitative data analysis skills and theoretical thinking are essential. Yet, a disciplinary divide between theoretical and applied approaches in anthropology and a market for commodified method skills often present challenges to teaching theory in the applied anthropology classroom. Our study is based upon the successful implementation of a three-phase qualitative data analysis model—Reduce, Visualize, Draw Conclusions, and Verify—developed by Miles and Huberman and Ladner, in a series of anthropology graduate practicum courses at Wayne State University (2017–21), in which students worked with corporate clients from Chevrolet, Nissan, and D-Ford. Our findings highlight the integral role of theory to the academic and practicing research process and provide a template for other practicum-based classes to teach analysis.

Unlike business, health, or engineering courses, undergraduate liberal arts programs do not point majors directly to a professional application, so students often need to creatively explore and identify professional roles and workplaces in which to use their education. Anthropology presents particular challenges: while students may enroll in economics if their institution has no undergraduate business program, or biochemistry may function as premed, there is no clear sense of what comes after an anthropology degree. In 2018, the American Anthropological Association announced a new approach to understanding this issue through its Undergraduate Research Fellowship. Currently enrolled anthropology majors worked together with faculty mentors, collaboratively across universities, to do anthropological research on the question, “how do anthropology majors approach the question of what comes after college?” The research provided practical insights and recommendations to departments, faculty members, career counseling centers, and the students themselves. This special section comprises six papers: an introduction to the project and the field sites; four analytic papers in which student researchers and faculty mentors explore the topics, “how students come to major in anthropology,” “how students are changed by studying anthropology,” “what anthropology majors think about their professional future,” and “what resources are available to support students’ college-to-career transition”; and a reflective essay that considers the fellowship not as a research program but as a high-impact pedagogical intervention. We show that, by participating in ethnographic research, student researchers become full members of the anthropology community who can give valuable recommendations for the future of the discipline.

Student research fellows at three universities (Illinois State University, St. Mary's College of Maryland, and Wheaton College) conducted ethnographic research among peers in anthropology programs to better understand students’ experiences in the major and their career goals. In this article, we highlight student narratives of personal and intellectual growth. We found that current majors had more to say about how they had been transformed by anthropology than about the specific anthropological skills relevant to future careers. We posit that students’ personal growth, including greater empathy and open-mindedness, and intellectual growth, including cross-cultural understanding and the ability to think critically, developed through students’ integration into departmental communities of practice.

This article explores the resources that are available, or should be made available, to support college-to-career transitions for undergraduate anthropology students. Using mixed methods, this research was conducted by undergraduate anthropology students at a small Christian college in Illinois and at a large public university in Kentucky, in conjunction with a wider project for the American Anthropological Association. Based on our two case studies, we argue that students, faculty, and career centers often do not effectively work together to provide and utilize career resources for anthropology majors. This lack of collaboration leads to students feeling underresourced and undersupported. This is partially due to student disinclination to use career center resources but also a result of the way career centers present themselves to students and faculty's inattention toward facilitating a connection between them. We end with recommendations for departments, career centers, and students to facilitate resource availability and use.

What do anthropology students think about their professional future? In what ways does the study of anthropology provide competencies or skills that will be useful in the workplace? Research fellows from Illinois State University, Indiana University, and St. Mary's College of Maryland conducted individual interviews, focus groups, or surveys of alumni or graduating seniors to examine narratives about the perceived usefulness of anthropology in securing and sustaining professional employment. Employing the metaphor of an “inverted funnel” shows that while an undergraduate anthropology major may appeal to a smaller range of the overall student population, hence the narrow end of a funnel, their education instills broad and critical thinking about issues, an appreciation for and ability to relate to human cultural and social diversity, and an empathic orientation to understand individual diversity. Thus, anthropology undergraduates successfully carve out job niches over a wide range of economic sectors and professions that are represented by the broad end of the inverted funnel.

How and why do undergraduate students decide to become anthropology majors? We explore this question through mixed methods research conducted by undergraduate students at two public universities in the United States and one in New Zealand. We found that students often discovered anthropology once in college and many spoke about it as a dynamic major through which they might enact change. The major can affirm students’ identity, interests, and ways of thinking, even as it elicits anxieties about the state of the world, past and present, and concerns about the discourse of race in anthropology. We explore the major as a doorway into departmental and disciplinary communities of practice, arguing that undergraduate decisions to major in anthropology are connected to past experiences, family contexts, interdepartmental experiences, and global conditions. This research is part of the larger project organized through the American Anthropological Association that is discussed in this special issue.

When the American Anthropological Association offered its Undergraduate Research Fellows program in 2019–2020, the intent was not only to obtain ethnographic insights into the college-workforce transition for anthropology majors, but also to provide a meaningful educational experience to the participating student-researchers. Previously (Ginsberg and Jackson, this issue), we have situated the fellowship program with reference to ethnography of higher education and native ethnography; in this paper, by contrast, we contextualize it with scholarship on high-impact practices in undergraduate education, including research opportunities, collaborative assignments, and community-based learning. We then present reflections from the student-researchers themselves regarding what they learned through participation in the fellows program. In their reflections, the fellows describe a process of becoming more central members of three overlapping communities of practice: the AAA research team, their respective home departments, and the discipline of anthropology overall. We conclude by discussing reasons why anthropology is particularly well suited to provide undergraduate research opportunities, and why doing so would strengthen the discipline as well.

Fieldwork is a hallmark of anthropology and the experience of being in the field features prominently in scholarly works. The processes by which anthropologists obtain permission to conduct fieldwork, however, are rarely described. The study presented here discusses in substantial detail how a research project in Togo, West Africa obtained official authorization to conduct un-crewed aerial vehicle (UAV or “drone”) fieldwork. Anthropologists are continually incorporating new technologies into their work and drones have the potential to become part of our methodological toolkit. For security reasons, however, drone importation and use is carefully controlled by governments. This article describes the processes and protocols by which a team of anthropologists obtained official permission for drone work in a West African country. As such, it provides a guide for how other researchers may obtain similar authorizations in other contexts and anticipate challenges in doing so.

The concept of cultural attachment is in the vernacular in the Appalachian region of the United States and served to stimulate policy attention to the concept when a 765 kV electric transmission line was proposed through Peters Mountain on the border between Virginia and West Virginia. The environmental impact statement of the U.S. Forest Service examined the extent of cultural attachment in the project area using our social science consulting company, which resulted in a rejection of the line in 1995 and an acceptance in 2002 when the proponent changed routes to avoid communities with high cultural attachment. The concept has been noted and used in several other settings and has evolved into a policy tool that accommodates the three pillars of cultural attachment—attachment to land, to place, and to kinship and social networks. We contend that use of the concept as evolving is an appropriate way to consider “endangered cultures.” The use of the concept of cultural attachment in decision making means there is now a track record and precedence that give legal weight to the concept, value to local residents in manifesting their voice, and improved prospects that we can continue to shape life in sustainable and human-affirming ways.

Attempts to understand college student food insecurity have primarily focused on demographic characteristics associated with higher rates of food insecurity, and have recommended improving awareness of and access to resources such as campus food pantries. We argue in this article that this emphasis on individual-level factors and efforts can lead to stigma or shame for many of those using pantries and other programs. Our survey and interview data collected from 2016 to 2019 show that many college students see hunger as tied to their individual failures. We find that an individualistic perspective on the experience of student food insecurity neglects the larger institutional and social contexts, including changes to financial aid, college funding options, food assistance policies, and discrimination. We propose an alternative model for understanding the stigma of student food insecurity that connects language and stereotypes to power differentials affecting access beyond the individual, and thus better addresses the root causes of student food insecurity.

Intentos de comprender la inseguridad alimentaria de estudiantes universitarios suelen enfocarse en las características demográficas asociadas con incidencias altas de inseguridad alimentaria y han recomendado mejorar la información sobre y el acceso a recursos como las despensas de alimentos universitarias. En este artículo proponemos que este énfasis en factores y esfuerzos a nivel del individuo pueden conducir a que muchos quienes usan despensas y otros programas de asistencia sientan estigma o vergüenza por ello. Los datos que recopilamos entre 2016 y 2019 por medio de encuestas y entrevistas demuestran que muchos estudiantes universitarios consideran que el hambre está ligado a fracasos del individuo mismo. Concluimos que al tomar una perspectiva individualista sobre la experiencia de la inseguridad alimentaria estudiantil se ignoran contextos institucionales y sociales más amplios que afectan al problema, incluyendo los cambios en la ayuda financiera universitaria, las opciones de financiación universitaria, las políticas de asistencia alimentaria, y la discriminación. Proponemos un modelo alternativo para comprender el estigma de la inseguridad alimentaria de los estudiantes que conecta el lenguaje y los estereotipos con las diferencias de poder que afectan el acceso más allá del individuo y, por lo tanto, mejor aborda las causas fundamentales de la inseguridad alimentaria de los estudiantes.