Annals of Anthropological Practice最新文献

This special issue presents accounts of different aspects of the CommuniVax Coalition and its work—a project that conducted rapid, multisited, applied anthropological research to deliver guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our purpose in writing these articles is to provide details of our work so anthropologists interested in similar types of research can learn from our efforts. While anthropological research has been, and largely still is, an endeavor of individuals at a relatively slow pace, the future of the discipline, and especially of anthropologists working outside traditional academia, is team-based, rapid research. As such, anthropologists need to know how to conduct research at speed, participate as members of research teams and, more importantly, how to organize and lead teams to conduct timely, collaborative, focused, and practical research.

To ensure the real-world utility of emergency ethnographic research, plans must evolve as circumstances shift. The CommuniVax coalition's work provides a case study of this scenario. Using rapid ethnographic interviews, focus groups, and other methods, the six local CommuniVax teams sought to comprehend and improve COVID-19 vaccine access and uptake. To this end, they responded nimbly to varying community priorities, the pandemic's shifting nature, evolving bureaucratic mechanisms, and political fluctuations. This paper provides specific examples of such instances, highlighting some of the critical decision points that emerged, demonstrating the flexibility needed for effective rapid community-based research, reiterating the importance of a bottom-up orientation, and elaborating on the trade-offs that occurred in decision-making regarding how best to move forward. This discussion is relevant to tackling any narrowly defined research problem, emergency-related or not, as well as research seeking actionable answers to specific questions that have practical bearing on human lives.

Collaboration and communication serve as the foundation of team-based research, and this extends to the analysis phase of a project. This article discusses the work involved in developing, communicating, and managing the analysis plan for a large-scale, multisited project. To generate an effective analysis plan, we considered what data were needed to reach our project goals and then selected methods and designed data collection tools accordingly. Once data collection commenced, we developed a basic codebook that provided an overarching structure but flexibility for localized tailoring. We then coordinated updates to the coding scheme and conducted reliability checks on the analyses. All of this required regular communication and constant monitoring of progress toward project goals. While only one example, this article provides insights and guidelines for other researchers working on large, team-based, and/or multisited qualitative projects.

In mid-2021, the CommuniVax Alabama team broadened their community engagement by partnering with the Chamber of Commerce, the Alabama Department of Public Health, and others to bring vaccines to the workplace. Through this collaboration, the team hoped to fortify the state's persistently anemic rate of vaccination. The goals of increasing access to, and convenience of COVID-19 vaccination were only partially achieved due to human resource and policy challenges and incongruent priorities that resulted from those challenges. The accomplishments, challenges, and suggestions for improvement are outlined to aid future efforts at health promotion and community outreach, especially in jurisdictions with limited extant public health infrastructure.

In this paper, we discuss the experience of the Idaho CommuniVax local team and how a large-scale incorporation of college students into its ethnographic research process ensured bona-fide community engagement and a deeper understanding of the experiences of Hispanic community members as they considered COVID-19 vaccination within the broader context of non-Hispanic, rural, agricultural southeastern Idaho. We detail the logic behind the steps we took to rapidly recruit, train, and provide future-oriented opportunities for 20 students who were studying a variety of disciplines. The students were from geographic localities in or near the research communities of interest. Their familial and social connections served as critical information channels between policy-makers, decision-makers, academics, and community members. Their varied ethnic backgrounds and their sheer number resulted in comprehensive research results and an expansive network of evidence-based COVID-19 information sharing that would have been impossible without their involvement.

Development projects present ambiguous ethical terrain for anthropologists to navigate. Particularly in relation to WaSH (Water, Sanitation, Hygiene) infrastructures which mediate human and environmental health. Our interdisciplinary team of anthropologists and engineers initially set out to design context-sensitive on-site wastewater treatment infrastructures for homes along Belize's Placencia Peninsula. The project's beginning coincided with the announcements of a government sponsored centralized wastewater infrastructure project and the construction of a cruise ship port on a nearby island, however. Soon the wastewater project's promises—economic opportunity, improved human and environmental health, modernization - came crashing into its pratfalls—exacerbating existing inequalities, loss of livelihoods, and diminished local governance. Our team was left with uncertain decisions about how to engage with improving infrastructure, given the emerging community dynamics. By detailing the imperfect trade-offs at play, we highlight ethical complexities inherent when communities’ development futures are at stake. Anthropology's fraught history includes legacies of unintended harms from entanglement in others’ inequities. However, avoiding involvement out of excessive caution risks leaving marginalized voices unheard and extant problems unresolved. This case immersed our team in the inherent optimism and ethical experimentation which underlie development contexts. Our analysis adopts the structure from Whiteford and Trotters’ (2008) “Ethical-Problem Solving Guide” to reveal the layered tensions that underly critical WaSH infrastructures.

We use a mix of qualitative and quantitative analyses to examine 1354 survey responses from members of the American Anthropological Association about their practice and teaching of cultural anthropology research methods. Latent profile analysis and an examination of responses to open-ended survey questions reveal distinctive methodological clustering among anthropologists. However, two historical approaches to ethnography remain prominent: deep hanging out and a mixed methods toolkit, with the former remaining central to the practice and teaching of all forms of contemporary cultural anthropology. Further, many anthropologists are committed to advancing research methods that account for power imbalances in fieldwork, such as through community-based and participatory approaches. And a substantial number also teach a wider array of methods and techniques that open new career pathways for anthropologists. Overall, our study reveals a core set of ethnographic practices—loosely, participant-observation, informal interviews, and the experiential immersion of the ethnographer—while also highlighting the great breadth of cultural anthropological research practice and pedagogy. The findings presented here can help inform how current and future anthropological practitioners and educators position themselves to meet the ever-changing demands of community members, funders, clients, collaborators, and students.

We examine the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on teaching and learning in an Engineering School of a large US research university. We focus on the adjustment of instructors as they converted their courses to distance teaching and learning formats (e.g., virtual sessions, online forums) and on bachelor student experiences with those changes. While both instructors and students experienced liminality, the pandemic affected these groups differently. Instructors attempted to form communitas with their students by prioritizing their teaching responsibilities, increasing the accessibility of course materials, and being more available to students compared to pre-pandemic times. However, students struggled to adapt to online learning contexts which lacked the sense of togetherness previously offered by in-person classes, study-groups, tutorial sessions, and communal study spaces. Unable to interact with their peers and create communitas, learning online proved to be an ineffective “solution.” Interacting with classmates and working in study groups are among the practices that can help students adjust to course delivery changes, even if it means those cultural practices go virtual. We argue that higher learning institutions, regardless of type (e.g., R1, R2, liberal arts, community colleges), should strengthen their remote teaching approaches. However, those strategies should incorporate: building strong relationships within and across roles, designing inclusive teaching and learning practices that take the contexts in which students learn into account, increasing spaces for peer-to-peer learning, and becoming proficient in the technologies needed to teach virtually.

Cambodia is a country facing an unprecedented wave of development but also the delicate task of conservation of traditional heritage. Pottery is one of the crafts that the Khmer civilization had been able to produce in various forms, of which mainly two are found in the country today. One style, produced in the province of Kampong Chhnang, is utilitarian and has a fairly solid internal market due to the still predominant agricultural society of Cambodia. It is unglazed, and aesthetically unadorned, but nonetheless “traditional” in its simple features. Another ware, produced mainly in pottery studios related to the Royal University of Fine Arts in the capital Phnom Penh, is, quite bombastically, but not without a certain consciousness, retrieving and repeating in a modern key, the ancient royal pottery once produced at Angkor. The latter ware style is, ironically, mainly produced for the tourist business in present-day Cambodia, and therefore, arguably superfluous for the country's living cultural heritage. This article investigates the two modes of production and attempts to elucidate why different practical and aesthetical approaches are selected for different purposes and markets by practitioners and retailers, according to certain cultural interpretations of what is supposed to be “traditional.”

A relatively novel, laboratory-produced, hemp-derived psychoactive cannabinoid called “Delta-8 THC” has become widely available to consumers since 2020. Lack of federal oversight and a loose patchwork of regulations by states have resulted in numerous “adverse events” reported by poison control centers and the CDC, and even warnings from the industry itself. Yet consumer demand for cannabinoids like Delta-8 THC has risen sharply. Published social science studies of Delta-8 THC use are in their infancy and have yet to document the social context of use, consumer preferences and motivations, behaviors, embodied experiences, perceptions of risk, and risk mitigation. We conducted 25 in-depth, qualitative interviews with consumers of Delta-8 THC to give insight into consumer practices and preferences. Data show that consumers of Delta-8 are aware of supply chain vulnerabilities but deploy personal calculations of risk-benefit and personal strategies of risk mitigation to reduce perceived threats.