Toward an anthropology that cares: Lessons from the Academic Carework project

Anthropologists’ cross-cultural studies of kinship, gender, and caregiving have shown how care is fundamental to the human experience. Ironically, anthropologists have been relatively silent about the caregiving we ourselves do. To understand these experiences, we conducted an online survey (N = 492), seven focus groups (N = 31), and seven in-depth interviews of anthropologists in various career stages. We use the term “academic carework” both to describe labor made invisible through caregiving and to recognize caring relations that structure our academic work. We show how carework challenges are experienced along axes of race, gender, class, sexuality, age, and precarious academic status, underscoring how anthropology reproduces itself as a privileged space in the context of the deterioration of working conditions in the neoliberal academy. We proceed to illustrate how the prevailing institutional strategy of temporary accommodation temporally confines caregiving experiences that are ongoing and compounding. An accommodation approach encourages caregivers to interpret structural problems as individual struggles and to discipline themselves accordingly, even as they critique its neoliberal underpinnings. We offer recommendations to address the impacts of carework on professional trajectories. More broadly, however, we look to new anthropologies of care for inspiration to imagine a more inclusive anthropology.