Anthropology Webinars

Since 2014 the AAA has been hosting regular webinars that are free for anyone to view. You can join in the conversation live, and importantly, catch the lecture/ discussion as an archived video afterward on their website.

Leveraging advances in social media and digital technology, these webinars offer a valuable opportunity to bring scholars together from diverse and distant locales to participate in discussions on breaking research, applied careers, and more.

For instance, you can check out the upcoming Townhall with Anthropologists Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees (15 March 2017) on "Protecting Immigrant and Undocumented Students." Or you might want to scroll through the archived webinars to watch anthropologists working on the frontlines to understand Zika, or catch Amy Santee's discussion about "Practicing Anthropology in User Experience, Design and Business."

Quick link:

• AAA Webinars Event page

What are Anthropology jobs?

According to at least one Anthropology Department Chair, the two most googled questions students have are, "What is anthropology?" and in a close second, "What can I do with a degree in anthropology?"

This second question often gets answered with a laundry list of jobs framed as "Anthropology jobs." In many ways, this list of job titles limits both undergraduate and grad students. Instead, we'd like to see students approach thinking about what they can do with their anthropology degree in terms of how the skills and perspective learnt through studying anthropology can align with the kinds of projects and issues/ areas/ roles that students find meaningful.

Take for example, the new Executive Director of Pride Toronto, Olivia Nuamah. Nuamah "earned an undergraduate degree in international development and social anthropology from the University of Toronto. She earned a Masters in Social Anthropology of Children and Childhood Development from Brunel University."

Since then, Nuamah has been working on many different social and economic justice projects, as an "executive leader, policy expert and social justice advocate": from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's poverty reduction pledge, to Toronto-based projects to help deliver healthcare to homeless communities. These are all "anthropology jobs" -- even if the job ads weren't advertising for an anthropology background, or an ethnographer.

Quick links & further reading:

• Pride Toronto names Olivia Nuamah as executive director (Toronto Star, 17 February 2017)
• For more ideas about the kinds of jobs some people with anthropology degrees have, check out our list of links here.
• For tips on how to talk about what an anthropological perspective can bring to different careers, check out our post on Articulating the Anthropological Toolkit to Non-Anthropologists
• Check out this post for a discussion of some of the insights that ethnographic methods training and experiences in the field allow anthropologists to develop.
• And if you're a grad student thinking about how to think ahead, we have some handy Advice for Grad Students.

Book Report Entry #1: Field notes: A Guided Journal for Doing Anthropology

This blog will feature a series of posts on a new (2017) resource for first-time and long-standing ethnographers - a 'guided journal' for doing anthropology by Luis A. Vivanco. The incentive for reviewing certain features of this coil bound book are its uniqueness as a resource and its usefulness as a tool of reflection for those experienced ethnographers.

Much of this blog is dedicated to the application of anthropology and ethnography which is why it was with great pleasure to come across Vivianco's first chapter entitled "Fieldwork Skills are Life Skills."

Vivianco argues that competently conducting fieldwork, which he defines as "participant observation in a community to investigate its behaviors and beliefs" (2017, p.10). affords anthropologists the following list of life skills (explanations are paraphrased and at times expanded upon):

1. Directed learning - from our participants/interlocutors and about matters they find important.
2. Curiosity - a habitual approach to research and life in the field.
3. Asking good questions - formulating questions that elicit meaningful answers (perhaps through trial and error, and learning more over time about what is meaningful and to whom)
4. Accuracy and attention to detail - the focus on documentation for accurate data collection and interpretation.
5. Listening - Vivianco references active listening as one being at the 'heart of fieldwork'. This simple act speaks to the many things, including the primacy of the participant in anthropological fieldwork, the construction of worldviews through personal experience, and more.
6. Negotiation - while we're starting to sound like lawyers here - Vivianco is speaking to the balancing and building of relationships.
7. Networking - fieldworkers identify, understand and use networks to cultivate relationships
8. Adaptability - a requisite value for contemporary workplaces - speaks to the ambiguous grey zone that anthropologists typically work in and through  
9. Communication - about one's project - a skill that most researchers require and few master.
10. Recognizing, respecting, and working with difference - such an important skill and one which anthropologists rarely mention. Some might identify this as uniquely anthropological not just for their use of practical realism but in their approach to theory, data, and our attention to multivocality.
11. Critical thinking - a skill for researchers when collecting, analyzing and evaluating their data.