UCL’s anthropology department (that’s Daniel Miller’s department) has announced an MSc in Digital Anthropology — they say the first worldwide. Here is the link and the text of the advertisement:

http://www.ucl. ac.uk/anthropology/digital-anthropology/

The new MSc in Digital Anthropology- -begun in the Autumn of 2009–is well positioned for becoming a world leader in the training of researchers in the social and cultural dimensions of information technologies and digital media.

Digital technologies have become ubiquitous. From Facebook, Youtube and Flickr to PowerPoint, Google Earth and Second Life. Museum displays migrate to the internet, family communication in the Diaspora is dominated by new media, artists work with digital films and images.

Anthropology and ethnographic research is fundamental to understanding the local consequences of these innovations, and to create theories that help us acknowledge, understand and engage with them. Today’s students need to become proficient with digital technologies as research and communication tools. Through combining technical skills with appreciation of social effects, students will be trained for further research and involvement in this emergent world.

This MSc (…) brings together three key components in the study of digital culture:

1. Skills training in digital technologies, including our own Digital Lab, from internet and digital film editing to e-curation and digital ethnography.
2. Anthropological theories of virtualism, materiality/ immateriality and digitisation.
3. Understanding the consequences of digital culture through the ethnographic study of its social and regional impact and issues of the digital divide.

Back in January we blogged about a competition for documentaries focusing on the multicultural city.  Right now the same organisation is calling for papers for a second festival.  One film I recently came across would certainly fit this framework.  Called, “Hear Every voice: NYC and the National Park Service”, this film is a collaborative effort between filmmaker Stephen Ogumah, the National Parks Service, and sociologists Professors Jerry Krase and Jennifer Adams of Brooklyn College, along with a number of their students.  The central question the film asks is how New York’s national parks can contribute to the experience of urban living, especially for the city’s highly diverse migrant population.

The film brings together the themes migration, multiculturalism, and the uses of urban space, particularly common space.  For example, it considers how shared spaces may be implicated in generating interactions in an ethnically diverse population through practices such as shared gardening, festivals such as carnivals, or even cricket.  Social research methodologies are also featured, as Brooklyn College students work as interns with the National Parks association to research knowledge of, and attitudes towards national parks in NYC.  Overall I found this interesting to watch, mainly because it brought together a themes that I wouldn’t normally associate with each other, namely the possible relationship(s) between migration and national parks.  It’s well worth a watch, and could possibly be a good resource in teaching courses on urban anthropology and/or migration.

more about “Hear Every Voice: NYC and the Nationa…“, posted with vodpod

Posted in Education, Film, Media, Migration, Multiculturalism, Urban Anthropology Tagged: National parks, New York City ]]> http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/nyc-national-parks-migration-and-visual-sociology/feed/ 0 Jovan http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/ethics-bureaucracies-and-student-research/ http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/07/22/ethics-bureaucracies-and-student-research/#comments Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:28:01 +0000 llwynn http://culturematters.wordpress.com/?p=834 ]]>

When I arrived at Macquarie in 2007, I had big plans for my students.  I was scheduled to teach a postgraduate methods class, and I decided that the students were going to learn research methods by undertaking their own research project from start to finish and trying to publish the results.

“Crazy!” one of my colleagues said.  “Do you really think that they can get published?”

“Of course!” I said. “Have you seen how many journals there are out there?  You can publish anything if you are persistent enough.”

Another colleague said, “What are you going to do about ethics clearance?”

Uh-oh.  I hadn’t thought about that.  But I wasn’t going to let it derail my plan, so my ad hoc solution was to make each of my students apply for ethics clearance.  Macquarie has 30+ page ethics application form for human research — not including appendices.

I tell you, the students LOVED that.  And so did the Ethics Secretariat, which had to process 20 ethics applications from one class and deal with weekly phone calls from me cheerfully asking when so-and-so’s project was going to get approved so s/he could start her research.  Some students didn’t get ethics approval to start their research until the last week of classes.  There were lots of extensions and late papers.

Despite the slow start and the frustrations, the work that my students did was really good.  In one semester, every student had to come up with their own original research projects, design an appropriate methodology, obtain ethics approval, execute the project, write up the results, and submit for publication. Every student came up with a completely unique research project, from researching the smoking practices of international students at Macquarie to investigating online lesbian networking in New South Wales to studying how Aboriginal artwork is marketed to tourists. Students gained a tremendous amount of hands-on research experience. At every seminar we discussed the progress of their research projects, and there were fascinating discussions about methods and ethics.  Even though they had largely seen the ethics application as an exercise in bureaucratic hoop-jumping, they were genuinely concerned with ethics, and we regularly discussed research ethics dilemmas.

So at the end of the year I decided that it was a good exercise and worth keeping the independent research projects the next time I taught the class. But the students were pretty clear in their feedback that they didn’t want to have to deal with the bureaucratic obstacles themselves.

Informal feedback from the Ethics Secretariat also suggested that they would be grateful if I found another solution (or at least stopped ringing them to ask about the status of students’ ethics applications).

Finding work-arounds for bureaucratic obstacles

So after the semester was over, I made an appointment to meet with the head of the Ethics Secretariat to try to find ways to simplify the ethics approval process for student research projects.  I’d gotten a fellowship from the Provost, Judyth Sachs, to work on this project, so I was empowered by significant institutional support.

We batted ideas around together. The Ethics Secretariat pointed out that Macquarie had a simpler process for evaluating student research projects that weren’t going to be published, but since helping students to publish was a major goal for me, I didn’t want to take that easy route.  They rejected the idea of a blanket template that would cover any sort of student research project.  I wanted to give my students some choice in what they could do.

The compromise that we worked out was this: I designed 4 basic research projects, all revolving around a different methodology and method of recruiting research participants. Students could then pick a project that already received ethics approval.  I tried to come up with projects that collectively would use every method that I could imagine a social science discipline using: online and street surveys; interviews, formal and informal; research in online communities; public observation; participant observation; even oral history, which has quite different conventions surrounding confidentiality and intellectual property than I was familiar with. The goal was to create a set of “templates” that colleagues could adapt to develop their own ethics applications for student research projects, so others could take advantage of my work and wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

The 4 projects

Here are the research projects I came up with, along with an extract from the project summary that I included in the ethics application. Each project title links to the full ethics application that I submitted. Of course, it is in the peculiar and particular format of Macquarie University’s ethics application form, but because MQ’s form is more elaborate than that of many other universities, you’re likely to find that I’ve dealt with most of the concerns that your own ethics committee or IRB might raise. All these ethics applications are Creative Commons licensed for non-profit use and adaptation, so feel free to borrow as much as you want. If you do decide to adapt one of these ideas for your own teaching, I’d love to hear about it! Send me an e-mail at lisa.wynn[at]mq.edu.au.

1) An ethnographic study of mobile phone use in Sydney

Anthropologists have always been interested in the relationship between technology and culture.  Contemporary anthropologists have recently been particularly interested in the spread of global communication technologies and how they are taken up in local social and cultural contexts (Axel 2006).  Mobile phones, in particular, have been revealed as devices which extend social networks in unique ways and which have been incorporated into local cultural norms about sharing, gift giving and exchange, and economic strategies (Smith 2007, Horst and Miller 2006, Wong 2007).  Corporate anthropologists have also researched the materiality of cell phones – where they are carried, how they are held, when they are turned off and on – to inform product design (Chipchase 2007).  Sociologists and psychologists have also examined the uptake of cell phone and messaging technologies amongst subcultural groups (e.g. Sylvia and Hady 2004).

Globally, some 3 billion people are expected to have cell phones by the end of this year, so it is clearly a technology that has a powerful global reach across cultures and socioeconomic class. How do new technologies such as cell phones extend or modify existing cultural norms and social networks?  What are the explicit and implicit cultural rules that shape how people use these technologies?

The methods for this study included street interviews and online questionnaires, as well as participant observation.

2) An ethnography of a virtual online social world

Tom Boellstorff (2008) poses this question: “How is everything from identity and community to property, place, and politics shaped the fact that human beings can now live parts of their lives in virtual worlds?”  Some of the potential research questions raised by cybersociality in online virtual worlds like Second Life include the following:

• How are social norms enforced and violated, and how does that contribute to a sense of community?
• What does identity mean in a massive multiplayer online role playing game when people can have alts (secondary accounts not linked to their primary avatar, or animated representative), or more than one person can control an avatar?
• What does embodiment mean in Second Life, where you can change your gender, body type, skin color, and even species at will, where other players can even *give* you a new body type to “wear,” and you can buy a penis to use for cybersex?  Do people change certain aspects of appearance (such as clothes or hair style ) more than others (such as body shape or gender)?  How often to people change their appearance?  To what extent does an avatar’s appearance influence how people interact with that avatar?
• What religious or cultural rituals do people engage in, in cyberspace?
• What are the social norms for gift-giving and reciprocity in cyberspace, and how does this contribute to community and sociability in cyber worlds?
• Are there coercive exchanges, and how are they handled or talked about?
• How does partnering occur in Second Life? Do virtual partners know each other in real life, and if not, how does it impinge on their real life worlds? What is the interface between Second Life and “real life”?

In this ethics application, I got a lot of help from Tom Boellstorff (whose ethnography on Second Life we read for the class). He generously shared with me his original ethics application for his research in Second Life, which I was able to draw on in figuring out how to answer the Ethics Committee’s concerns about privacy and the permissibility of research in Second Life.

3) Oral Histories of International Students in Australia

Education is a $12.5 billion “export industry” for Australia, bringing in more income than tourism (Rout 2008).  Yet little is known about the social experience of international students in Australia, despite the fact that they face unique pressures.  Rout (2008) summarized recent research that points out that, “Contrary to their image as cashed-up BMW drivers, many overseas students cannot afford to eat, are paid well below the minimum wage and are among those most vulnerable to exploitation in this country.”

For this project, students in ANTH 801 will conduct oral life histories of international students at Macquarie, focusing on their educational trajectory leading to, and including, their student experience at Macquarie.  How did they end up at Macquarie?  What are the personal, social, financial, and familial obligations that shape students’ experiences at university in Australia?  What are the cultural factors that influence their integration into, or alienation from, the Macquarie student body?

Very little qualitative research has been done on the higher education experience of international students in general, and yet they comprise a large minority of students at Macquarie.  Letting them speak in their own words about their experiences is an opportunity to learn about the pressures and problems that international students face, their goals and aspirations, and the social and learning strategies that they use to cope with a culturally new educational experience, which Macquarie University may be able to use to improve the experience of international students on campus.  It also has the potential to inform our understanding of the informal, affective, and social aspects of learning and intellectual development for international students.

I grounded this project in the principles of oral history methods, which specify that (1) the interview or transcript must be placed in a repository, and (2) those interviewed retain copyright and control over the use of their interviews.  It was therefore a complicated application, and probably the most closely scrutinised of all the projects I submitted, but it eventually received approval.

4) An applied anthropological study of the social use of space on campus and its relationship with ‘intellectual climate’

Macquarie University is looking for ways to improve its rankings in graduate student evaluations of “intellectual climate” on campus.  U@MQ is eager to think about new ways that the food and social facilities on campus could be restructured to be more appealing and better utilized.  Might these be linked?  Do students’ most formative moments at university happen inside or outside of the classroom?  How is social time in or outside of the classroom related to intellectual interaction?  To what extent is intellectual climate shaped by space and facilities?  What other factors shape the perception of intellectual climate on campus?  The aim of this project is to study use of space and evaluate whether there are any inexpensive or cost-effective interventions that you can recommend to improve the intellectual climate for students at Macquarie.

Here are some angles that you may consider:

1) In the library, how do students mark off spaces for individual and group work?  The library is the most formal learning space on campus.  How do students claim it to be more informal?

2) How much does home life influence use of public spaces on campus? Do students who use the campus do so to escape from home life for whatever reason?

3) Using the language of de Certeau, what are the tactics that students use to claim space and how does it differ from the ostensible ways that the space was designed to be used?

This particular project was set up as an applied anthropology project for a “client,” Macquarie University, and one organisation in particular, U@MQ, was very interested in the results and sponsored a competition and prize for the best student project.  (U@MQ is the company that provides non-academic services on campus — they run the coffee carts, the food court, the gym, etc.)  At the end of the semester, the students who did this research project presented their research results and policy recommendations to a panel from U@MQ, the Learning and Teaching Centre, and Facilities Management.

Protocols and scripts

In the ethics application for each project I had to set out the general research question and draft protocols – scripts actually – for students to follow in recruiting participants.  This was the only way that the ethics committee could feel satisfied that students wouldn’t put undue pressure on friends and family to participate in their research projects.  I also had to draft protocols for taking pictures, and several variations on informed consent forms and recruitment advertisements.  Students put their own spins on the research project and came up with their own lists of interview questions.  They submitted a short description of their own approach at the beginning of the semester and this received expedited review by the Ethics Secretariat.

So students in that same methods class the following year were able to either do their own research project (and go through the whole ethics approval process), OR they could take one of these 4 research projects and interpret it in their own way, while following the basic protocols and methodologies that I’d already gotten clearance for them to use.  Two did their own projects (one on roller derby leagues in Sydney and another on the Miss India-Australia beauty pageant); the rest of the class slotted into the projects I’d gotten pre-approval for.  With ethics approval mostly taken care of in advance, the students in 2008 were able to start their research right away.  We still had extensive discussions about research ethics, facilitated by the online ethics training module (see section 2 above), but this time students didn’t see research ethics as a tedious bureaucratic requirement, but rather as an area of intense current debate in anthropology.

They all did great work.  Most of them have submitted their papers to journals.  Several are under review, and so far one has been published (Elisabeth McLeod’s study of mobile phone use amongst Baby Boomers in Sydney in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies) and another was just accepted for publication (Vanessa Gamboa Gonzalez’s thought piece on conceptions of the body and health in Second Life for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research). I’m over the moon about this. (I wish that I’d thought about my essays for class in graduate school as articles to submit for publication.  Then maybe I would have had more than 2 obscure publications when I finished my PhD.) These are the exciting possibilities when students are doing their own research instead of writing about the research of others.

–L.L. Wynn

On 14 May, Alfons van Marrewijk, who has been guest blogger on CM during his recent stay in Sydney, gave his inaugural lecture at the Vrije Universiteit as the newly appointed Professor of Business Anthropology, Especially the Anthropology opf Cultural Interventions in Complex and Public/Private Networks. Such lectures are major public events with considerable pomp (I am already planning my own in November!), and the topic signifies a further step in the academic mainstreaming of business anthropology (although the VU has already been in a special situation, having both a social and cultural anthropology department and one that deals largely with organisational anthropology). The lecture broadly outlined the scope of business anthropology in Alfons’ own practice, in which I found particularly interesting the focus on material culture and spatial settings — from office spaces to project locations — which is close to the interests of one of our PhD students at Macquarie, Melanie Uy, who is doing her research in a small Chinese company.

Corporate anthropology as well as the anthropology of business is increasingly in the news in Europe as well, and the collapse of financial institutions may have given it a boost. The simple idea that managers do not always behave rationally suddenly does not need “selling.” Alfons mentioned that British anthropologist Gillian Tett’s book Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets and Unleashed a Catastrophy (a rather un-anthropological title, I must say) received the British Press Award. The book Gezocht: Antropoloog m/v (Required: Anthropologist [m/f]) and the organisation NAGA (Niet Academisch Gebonden Antropologen, Anthropologists Without Academic Affiliation) are testimony to the emergence of the trend in the Netherlands. Unlike in many other academic settings, at the VU, there is no animosity between academic and applied anthropologists, and the institutional conditions for a close interaction between them are at hand. Yet even here, the training of anthropology students (in either department) has not quite kept step with or been able to drive home the fact that anthropologists are in demand in the workplace — despite the fact that Alfons himself, together with another colleague in his department, runs an anthropology consultancy.

This week I made the most massive error I have made to date as a teacher.  I run a large first year class called Drugs Across Cultures with about 400 students in it.  On Monday we had the mid-semester multiple choice exam scheduled that’s worth 20% of their grade.  The students had all come in, sat down, and I had given the last instructions for how to hand in the quiz when they were done.  Then I handed out the quiz.  I’d passed out about 100 of the question sheets when someone raised her hand and said, “Umm, why are some of the questions highlighted in bold?”

Yes, that’s right, I printed out 400 question sheets with the correct answers in bold.

I had to cancel the whole quiz, write another one, and have them all take it again (online this time).

I was reflecting on my colossal stupidity with a colleague who told me this great story about another teaching stuff-up.  A man he knew was teaching a large undergraduate class on biological anthropology.  The mother of one of his students was a primatologist and had sent him a film of someone’s field research on gorillas.  He decided to use it in class but hadn’t reviewed it before-hand — it was completely unscreened.  So he went to class and put on the film.  It started with two male gorillas approaching each other, and everyone expected to see a battle for dominance.  But instead, one of the gorillas lied down and the other started performing fellatio on it.  According to my colleague, the gorilla ejaculated spectacularly all over the other gorilla’s face.

Now that’s another good story about giving students a bit more than they are expecting!  I just did a google search for “gorilla film homosexual fellatio” and got to this result, a 2005 Guardian UK article asking “can animals be homosexual?” which says, “There’s a video some researchers made of male bachelor gorillas engaging in fellatio, but it still hasn’t been shown in the US.”  Oh yes it has!

Anyone else have any good stories of epic  blunders they’ve made in their teaching?  Or of mistakes that your teachers have made?

–L.L. Wynn

Recently, I read Tom Boellstroff’s book: “Coming of age in second life. An anthropologist explores the virtually human”. The book is an account of two years field work and an anthropological ethnography of avatar life in Second Life. Avatars are virtual personages created and Tom’s avatar was the anthropologist in 2^nd Life, interviewing, observing and, first and foremost, participating in social life.  This resulted in ‘thick description’, useful to understanding social life at Second Life. Tom explained that although it was difficult to tell whether the avatar you were talking to was a man or woman, different persons or human at all, social interaction between avatars in 2^nd Life was ‘real’. Dmitri Williams of the Annenberg school for Communication studied all server logs of 3-D game EverQuest and concluded that gamers are behaving online. Players who live 10 kilometres of each other play five times more intensively than people who live at larger distances (van Ammelrooy, Volkskrant 28 februari 2009).

Increasingly, 3-dimensional virtual platforms are being used by public and private corporations. The VU University, the one I’m working with, has (actually it was dr. Frans Feldberg) build a virtual University in which students can visit different information settings and view teaching examples. Large companies such as the ABN Amro Bank have built digital offices to attract young customers and to try out virtual services. Virtual platforms such as 2^nd Life are designed for social interaction and collaboration. Therefore, it was not strange that practitioners of private construction firms we worked with to reflect upon their practices of collaboration in with public partners suggested to use 2^nd Life. Not knowing much of the platform I started reading about the platform and made myself an avatar. Soon I found myself (my avatar) flying around, talking (typing) with an Italian girl (or someone saying so) about getting around. I tried to drive (sit in it) a parked car, but someone (never seen the avatar) threw me out telling me that I was stealing his car!

In order to facilitate learning of public and private partners we built a simulation game on 2^nd Life centred on a megaproject, the tunnelling of train, road and tram infrastructure in Amsterdam’s corporate suburb Zuid-As. One group played the public office, three others played private construction firms trying out a competitive alliancing tender model. In this model, partners have to collaborate in order to get the best solution for a complex problem, without knowing yet who will get the assignment. Employees (better: avatars) were first trained how to behave themselves at our research island. We had bought the island to have a selected group of people in the project. However, at one stage of the game we had thought of opening up the island for a broad audience to let them make a pubic choice of what the best design would be. This has not been applied yet.

We made a short documentary on the topic and I thought most of the young organisation anthropology students would love this stuff, but to my surprise the reactions were not very enthusiastic. They thought that studying people did not include studying avatars. There were not much anthropologists that would like to be virtual anthropologists, which is a pity. 2^nd Life will maybe disappear but, seeing my daughter using the Nintendo DS to play with her friends, 3-virtual platforms will be helpful in the near future for training and education. And Sony, the ‘owner’ of the earlier mentioned EverQuest was very interested to work with researchers/consultants that could help them understanding their gamers’ behaviour (van Ammelrooy, Volkskrant 28 februari 2009). Is here a new field for applied anthropology?

I am not sure how many Culture Matters readers have followed the French debate that has surrounded the government’s announcement that university funding will be reformed in accordance with the audit model that French commentators mistakenly identify as “American,” but which all of us elsewhere in Western Europe, Australia and so on have meekly accepted. (I recall how surprised I was by the atmosphere in a faculty meeting at Macquarie, in which there was no attempt to discuss whether or not we should go with the new “research assessment” system; rahter, the debate was restricted to “harm reduction.”) French university staff, by contrast, has gone on strike in protest.

In Le Monde, Bruno Latour has published an article rejecting the reform principally in the name of defending university autonomy. The article unleashed another round of the debate, in which Claude Calame of the EHESS took issue with Latour. Calame points out that the current system is hopelessly in need of reform and that, in any case, universities’ liberties are now limited to the liberties of/in the market:

the Sarkozy administration is so reactionary, in the neoconservatie sense of the word, that it has succeeded in making a situation that no one wishes either to defend or to maintain appear progressive. To denigrate the state, and the dependence it will impose upon teachers and researchers, is to forget that it is also the state of law and the guarantor of fundamental liberties. It is this ensemble of institutions and services that not only maintains a certain equality of treatment … but also allows citizens to exercise political control over the institutions they finance, so that they are not short-circuited by an oligarchy of plutocrats or that its tasks are not farmed out to the private sector.

Not being familiar with the debate in is entirety, it appears that Calame sees the state-imposed audit system as a guarantee of taxpayers’ control over publicly financed institutions, which is exactly the freemarketist justification that audit systems use everywhere, in both state-financed and non-state-financed systems (and of course the argument of those in favour of e.g. bank nationalisation). Yet Calame attacks freemarketeers and “plutocrats” (a word that, I must say, sets off alarm bells for me, all the more that in Eastern Europe it has often been used in the combination “Judeo-plutocrats”).

In any case I would like to see more serious discussion of the combined effects of bureaucratization, democratization, and most recently recession and a turn back to state ownership, on knowledge production. I wonder in particular what effect the recession is having on the largely privately financed U.S. research and education system.

When some colleagues and I did research on Chinese and Afghan children in Hungarian secondary schools in 2003-04, we found that xenophobic views were consistently expressed by Hungarian students more or less regardless of social class (though of course there was individual variation). We hypothesized that this had to do to a large part with the absence of what is usually referred to as citizenship education — i.e. a coherently transmitted picture of what constitutes the Hungarian polity — which allows the ethnicist, descent-based views of nationhood held by many teachers and not refuted in mainstream media to spread unchallenged. In this, Hungarian schools were starkly different from those in Northwestern Europe, and this has not changed since Hungary joined the European Union.

This has just been confirmed once again by a survey carried out by a group  of sociologist, led by Mihaly Csako, on secondary school students’ views of democracy. Fewer than half of the students considered respect for the rights of minorities an important feature of democracy. Consistent with this, a majority said they would be bothered if they had to sit next to a Gypsy student. (60% of students at the more ‘elite’ type of secondary school, gimnazium, said so, in contrast to 40% at vocational secondary schools, where they are much more likely to actually have Gypsy classmates.)

The relegation of minority rights to a marginalised liberal discourse has been a gradual process. Tolerance of all minorities — ethnic, religious, sexual or social, e.g. the homeless — has been rising. Whereas homophobia was not discernible in Hungary’s political landscape in the 1990s, it has today become a regular feature of nationalist discourse. It must be said that in the ’90s, gay rights were not part of the liberal human-rights discourse or the politicized identity that they have become now, with politicians’ “comings-out” and Western-style gay pride parades (very small and heavily protected from physical attacks by hecklers though they are). But in Hungary, homophobia has little to do with religious concerns; rather, the thematization of any minority rights provokes angry attacks by nationalists who see this as part of a liberal discourse that betrays national interests. Anti-semitism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Communism and anti-liberalism are related and almost interchangeable sentiments in Hungarian nationalism, and indeed frequently feature in the same speeches. The kike, the Chinaman, the faggot and the Commie have become signifiers for the same conspiracy that threatens Magyardom. In this respect the nature of xenophobia in Hungary is different from Western Europe (where it is conceptually difficult to be both Islamophobic and antisemitic) or Australia.

Charity Goodman, an anthropologist who is a public health analyst for the U.S. federal government, wrote the below with some information about anthropologists working in U.S. federal agencies and she includes some excellent advice about what student anthropologists who aspire to working for the government should study.  Though some of it is specific to working for the U.S. government, other things (like “get methodological and statistical training”) are relevant to aspiring applied anthropologists anywhere.  I repost it with her permission.

–L.L. Wynn

Shirley J. Fiske has written a highly informative article on the federal government as an employer of anthropologists. (See Careers in Applied Anthropology in the 21st Century: Perspectives from Academics and Practitioners, napa Bulletin 29, 2008, pp 110-130. ) She provided statistics on the number of anthropologists in various federal agencies, interviewed practicing anthropologists in a number of agencies, summarized their recommendations for those searching for jobs, and included a list of websites to assist job seekers. According to Fiske, the federal government is largest employer of anthropologists outside of the academy with OPM estimating of 7,500 social scientists (job series GS-101) in 2006. This series includes anthropologists, behavioral scientists, geographers, sociologists and planners. She focuses on the U.S. Census Bureau, The National Park Service, National Marine Fisheries, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and USAID.

From her interviews, Shirley found the following recommendations and lessons learned that are helpful for those planning to work as a federal employee, contractor or for those who already work for the government and want more insight into how another agency works.

1. “Have a secondary specialty,” especially if planning to work in international development. “It might be methodological, such as evaluation research, or qualitative methods; or it might be substantive specialty such as public health, agriculture, public lands and resource management, housing policy, or any number of mission-related fields or analytic approaches.”
2. “The importance of the experience factor for USAID hires”. Fedanthro member, Joan Atherton, suggests that if you are right out of graduate school you might want to work for an NGO to gain this experience before applying for USAID.
3. “Get methodological and statistics training.” Most of the anthropologists mentioned that in addition to graduate school, many anthropologists were expected in their jobs to have this training.
4. “Utilize internships, fellowships, and networking.” Networking is a life long skill and these programs allow prospective job seekers to make employment contacts.
5. “Prepare with training specific to government work.” Receive training in federal laws applicable to your specialty. According to the author who worked many years for the federal government, she found understanding “the federal regulatory process and U.S. Code, the civil service rights and responsibilities, and practical skills such as how to read and interpret the federal budget and the budgeting process were extremely useful. Most are learned on the job; but often you can find workshops, classes or courses on these topics.”

Charity Goodman, Ph.D.

Public Health Analyst, Office of Program Analysis & Coordination, Center
for Mental Health Services,

Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration, Dept.of Health
and Human Services

This morning I was trying to explain to an engineer-physicist all about the Human Terrain System.  That got me to explaining about the blog, “iluvamaninauniform.blogspot.com.”   The nom de plume of the blog is “Pentagon Diva” but the author was recently named as Montgomery McFate, as Open Anthropology, Savage Minds, and In Harmonium reported last week.

But when I went there to show him, the blog was gone!  It’s been taken down.  I wish I’d made some copies of the text (fortunately there are a few choice excerpts on Open Anthropology and In Harmonium).

“Never fear!” I proclaimed to the engineer-physicist (let’s call him Dave).  “I know a site that archives web pages.”  So I went to the Internet Archive to look for it.  Sadly, it appears that it’s not available on the Internet Archive, but that doesn’t seem to be because of a deliberate block but rather because it’s relatively recent.

But then Dave told me that he’d heard an interview on NPR’s On the Media with Brewster Kahle, the co-founder of the Internet Archive, describing how he fought back when he received a “National Security Letter” (NSL) from the FBI requesting data on a particular user of the archive.  According to Kahle, some 50,000 of these requests are made every year.  What’s alarming about these NSLs, besides the fact that they are outside of judicial review, is that they put a gag order on the recipients, preventing them from discussing the NSL request with anyone except their lawyers.  Of the estimated 200,000 issued over the past several years, only 3 NSL recipients have legally challenged the demand for information.  It reminds me again why I’m glad to have left the U.S.

Anyway, Kahle fought back with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and eventually the FBI settled.  One of the terms of the settlement was that the gag order was lifted and Kahle was allowed to discuss the NSL and his fight against it.  Three cheers for the EFF, the ACLU, and the few people who have had the courage to fight an NSL.   (As a result of a previous challenge to an NSL, a U.S. judge found the whole system of NSLs to be unconstitutional.)

There’s a video describing another NSL recipient’s fight against this, and the EFF has made publicly available information on how anyone who receives an NSL can fight it.  I know we anthropologists probably aren’t on the front line when it comes to NSLs.  But then again, given the gag order, who knows who’s getting these things?  Might they include requests to teachers to provide information on a student?  So I thought it might be something that educators should generally be aware of.

–L.L. Wynn