Alexandra Mack has just posted on Anthrodesign a list of companies and state agencies that are participating in the Employer Expo hosted by the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology at the AAA meeting. It makes interesting reading. I think a few years ago there were no non-academic recruiters at the AAA.

1. Battelle
2. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention
3. Intel
4. Harborlight Management
5. LTG Associates
6. U.S. Agency for International Development
7. Pitney Bowes
8. JBS, Aguirre Division
9. Statistical Research, Inc
10. National Institutes of Health
11. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
12. U.S. Government Accountability Office
13. The Manoff Group
14. EnCompass
15. U.S. State Department

Recently we were informed that Macquarie was to change its ethics policy to make it so that students could no longer be listed as chief investigators on ethics applications.  This would mean that supervisors would have to be listed as CIs for all student research projects, including those of PhD students.  Should these changes be put in place students will have the choice of being minor researchers or, at best, ‘Co-investigators’. The proposed changes immediately raised concerns in the anthropology department about the implications our students’ research.  I’d like to raise some of these issues here in the hope that it will generate a productive discussion of the subject.  The central question essentially is this: why might a change that is perfectly innocuous for other disciplines be problematic for anthropological research?

First, what are the stated reasons for making these changes?  The primary justification for the new approach is to better recognise the role of students as research trainees rather than researchers in their own right, and to better reflect the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, which states that

“the research supervisor… (must provide) guidance in all matters relating to research conduct and overseeing all stages or the research process, including identifying the research objectives and approach, obtaining ethics and other approvals, obtaining funding, conducting the research, and reporting the research outcomes in appropriate forums and media”

I don’t think anyone would disagree that it is always the supervisor’s role to provide guidance in all the areas stated here.   But making supervisors CIs is something rather different than acknowledging their role as mentors; it implies that this is their own research in some sense, and more importantly it assumes that they can take ethical responsibility not only for the design of the research project but also for its conduct.

It seems to me that these changes are an attempt to apply a laboratory-based model of research across the board in which students either work on a project in collaboration with their supervisor, or work in a controlled environment in which they can, at least in theory, be constantly under the supervision of an academic.  I was reminded of the different disciplinary expectations of lab-based research when I discussed this issue with my wife, a molecular biologist.  She couldn’t initially see why the anthropologists were so concerned about the implications of the changes; for her it was perfectly normal for the lab head or other senior researcher to be the CI for student projects.  This gave me cause to reflect on why the changes seemed so problematic for anthropological research.

So why is anthropology different?  Here are four reasons I can think of why the proposed ethics model is problematic for ethnographic research:

• First, students doing fieldwork in often far flung locations cannot reasonably be expected to be under the direct supervision of an academic.  Guidance may come from afar but in the end the student must be able to take responsibility for their own ethical conduct.  Related to this, the research ’situation’ is never determined once and for all as it is in a laboratory environment; it is an ongoing, evolving process in which the ‘terms’ of the research, and the frame which differentiates the research from not-research, are never fixed.  This therefore requires researchers to make ethical decisions in real time, in novel situations as they arise.  Thus it would not be possible for a supervisor to visit a field site, determine that everything is okay ethically, and then leave again.  For a supervisor reasonably to take responsibility for the ethics of an ethnographic field project s/he would have to be there the whole time.
• Second, the ethical qualities of anthropological research cannot be separated from the relationships of trust established during fieldwork.  As the sole fieldworker the student, and no-one else, enters into relationships (hopefully) of trust and obligation with the people s/he is working with.  This kind of rapport is not something that can simply be transferred to others, people whom the research communities have never met.  How can informants be sure that sensitive, personal or secret information won’t be shared with the other researchers on the project?  How could the student researcher guarantee the confidentiality of information s/he acquires?  And would, indeed, supervisors have the right to demand to see their students’ fieldnotes on the grounds that they are CIs in the research project?
• Third, in interactions with bureaucracies and others in gate-keeper roles, it is the student who must act on his/her own behalf.  The perception that the student was merely an assistant (because even as ‘co-investigators’ they would clearly appear to be the junior party) would certain diminish his/her ability to negotiate terms of the research.
• Fourth, unlike fields such as biology in which the lab head always appears as last author on papers regardless of whether s/he contributed to the research in any practical sense, in anthropology the student is usually the sole author of work based on her/his research.  There are some exceptions of course, but in the case of co-authored work there would be expectation that the supervisor has also did a substantial amount of the research or writing.  If supervisors were required to be CIs with regard to ethics, would they also appear as authors of the research outputs?  Shouldn’t there be a logical consistency between ethical requirements and authorship, both of which are expressions of the subject-position of the researcher?

So those are four reasons, although I am sure there are more.  The broader consequence of my argument is that there can’t be an a priori universal ethical researcher-subject, independent of discipline or research situation.  In order to work with this recognition ethics committees need to be able to indulge in a sort of ethical relativism, which is to say that they see ethics as contextualised by discipline and research situation rather than being based on universal models that can be applied uniformly in every situation.  This is of course a very ‘anthropological’ way of viewing things.  But I think anthropology and its methods demand the ongoing contextualisation of ethical engagement, which is to say that it demands to practise what it preaches.

I’m interested to hear what others think on this matter though.  Are there other universities adopting a similar approach to student researcher ethics?  Are there any precedents for this sort of change?  Are there good arguments for making supervisors CIs for all their students’ research?  Or does this put supervisors themselves in an unethical position, i.e. being asked to take responsibility for things that are largely out of their control?  And if supervisors feel that they are morally and even legally accountable for their students’ ethical conduct during research, what effects would this have on the sorts of projects they would be willing to take on?

While we’re talking about national parks and other common spaces in relationship to migration, I’d like to draw attention to this nice short film on the concept of “The Commons”.  Using some groovy retro animation and sporting a catchy soundtrack, the film makes an argument for recognising those things that we (should) share as members of societies, including water and government.  The film encourages us to see the value of these shared things and to see the injustice of their exploitation by the few.

As a concise way of making a bringing a simple idea to life, I think the film is very effective.  It is also inspiring, which is not all that common in environmentalist discourse.  As was noted in a recent NYT article, environmentalism is generally failing to inspire large numbers of people to change their ways.  Witness the ever greater numbers of people who, despite the hardening of scientific evidence, do not believe climate change has anthropogenic causes.  Thankfully, there seems to be an increasing recognition that bringing about social change around climate change is not just a technical issue but one that involves understanding human psychology and “culture”.  One important factor is that of motivation, of inspiration.  Consider these statement from the NYT article:

“I think we have become very, very good at describing that we’re against. … We’re terrible at describing what we’re for. We’re against climate change, we’re against biodiversity extinction, we’re against land-use change, etc., we’re against pesticides … but what are we for?” [Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change] said.

Martin Bunzl, a philosophy professor at Rutgers University, compared the climate change movement to the civil rights movement. Climate change is often described as a “technical” problem with technical solutions, he said, a portrayal that research has shown is ineffective.

Instead, he said, the key is culture change — it’s about changing what’s in people’s heads.

I agree that people are going to have an easier time coming on board some social project which inspires them, which feels like moving in the right direction.  The problem with a lot of environmental discourse is that it plays upon feelings of guilt and pushes in the direction of greater asceticism.  No wonder so many people have difficulty signing up to that.  So perhaps we need to reframe the debate and ask ourselves not what we should abstain from but we are for.   And one possible answer to this question could be, “We are for the commons!”

Okay, enough of a rave.  Here’s the film:

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/2009/11/18/remembering-chandra-jayawardena/ http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/remembering-chandra-jayawardena/#comments Wed, 18 Nov 2009 06:14:48 +0000 Jovan Maud http://culturematters.wordpress.com/?p=987 ]]>

Portrait of Chandra Jayawardena, founding professor of anthropology at Macquarie. Van Sommers 1979. Photographed by Sumant Badami.

We were very excited when the library here at Macquarie agreed to hand over a portrait of our department’s founding professor, Chandra Jayawardena.  Up until recently it had been gracing a wall near the library’s anthropology collection.  It is now hanging just outside our meeting room (and directly outside my office) and adds a welcome touch of seriousness and history to the otherwise featureless walls here.  This portrait by van Sommers was one of several made of academic staff in the department back in the 1970s. This particularly striking image of Chandra references his work in the Carribean, or perhaps Mauritius.

Although Chandra died long before I came to Macquarie I have over the years developed a keen sense of his legacy.  In conversations with staff members who knew him, all of whom have retired over the last few years, I have noticed a level of esteem for Chandra bordering on reverence.  The values with which he founded the department — social engagement, a concern with power and inequality, and a willingness to innovate — are, I think, still alive and well.  Personally, seeing this portrait as I leave to go to class, and looking into Chandra’s eyes, reminds me that anthropology is a serious and important business with a lot to offer the world.

I’ve copied below text from our department website which gives some more details about Chandra, his life, and his influence in anthropology.

Chandra Jayawardena was the Foundation Professor of Anthropology at Macquarie. He was appointed in 1968, and sadly died as a result of an operation in 1981 at the age of only 52. He had previously taught at Sydney University, where he was an intellectual catalyst of extraordinary impact. He taught many of the current staff at Macquarie’s department. Professor Hamilton particularly remembers him for his dynamic and exciting lectures on the topic of the bureaucracy in Zazzau, a kingdom in northern Nigeria, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – something which only the most talented of lecturers could make into a gripping topic.

A scholar of international repute, Chandra exerted a great influence on the development of anthropology in Australia. Born in Sri Lanka, he graduated from Colombo he enrolled at the London School of Economics and studied across a number of fields: cinema, law, social theory, anthropology, literature and politics. We can see in this framing of his intellectual life many of the important strands which still inform teaching and research in the anthropology department at Macquarie. His research interests included, in the 1950’s, work in the Caribbean, especially on work, solidarity, conflict and egalitarianism among Guyanese plantation workers; in the 1960’s, studies of Indian society in Fiji, especially with regard to religion and social change; and from the mid 1960’s, an investigation of politics, religion and law in Aceh, North Sumatra.

After his appointment to the Macquarie Anthropology department he gathered together a number of scholars with interests similar to his own, with a commitment to an international and cosmopolitan type of anthropology, and a deep interest in social theory. All were Australians, which was most unusual since the majority of appointments in Australian universities up to the 1970’s were from England or the United States. Chandra himself taught tirelessly and published as frequently as he could. He had just received his first ever Australian Research Grants Committee grant when he passed on. He was planning an ambitious study of the Indian diaspora, looking at plantation communities in Fiji, Natal, Mauritius, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad. His failing health in later years made work and travel more difficult, and there are many papers and drafts for publications which were never completed. His unpublished notes and papers are archived at Macquarie University library.

It’s been a bit of a quiet time on CM and I thought the perfect way to get things going again would be another makeover.  To tell the truth I didn’t like the last look at all and ended up agreeing with one commentator who thought it was too cluttered.   This time I though we should move to a less cluttered look and also to update the header image.  I have once again employed my very modest Gimp skills to produce a new banner which I quite like.   Doing the header I took inspiration from Anthropology Works, by using a Creative Commons licensed photo from Flickr as the basis for the design.

Feedback is always welcome.  If you like it or hate it, please let me know!

I woke up this morning to read that Claude Levi-Strauss has passed away, aged 100.  As a testament to his stature as a world-shaping thinker, he has received prominent obituaries in newspapers around the world.  This New York Times piece by Edward Rothstein is especially worth a read.

As one wit wrote in the comments to that article, “He will be mythed!”

This year the Australian Anthropological Society has instituted a distinguished public lecture in anthropology to be given by a prominent member of the discipline. Clearly this is an attempt by the society to give anthropology more of a public face in Australia, which I think is definitely a Good Thing.

The inaugural lecture will be given by Ghassan Hage, entitled “The open mind and its enemies: Anthropology and the passion of the political”. Scheduled for 8 December, the lecture will open the events surrounding the AAS annual conference 9-11 December, proudly hosted by us at Macquarie.

Details: (AAS lecture flyer)

Ghassan Hage is an internationally acclaimed thinker, both as an academic and an arresting public intellectual. He is the author of many works on nationalism, racism, multiculturalism and migration from a comparative perspective. The most well-known is White Nation (2000) examining White experiences of Australian Multiculturalism, and his latest is Waiting (2009). Prof. Hage taught Anthropology at the University of Sydney for fifteen years until 2007. He has held many prestigious visiting professorships including at Harvard University, L’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the University of Copenhagen and the American University of Beirut. His provocative, insightful and sometimes moving press and radio discussions have been a valuable part of public life in Australia during the last decade.

Tuesday 8th December 2009
State Library of NSW
Macquarie Street, Sydney
Metcalfe Auditorium
FREE ADMISSION
Program:
6pm Refreshments will be served
6.30 – 7.15 Lecture
7.15 – 7.45 Questions from audience
8pm Finish

Please Visit www.aas.asn.au for further information

I have just received some information about the first national tour of the Arab Film Festival in Australia.  The Festival opens with the Egyptian film, Eye of the Sun, at Dendy Opera Quays Sydney on 1 November.  The Festival contains a program of six films and will tour around Australian cities between 1-29 November.  For more details see the official website http://arabfilmfestival.com.au/

I was intrigued to find  out from today’s New York Times (Michael Cieply, “In Polanski case, a time warp”) that a report by two probation officers who, in 1977, made a recommendation against a longer gaol term (as compared to the 48 days  he got) in Polanski’s case of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old, they made the argument that while foreign filmmakers “enrich[ed] the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands, which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land.” Implicitly, they were making a cultural argument in favour of a lenient sentence.

These days, the cultural defense is often used in sex crime cases of non-European migrants (it is rarely successful in Europe, more often so in the U.S.), and it tends to be forgotten that thirty years ago it was applied to South and East Europeans. Overall, cultural arguments in such cases have become more explicitly articulated, both by defense and prosecution (and especially in public debates). At the same time, attitudes towards child-rearing, the agency of children and the adult-child relationship, and the biological versus moral determination of sexual behaviour have changed in complex ways. These days, children are seen as being endowed with more rights, yet, as the article points out, they are given less voice in legal deliberations because of the assumption that they must be protected. It seems that the biopolitics of childhood has become more strongly entrenched because it is harder to find an interpretive framework for the ambiguities of individual cases (that is, the difficult questions of free will and choice) when they involve individuals coming from different societies, as they increasingly do. It seems that the most successful weapon to deploy against the schematicism of this biopolitics is an equally schematic politics of culture. Thus, in a case reported by Alison Dundes Renteln in her book The Cultural Defense, an Afghan father in the U.S. was put on trial for kissing his infant son’s penis. He would have likely faced a harsher sentence than Polanski had the defense not mobilised an anthropologist to testify that such behaviour was a culturally appropriate expression of affection.