Why Doesn’t Diversity Training Work?
Diversity training in both academia and business has seen limited success at best. Photo courtesy of publicdomainpictures.net The Challenge for Industry and Academia Uncommon Sense Starbucks’ deci…
Tag: ACADEMIA
Vlad Schüler-Costa: Academic precarity and the false coin of our own dreams
A specter haunted EASA2018—the specter of precarity. Like a “frightful hobgoblin” (that, one could argue, is a more suitable, if inaccurate, translation of Marx’s Gespenst), it appeared in…
Is Higher Education a “Family-Friendly” Career Choice?
At the end of a day of academic work, you may not want to talk to anybody else, and giving yourself that option is a form of self-care.…
#EASA2018: Motion against apartheid academia in the West Bank
Matan Kaminer is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan and a member of the Israeli Anthropological Association and of Academia for Equality, an Israeli group for…
Imagining new imaginaries for the university
Are we seeing a shift away from explicitly imagining alternatives to the status quo? Are we even still capable, as a society, of envisaging these alternative imaginaries? There…
How academic culture gives us permission not to know
Every way of knowing is also a way of not knowing. Privileging one point of view, or one form of evidence, requires the erasure of other ways of…
Ethical dilemmas, anthropological practice, and principles #HauTalk
Hautalk is an opportunity to reinvigorate and remake our disciplinary identities. But how can we move this discussion beyond disciplinary boundaries—into spaces where we practice our craft? This…
Fiona Murphy: When gadflies become horses: On the unlikelihood of ethical critique from the academy
Something smells of bullshit. It has for a long time. Caught in the spectacular entanglements of the neoliberal university, academic work is being actively “bullshitized.” Audit cultures, the…
Shocked, not Surprised #hautalk
The surest signal that we are having something akin to a #metoo moment in academia is when my social media accounts, email inbox, and phone go into a…
REDUX: #PrecAnthro. Let’s talk about unionisation. #hautalk
First published on the 21st of June 2018 The HAU controversy is both a disappointment and an opportunity. It is a disappointment because it reflects the troubled condition…
Pyramid Scheme. #hautalk
For people immersed in bureaucratic institutions, like universities, the current ruckus over HAU raises at least one longstanding anthropological question: what kind of organizational structure not on…
Situating #hautalk. A polyphonic intervention
As an established blog with personal and institutional contacts to many of those involved in the recent upheaval at HAU and the Society of Ethnographic Theory, we do…
The neoliberal university is making us sick: Who’s to blame?
Outside the academy, I’m sure the perception remains that academics sit in leather armchairs, gazing out the gilded windows of our ivory towers, thinking all day. That has…
The Nerds’ Turn: Battling for a Democratic Academia in Poland
As students and academics in Poland are fighting to defend democracy and autonomy of the universities, this post is a battle cry. It outlines the threats to intellectual…
Hearing Indigenous Voices
The 27th of May to the 3rd of June is National Reconciliation Week in Australia. Reconciliation, for anthropology, includes reckoning with the discipline’s colonial past, and confronting the…
The Limits of Academic Freedom
We need to acknowledge the role we all play in silencing research. Consider the times we have dismissed a colleague’s idea because it ‘isn’t worth it’, or immediately…
Reflecting on Boundaries, Protection, and Inspiration
By: Gina Athena Ulysse Before reading Zoe Todd’s “Should I stay or Should I go?,” I had been pondering writing a post about why and how, I, a…
We suck at (academic) politics
Ninety percent of the time if you were to read a blog post about academics and politics it would be a rant about “identity politics.” This isn’t going…
Reading Not to Perish
The “publish or perish” imperative in academia is periodically debated in the newspapers. I think some distance should be taken from the arguments developed in such articles. Even…
Stephen Hawking, Dis-Incorporated
As Helene Mialet’s ethnography examines the role of his assistants, his students, and the media in the social construction of ‘Stephen Hawking: the great genius’, she also shows…
Race is Still a Problem in Anthropology
By Anar Parikh [The following essay emerges from conversation with fellow PhD student and AES/SVA attendee, Scott Ross (George Washington University).] How is it that a senior anthropologist…
Doing Development the Right Way: A Conversation with Charles Piot
Anthropologist Charlie Piot has been conducting research on the political economy and history of rural West Africa for over thirty years. His first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity…