GRADUATE SOCIALIZATION IN ANTHROPOLOGY

To our gra
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CALL FOR PAPERS

GRADUATE SOCIALIZATION IN ANTHROPOLOGY

To our graduate student colleagues:

Have you ever thought anthropologically about graduate school? About the academic world? We invite you to turn a professional eye on your own departments and universities, and submit essays to a project on graduate socialization in anthropology. We hope to scrutinize the contradictions and contortions of graduate student life, everything from the classroom to the bar, from formal talk to personal experience, from schoolwork to life off campus. We're interested in processes of professional socialization and discipline, of social belonging and exclusion, economic hardship and reward, resistance and struggle — in short, in the whole academic system. And we hope to stir up discussion about how things could be changed for the better.

We'll consider long analyses or short reflections, in any style you like. We plan to print a set of 800-1100 word essays in the AAA's newsletter, Anthropology News, and a set of longer essays in a student-edited journal, Michigan Discussions in Anthropology. 

If you're interested, please submit a 250-word abstract by July 1st; if accepted, the final deadline for essays will be September 30th. 
Send your abstracts to [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask] We'd be happy to answer any questions.

best wishes, 
Eli Thorkelson (University of Chicago) 
Saul Mercado (University of California-Berkeley)

See below for an editorial by Eli Thorkelson that was published in the April 2007 issue of Anthropology News.


"On the Socialization of Graduate Students in Anthropology" 

By Eli Thorkelson (U Chicago)

"Does contemporary anthropology have any real value?" That’s what I was asked yesterday, in an earnest email from a friend, an undergrad. It’s a good question, simultaneously intellectual, personal and ethical: one part existential dilemma, one part research project. It asks: is anthropology legitimate, justifiable or more simply, just?

In graduate school, on the borders of the discipline, these questions are acute. Although we will never escape ethical questions, ethics begins at home, in our own academic institutions. We can’t separate ethics from practice in our professional lives, where we’re surrounded by academic norms, and the smallest gesture, like the shake of a professor’s head, can be an eloquent judgment. Nonetheless, the academic world often falls short of our ideals. And in trying to understand this world, ethics and value judgments are our tools of critique.

Having said this much, I want to make a simple argument. Graduate education is imperfect—and some of its problems are structural, institutional and tenacious. But being anthropologists, we know how to analyze and understand social situations, including our own. And without such an analysis, informed change will not be possible. So we need to make our professional expertise practically useful, putting it at the service of rethinking our own institutions.

What are these problems, you might ask? For one thing, our theory and practice are inconsistent. We critique hierarchy while reproducing a rigid system of academic ranks; we denaturalize market ideology while putting ourselves on the job market; and we decry the theoretical inadequacy of Western individualism even as we artfully distinguish ourselves from others in our writing. For another, within graduate school there are still real inequities of wealth, opportunity and prestige, often coupled to gender, class, race/ethnicity, educational background and all the other typical markers of social distinction. My department’s chair, John Kelly, observes that we suffer from unresolvable tensions between equality and merit. Finally, our emotional lives are tangled up in our work: anxiety, fatigue, disenchantment, worry, guilt, haste and occasionally even despair are part of daily life for many.

These are not accidents. The socialization of graduate students into the discipline is a structured process, and our personal experiences reflect that structure. Anxiety, for instance, is not just an individual, psychological problem; it is a symptom of the social world we inhabit. Yet our personal experience is inevitably partial and parochial, and debates about institutional reform are limited by a lack of collective, comparative knowledge about graduate socialization. Without knowing what varies across institutions, it is difficult to know what can and cannot be changed. Of course, we all reflect on the discipline, but most of our reflections happen in bars and coffeeshops, or behind closed doors with friends. And at least since the 1980s, most “reflexive” critiques have focused on theory or fieldwork, neglecting to examine academic institutions in much detail. A new public debate is needed.

Towards that end, graduate students from across the country, including me, are working on a collaborative set of analyses. We plan to publish an essay collection and to present some of our work at this year’s AAA meeting. The more intriguing topics include the linguistic politics of collaborative research in Arizona, relations with faculty mentors in Indiana, and the causes of curriculum change in California, not to mention the biography of a funding proposal, tracking the biographies of funding proposals, teaching theory, writing ethnography as fiction, and examining anthropology as a form of meditation. We’re still actively looking for participants, so please get in touch if you’re curious, or even if you’re just interested in reading our results. You can reach me at [log in to unmask]

Finally, I should emphasize that our critiques are hopeful: I answered yes to my friend’s question, saying to myself that if anthropology had no value, there would be no point in criticizing it. Graduate education is full of contradictions, but through informed debate they may eventually be addressed.


	
	
		
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