Digital literacy is loosely defined as the ability to understand and use a range of digital technologies. For an anthropologist, these are specific tools such as social media, digital repositories, or web design that can significantly augment our success as scholars. Most of us have heard about the benefits of using Twitter or have figured out how to post lecture slides onto our online course management systems. However, I have found from personal experience that it is not enough to know that these tools exist – we also need to understand and navigate the complex digital cultures which they (and we) are bound up in.

I mentioned in my previous post that I am a fellow in the Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) Program at Michigan State University. The purpose of this fellowship is for graduate students to gain hands on experience with a range of digital tools which can improve our teaching, research and professional networking. However, the value from these experiences comes from the fact that they are contextualized within broader discussions relevant to anthropology today. Examples include creating a digital article and understanding the controversy over open access publications; developing a mobile app for archaeologists and figuring out how to incorporate this technology into ones fieldwork; or designing a digital archive and discussing the importance of persevering and increasing access to large bodies of data.

During my time in CHI, I realized that each of these technologies comes with its own set of social and technical rules that are important to consider long before we can expect to become great tweeters,  online instructors, and anthropologists. For me, having a safe and structured space to experiment with these tools was an important part of realizing this. When I made a mistake, felt overwhelmed, or was just plain clueless about where to start – I had a support system to work through it and get the most out of the digital tools I was using. Although I can’t share every lesson I learned this year in one post, the following are a few examples of common misconceptions I and others have had about what it means to be a digitally literate anthropologist.

Digital Identity – in a world where most search committees will Google you before they hire you, learning how to manage you digital identity is an indispensable skill. It’s not just about removing all those questionable Facebook photos, but also making sure to put your best face forward on all social media outlets. However, figuring out how to do this effectively can take time. It is unlikely that by simply creating a website or a Twitter account that you will immediately reap its benefits. It would be like walking to your field site and assuming your participants are going to scream the answers to your research questions at you (wouldn’t that be great!) Social media has its own weird culture – take a few weeks to learn and observe before you ever open your mouth (or start blogging/tweeting). Also, make sure to ask your colleagues for constructive feedback about your blog, tweets, website, etc. so you know how others perceive your digital presence. For more information on how to manage your online academic identity, check out this blogpost from Katy Meyers at GradHacker.

Copyright and Fair use – as the online course supervisor for my department, one of the most common questions I get from faculty is “can I post this online?” This is an extremely important issue to consider before scanning an entire book or digitizing a Hollywood film that you would normally show in your course without a second thought. Intellectual property laws can be very confusing, especially in a digital environment when the rules are still being sorted out. For this reason, it is extremely beneficial to work with other colleagues in the development of your own course. They will be able to help flag potential copyright issues and offer alternative solutions which may save you a lot of headache in the long run. I mention this and other issues that are specific to teaching anthropology online in my article on Teaching Anthropology in the Digital Age in the spring issue of General Anthropology. If you are really confused about fair use and need help figuring out the policies, check out this detailed overview from the Stanford University Libraries.

HTML and web design – I have gone back and forth on how much someone really needs to know about web design as an anthropologist and as a graduate student. On the one hand, knowing HTML, CSS, Java or Python can allow you to do some really incredible things with your data. For example I am currently working on a project in using D3.JS which offers a number of really cool ways to visualize qualitative and quantitative data.  Check out some examples of what exactly that means. Learning basic web design has also allowed me to build my professional website which I can customize however I want. On the other hand, we are so busy in graduate school is it really worth the time to learn all of this stuff? It sure is, especially if you can do a little at a time. There are a number of self-paced programs which allow you to learn the language of the web in a hands-on way. The one I use is called Code Academy and is absolutely free. In the CHI fellowship, we completed Code Academy together which allowed us to troubleshoot our final projects with each other along the way. Although it does take time, the truth is we will never have more flexibility in our academic careers to learn some of these fundamental skills.

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I realize that my experience in digital literacy training at Michigan State is unusual.  I have been fortunate enough to get involved in programs like the CHI fellowship and the CHI field school and work with mentors who understand and emphasize the importance of acquiring these skills in graduate school (if not sooner). After all, digital literacy training is not about becoming a “digital anthropologist” – it’s about “doing anthropology” in an increasingly digital world.

What kinds of digital literacy training are offered in your program? What kinds of misconceptions have you had about digital literacy in anthropology? Let us know in the comments section and stay tuned for my next post on demystifying MOOCs – an interview with the creator of the Foundations of Science MOOC at Michigan State University.

What will you be reading now that classes are out?

Ryan Anderson:  First of all, thanks for doing this interview.  Let’s start off with the basics:  Why anthropology?  How and why did you end up in this field?

Sarah Kendzior: I got interested in anthropology while working as a research assistant for an anthropologist, Nazif Shahrani, while getting my MA in Central Eurasian Studies at Indiana University. Before I was an anthropologist, I was a journalist, but I was frustrated with the superficiality of foreign coverage. Journalists often cover foreign conflicts without knowing foreign languages, talking to local people, or examining the history and culture of the place they visit. I wanted to do things differently.

In 2004, I used to joke that anthropology was journalism with more work and less money. Of course, now there is no money in journalism either, but my point still stands. Ethnography is journalism that takes too long. I mean that not pejoratively but as an affirmation of the discipline’s values –– long-term observation; scrutiny of methodological practice; respect for history; commitment to understanding local beliefs and traditions.

I got spoiled working for Dr. Shahrani. He is an outspoken intellectual who spares no criticism of systems that he finds corrupt – including academia. He saw anthropology not as an abstraction removed from public life, but as a source of insight from which the public could benefit. In 2004, at the height of the “war on terror” and political propaganda against Muslims, this seemed a worthy goal. Dr. Shahrani is also very funny and honest and therefore left me with an erroneous impression of what anthropology, as a disciplinary institution, is like.  I applied to PhD programs in the fall of 2005. In my application essay, I wrote: “I am not only interested in writing about the world, but for it as well.” This is still true. In retrospect, it is surprising I got in so many places.

RA: And how was your experience in graduate school?  What’s your overall assessment of grad student life in anthropology?

SK: I can’t separate my grad school experience from other things going on in my life at the time. During graduate school I wrote six peer-reviewed journal articles, one policy paper, one dissertation – and had two children. My daughter was born at the end of my first year, in 2007, and my son was born as I finished my dissertation in 2011.

I was not a typical graduate student, and I didn’t have a typical graduate student life, so I’m probably not the best person to assess it. But on a personal level, it was fine. Because I’ve written critically about academia, people tend to assume I had a bad time in graduate school. This is not the case. I entered academia from the working world — graduate school felt like a luxury. My department supports its students well, and I had free tuition, a decent stipend, research money, and travel money for conferences. I worked on my own time on projects of my own choosing. I love to research and write and I enjoyed writing the dissertation.

Graduate school was easy. It was the non-existent future that I was working toward that was the problem. Every grad school path is unique, but almost all lead to the same dead end: a contingency market in which you must have both personal wealth and a willingness to accept your own exploitation to stay in the game.

I would never tell anyone not to go to graduate school. It is a personal decision, and there are many reasons to go. But I would tell them not to go to graduate school believing that your performance in graduate school has anything to do with your ability to find a full-time academic job. Academia is closer to a Ponzi scheme than a meritocracy.

RA: Looking back, is there anything you would change about your experiences in graduate school?  Anything that you think should be done differently about how we train and teach graduate students?

SK: Graduate students live in constant fear. Some of this fear is justified, like the fear of not finding a job. But the fear of unemployment leads to a host of other fears, and you end up with a climate of conformity, timidity, and sycophantic emulation. Intellectual inquiry is suppressed as “unmarketable”, interdisciplinary research is marked as disloyal, public engagement is decried as “unserious”, and critical views are written anonymously lest a search committee find them. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the Academic Jobs Wiki.

The cult mentality of academia not only curtails intellectual freedom, but hurts graduate students in a personal way. They internalize systemic failure as individual failure, in part because they have sacrificed their own beliefs and ideas to placate market values. The irony is that an academic market this corrupt and over-saturated has no values. Do not sacrifice your integrity to a lottery — even if you are among the few who can afford to buy tickets until you win.

Anthropology PhDs tend to wind up as contingent workers because they believe they have no other options. This is not true – anthropologists have many skills and could do many things – but there are two main reasons they think so. First, they are conditioned to see working outside of academia as failure. Second, their graduate training is not oriented not toward intellectual exploration, but to shoring up a dying discipline.

Gillian Tett famously said that anthropology has committed intellectual suicide. Graduate students are taught to worship at its grave. The aversion to interdisciplinary work, to public engagement, to new subjects, to innovation in general, is wrapped up in the desire to affirm anthropology’s special relevance. Ironically, this is exactly what makes anthropology irrelevant to the larger world. No one outside the discipline cares about your jargon, your endless parenthetical citations, your paywalled portfolio, your quiet compliance. They care whether you have ideas and can communicate them. Anthropologists have so much to offer, but they hide it away.

I got a lot of bad advice in graduate school, but the most depressing was from a professor who said: “Don’t use up all your ideas before you’re on the tenure track.” I was assumed to have a finite number of ideas, and my job as a scholar was to withhold them, revealing them only when it benefited me professionally. The life of the mind was a life of pandering inhibition.

I ignored this along with other advice – don’t get pregnant, don’t get pregnant (again), don’t study the internet, don’t study an authoritarian regime – and I am glad I did. Graduate students need to be their own mentors. They should worry less about pleasing people who disrespect them and more about doing good work.

Because in the end, that is what you are left with – your work. The more you own that, the better off you will be. In the immortal words of Whitney Houston: “No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity.” And in the equally immortal words of Whitney Houston: “Kiss my ass.” Both sentiments are helpful for navigating graduate school.

Academic training does not need to change so much as academic careerism. There is little sense in embracing careerism when hardly anyone has a career. But graduate school can still have value. Take advantage of your time in school to do something meaningful, and then share it with the world.

RA: How have things been for you since you graduated?  What has it been like to move beyond graduate school and academia?

SK: I’m not sure becoming the poster girl for the collapse of higher education means moving beyond academia, but overall things have gone well — albeit not in a way I had expected. I did an interview on this topic for From PhD to Life, and people can read about it there.

RA: Earlier you mentioned an adviser who sees anthropology as something that should not be removed from public life–as something that can benefit the public.  Do you share a similar vision of the discipline?  What’s your take on the role of anthropology in public life?

SK: Anthropology benefits the public. Unfortunately, it is blocked from the public, and anthropologists who engage with the public – people like David Graeber – tend to be shunned by other anthropologists, to the point where they lose their jobs. This makes younger anthropologists afraid of public engagement, even though they have valuable insights to share.

Anthropologists complain about politics and the media, but they rarely engage with either. Then they wonder why their voices are not being heard. The most obvious way anthropologists can increase their influence is by writing online. I don’t mean writing in places like Anthropology News — where you have to pay an exorbitant membership fee to leave a comment – but on real blogs, on Twitter, on mainstream media sites, and in open access journals. Publishing reprints of paywalled articles is also a good idea, and is usually legal after a period of time. I did an interview about the benefits of reprinting journal articles online with Academia.edu, which you can read here.

Anthropologists tend to forget that tenets basic to our discipline – for example, that race is a social construct and not a biological determinant of behavior – come as revelations to a lot of people. Issues of racial and religious discrimination are among the many areas where anthropologists can have a powerful voice.

I recently wrote an article for Al Jazeera, “The Wrong Kind of Caucasian”, that had a complicated premise but a simple conclusion: do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnic background or country of origin. It was read by half a million people and shared on Facebook 57,000 times. I got letters from people saying I had changed their preconceptions and that they were going to keep an open mind about race, ethnicity and immigration. It felt good to make a difference at a politically heated time.

Academics justify the paywall system by saying the public is not interested in academic research. I argue that the public has had no opportunity to decide for themselves, since access to research has always been blocked. But I have faith in the ability of non-academics to understand and appreciate academic work. Given our current political and economic situation, anthropology may be of particular interest. More than any other discipline, it tackles issues of power and corruption, paying attention not only to the powerful, but to the struggling and marginalized.

Except, of course, when it comes to the struggling and marginalized anthropologists. Rarely have I seen a group more oblivious to their own hypocrisy than the “enlightened” anthropologists ignoring the adjunct crisis. You would think such incredible structural inequality would be interesting, at least, to the anthropological mind. I know it is interesting to me.

RA: You’re writing for a lot of non-academic venues these days–Al Jazeera and so on.  How is this different from writing for academic venues and audiences?

SK: Hundreds of thousands of people read it. That is the main difference. I still write on many of the topics I studied while getting my PhD — digital media, politics, Central Asia. Stylistically, there is little difference between my Al Jazeera articles and my academic articles. The idea that academic writing needs to be abstruse is a myth. I had a pretty easy time publishing in academia — no reviewer criticized my writing style or suggested I use more jargon.

Because so many people read my work, I get a lot more feedback. Sometimes it is overwhelming. Al Jazeera is a great place to write because it has a huge international audience – I get email and tweets from people around the world, and like hearing their perspectives

That said, I enjoyed academic writing too. I don’t find it hard to move between different audiences, in part because I don’t make a distinction. Many of the people who like my Al Jazeera articles are academics; many of the people who like my academic articles are not.

RA: Above, you highlighted the fact that many anthropologists complain about their voices not being heard, yet ironically they often don’t engage much with politics or the media.  To me, this persistent disengagement paves the way for attacks on social science by the likes of Tom Coburn and Florida Governor Rick Scott.  We’ve essentially dug our own grave when it comes to public engagement–it’s easy to discount a highly insular, often silent discipline that few people have ever heard anything about.  So, in order to wrap up this interview I am going to ask you two simple questions that I hear all the time from non-anthropologists:  1) Anthropology?  What the hell is anthropology?; and 2) What are you going to do with that?

SK: You are right that academics’ lack of public engagement opens the door to political attacks. I wrote an article about this for Al Jazeera called Academic funding and the public interest.

I’m not going to answer “What is anthropology?” No one cares about our ontological debates. But here is how I would explain cultural anthropology to a layperson:

All of the social sciences – history, political science, economics, etc – study how people behave, form groups, and build a society. Each social science has its own way of figuring this out. Anthropologists believe the best way to find out what someone is thinking is to ask them. We respect that people in another community understand their own way of life better than outsiders do. We observe a community for a long period of time so that we don’t come away with hasty generalizations. We are careful when we write about others to put their words and their views before our own.

When you study anthropology, you learn about people and places that you might not otherwise. Anthropologists write about everyone – powerful and powerless, rich and poor, all races and nationalities. They explore how political decisions affect ordinary people, and how ordinary people influence politics. They look at how public perception is shaped, how social trends emerge, and how movements are formed. They ask what people expect from life, and what happens when they don’t get it.

Anthropology has a reputation for being exotic. But the point of anthropology is that exoticism fades when you get to know someone. Bigotry and prejudice fade too, which is why anthropologists used to be influential in reshaping ideas about race and ethnicity.

Anthropologists are interested in why people believe lies. For example, a large percent of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya. For an anthropologist, it would not be enough to note that this is factually incorrect. They want to know why so many people believe it is true.

Anthropologists understand that the world often doesn’t run on facts, but on dreams and delusions, hopes and fears, imagination and ambition. They don’t dismiss anything as unimportant.

***

Now onto your second question — what are you going to do with that? First of all, higher education and the economy are both such disasters that you cannot assume any major or degree will guarantee you a good, secure life. STEM, liberal arts, law – no profession is safe. Industries are disappearing or being restructured out of existence. Practical training you get in college will likely be useless ten years from now. There are no safe bets.

So what is the point of an education? The point is to think critically, become an informed citizen, gain some specialized knowledge, gain broader insight into the world, and communicate well. Some people will say they don’t need to go to college to do this. I actually agree with that. But since college is a prerequisite for most jobs, you might as well get a solid education.

The best education is a broad education with an emphasis on primary sources, debate, and writing skills. I recommend that people study anthropology, but they should also study history, literature, religion, art, science, economics, sociology, political science, and other subjects. The constant assertion of disciplinary superiority is self-defeating. If the social sciences want to win the battle against people who want to defund us, we need to band together. We also would benefit intellectually if we read work outside our discipline and showed tolerance for alternate approaches.

I study Central Asia, a region of the world that is so understudied that there is a very small body of anthropological literature. As a result, most anthropologists draw not only from anthropological studies, but from the work of sociologists, historians, geographers and others. We also tend to read and cite non-academic work, since data on Central Asia is so limited. We have a supportive research community and no one’s knowledge is dismissed out of hand because of their background.

I also study the internet, and so I read broadly in communication, sociology, humanities and other fields. Yet when I write an article for an anthropology journal, I am expected to cite only other anthropologists. When I co-wrote a mixed-methods article with a quantitative communications scholar, and we got it published in the top communications journal, I was told by some anthropologists to leave it off my CV, because it showed I was interested in something other than anthropology. This is ridiculous. There is no need for this insecurity masked as insularity.

Anthropology is struggling as a discipline because anthropologists bank on a lofty reputation that they don’t really have while simultaneously shielding their work from the public. The public is not going to believe you have something worthy to say when you refuse to let them in on the conversation. Don’t be so afraid, anthropologists. You of all people should know the world is not what it seems.

In the past five years, Twitter has become a mecca for social science researchers: the number of topics, informants, and networks waiting to be analyzed are limitless (here are some examples). With the help of a nifty program like Tweet Archivist, you could literally collect thousands of micro-narratives about people’s ideologies, behaviors, and relationships around a search query – all from the comfort of your office. This was the utopian vision I had of Twitter research when I started designing my final project for the Cultural Heritage Informatics (CHI) Fellowship at Michigan State University (link has been fixed!).

Over the last year, I have become interested in how Americans are sharing experiences with prescription drugs through social media. My dissertation look at one drug in particular, Adderall, a treatment for ADHD which is being illegally bought and sold by college students for academic and recreational purposes.  At first, I was completely shocked by the sheer number of individuals who are openly admitting their illicit drug use online – after all, many twitter names are publically attached to an individual’s real name. More amazing was how many are intentionally categorizing their tweets using hashtags like # adderall or #adderallproblems,  so that people interested in the topic (like myself) could easily find and share their tweets. There are even entire accounts dedicated to the “adderall lifestyle” like @adderallavenger @adderallnation @adderalltalking @addiestories… and the list goes on. I felt like I had hit a goldmine of data – now all I had to do was figure out how to harvest it.

One of the biggest issues with collecting twitter data is that you can only go back so far before Twitter clears its history– which means time is your enemy. Initially, I had no idea how to capture these tweets so I began taking screenshots and collecting the most interesting ones. As you can imagine, this got really tiring and I thought to myself “there must be a better way to save these”. Being relatively new to Twitter, I looked around and discovered that you could “favorite” a tweet and save it to your account. I started favoriting tweets left and right for about a week, with the intention of screen-capturing them later on when I had the time to work on it. What I failed to realize was that when I favorited a tweet, the author of the tweet received a notification about it. All of a sudden, I went from being a silent observer sitting in my office in East Lansing, MI, to becoming a tangible, visible part of each of their worlds… all because I thoughtlessly hit a button.

In general, most authors of the tweets I favorited didn’t respond. Several of them started following my account and retweeting some of the articles I tweeted about. A few even messaged me and told me how cool they thought my research was. However, there was one individual whose tweet I favorited who had a different reaction. I remember favoriting the tweet because I thought it contained really important data on how the desire for Adderall was facilitating doctor-patient relationships:

The next morning, the author of this tweet had sent me a direct message indicating that she felt like I was judging her as a “drug addict” and that somehow my intention was to use her tweet to argue that Adderall should be banned… she inferred all of this from the simple fact that I had favorited her tweet and taking a quick glimpse at my own Twitter account. I quickly sent her a message apologizing and trying to clarify the intent of my project and that I was in no way passing judgment on her. She didn’t respond so I couldn’t tell you if she understood or accepted my explanation.

Initially, I was really upset by this experience for several reasons. Why would this person assume I was anti-Adderall or that somehow I was trying to take away her access to medication by doing this project? More importantly, didn’t she know that these tweets are public? If she didn’t want people reading them or “judging” her, why did she put them online in the first place?

At the following CHI meeting, we discussed this incident as part of several broader issues. To begin with, how do we establish ethical boundaries in social media research, especially around sensitive topics like mental illness, academic dishonesty, and illicit drug use? One project that helped us think through these issues was the site NoHomophobes which does an excellent job visually representing the frequency in which people use homophobic language online. Despite the importance of the project, is it ethical to decontextualize a single tweet and attach an individual’s identity to a site dedicated to exposing homophobia?

The positionality of anthropologists to their informants was another important consideration. While participant observation is a key method in anthropology, it raises concerns of how the act of observation itself can influence the subjects of study. Once the author of a tweet knows they are being observed, will they change their tweeting habits? Will they now be more careful about what they say online? Is this necessarily a bad thing?

This leads me to my final point which is that social media research really highlights the ambiguity between public and private spaces. While I am not being personally invited into their corner of Twitter and I may not be the intended audience for the tweet, I am not illegally invading it either because tweets are public. This concern forces me to weigh the value of collecting unadulterated data against a gut feeling that my participants should know and understand their role in my larger project, even if it is a small one.

As a result of these concerns, I stopped favoriting tweets and moved to other methods of data collection which allow me to harvest tweets both quickly and anonymously. While I have circumvented some of the issues mentioned in this post, I am still struggling to navigate the waters of social media in a way that leaves both my informants and myself feeling positive about my research.

Stay tuned for my next post on which will elaborate on the methods I am currently using to collect data from Twitter and Instagram…

Yesterday someone I follow (@bacigalupe) posted a link to a Digital Sociology post titled “Can academics manage without Twitter?” My answer was: of course they can. Academics do not need to be on Twitter, and yet there are some very real benefits to Twitter. What are they, you ask? In the order I posted them (and with the original 140 character limitations of syntax preserved), here are five academic benefits I’ve experienced through using Twitter:

#1: learning about new research, publications, conferences, conversations

#2: community-building, following/connecting with colleagues around the world in your own + cognate fields

#3: the drop-in or hang-out-all-day options; you can tweet & read as you like, greatly enabled by list feature

#4: I think of my Twitter feed as personally-curated updates of news, info, stories on topics I care about

#5: knowing things well before they hit email or FB (aka W Benjamin’s value of info is in the current moment)

Now, some extended thoughts on these benefits: Twitter is initially an empty space each user individually transforms into a public, dynamic space. You follow other users without obligation or permission based on your interests. Posts (“tweets”) from users you follow then comprise your Twitter feed and are constantly updated as users put up new posts. You can check in several times a day, once a day, once a week or month or even more sporadically—whatever suits your needs. In addition to following users, you may also search via topic (e.g., #ethnography), subscribe to lists (e.g., @kerim’s list of 350 anthropologists on Twitter), or follow tweets from a conference (e.g., #aaa2012). There is no right or wrong way to use Twitter.

Who will you connect with? Whose posts will you read? These depend on your passions and concerns. My feed is heavy with posts about anthropology, academia, publishing, Tibet, Nepal, India, China, and issues of social justice. I’ve connected with other scholars, writers, and activists around the world; linked up with others for conference panels; discovered articles, research, pedagogies, and funding possibilities I might not have otherwise learned about; connected with prospective graduate students; joined with others to form the Open Anthropology Cooperative; discovered some great new music; and in general, have shared and learned in ways that feel productive, valuable, and communal in the best sense of the word.

Twitter moves fast and covers wide ground which suits my multitasking mind. I am often writing on two different topics, reading about a third for a class I am teaching, and thinking about still more on any given day: this is the life of an academic. Twitter collates and curates my worlds in a stress-free way, providing a platform for learning, engaging, and connecting which rests simply on one’s own interests and availability but—to me at least—never feels like a burden. It is instead a resource and a community that I most frequently draw on when I am immersed in the solitary activity of writing. Sometimes I need quiet spaces in which to think, and sometimes I find crowded, noisy spaces useful. Twitter is the latter.

In the end, the value of Twitter for academics is what you make of it. So, can academics manage without Twitter? Of course they can. But the better question might be “What can academics manage with Twitter?” I find thinking about that question to be much more exciting.

[For those readers interested in checking Twitter out for the first time, there are numerous online guides such as LSE's Twitter guide for academics. A simple web search for “twitter for academics” turns up all sorts of pages ranging from the Chronicle of Higher Education's "10 Commandments of Twitter for Academics" on through to individual bloggers' posts such as "A Gentle Introduction to Twitter for the Apprehensive Academic." If you do join Twitter, you can find me at @cmcgranahan and this blog at @savageminds]

Mullings covers many of the key aspects of the adjunct problem: 1) lack of access to adequate health care; 2) the fact that about 3/4 of the teaching workforce is NOT on the tenure track; 3) the abysmally low pay for many adjuncts (median compensation per class is about 2700 bucks); 4) adjuncts have to deal with high travel costs in order to teach enough classes; 5) retirement benefits are lacking; 6) they have very limited access to educational resources (many don’t have offices, libraries, etc); 7) serious job insecurity, which often “translates into lack of academic freedom.”

Clearly, there’s no shortage of problems.  We all know this.  The question now is what we’re all going to do about it.  Sit back and watch, or find a way to band together to start making some changes?  Mullings concludes her post with this:

It is time to again turn our attention to better informing ourselves and to doing all we can to improve the conditions our colleagues and students confront. By the 2013 annual meeting, the CLR intends to: administer a short survey to department chairs about adjuncts in anthropology; organize sessions about the contingent workforce for the annual meeting; report on their survey findings in AN, analyze the results of the CAW 2010 Survey of Contingent Faculty Members and Instructors; and present a resolution to the membership for their consideration. These are only the first steps in returning to a more activist stance in addressing this most critical issue.

Let me say this: I think it’s a good thing to that AAA is finally weighing in on this issue.  This is what needs to happen.  It’s time to pay attention and stop sweeping these unpleasant issues aside.  Mullings does a good job of highlighting what’s going on, and just how grave things are looking.  Clearly, more people need to hear about what’s going on with all those adjuncts out there, and some serious changes need to take place.  So, good on the AAA for jumping on the band wagon and speaking up about this.  If we are going to really address the “inequality within,” then we need to get some real dialog going.  This AN piece is meant to contribute to that dialog, but unfortunately it falls a bit short.  Why?  Well, in order to actually join the conversation on Anthropology News you have to be a paid member of the AAA (the site clearly states: “Posting comments is a benefit for AAA members”).  This is unfortunate, since it severely limits the conversation and feedback that such a post can generate.  It’s also pretty ridiculous.

The AAA opens the door for discussion, and then immediately closes it off for a large swath of people (and you gotta wonder: how many of them are adjuncts who, ironically, can’t afford to pay yearly membership dues?).  So, if you’re a non-member and you want to share your opinions and add your voice to the ideas that Mullings has put fort here, you are out of luck.  No dice.  You gotta pay to play.  While I think that Anthropology News does a great job of getting the face of anthropology online, it’s little things like this that really take away from their project.  I don’t get it–this kind of thing just shoots the whole thing in the foot.  What’s the point of putting something online and only allowing a very limited (and insular) audience to take part in the conversation?  It makes no sense.  Especially considering the issues that this particular post seeks to address.

Irony overload.  Well, at least that’s free.

Fortunately for all of you out there in Savage Minds reader-land–and the blogosphere in general–I have an easy solution.  Want to voice your opinions, concerns, fears, ideas, or reservations about the adjunct crisis?  Well, you can do that right here, FOR FREE.  So, go ahead, make your voice be heard.  Have something to say about the proposals that Mullings puts forth here?  Do you have any comments about the role the AAA can or should play in all this?  Want to share some of your own experiences in the world of adjuncting?  Have some suggestions?  Go ahead, comment away.  The sooner we confront these issues, the better.

About two weeks ago, I received an email from one of the editors of the Science Insider blog. He began: “You’ve probably heard that your NSF grant to study the [Chinese] melamine poisoning scandal was targeted at two House science committee hearings yesterday.” I hadn’t heard and this is the first time my research has become the target of what feels like the never-ending rounds of partisan politics. The original critique of my project and the others being targeted is that they fail to directly benefit the American people. I was, quite frankly, rather surprised to be included as my project examines China’s evolving food regulatory system and has direct relevance for America’s food safety and security. The targeting of particular awards are not (and never are) about their specific content or quality but rather involve broader issues including the allocation of funding, peer review and congressional oversight. (It can, however, certainly feel direct especially when the intellectual merit of your specific grant is questioned and copies of the peer reviews and the program officer’s evaluations are requested in a letter written by the committee’s chairman. As a recent Slate article notes, these attacks appear to be winning. this year, for example, the Coburn amendment successfully limits NSF funding in political science to those that promote national security or the economic interests of the US. The same article argues that with a few exceptions, the social sciences have not been pushing back and are failing to present arguments with much traction in today’s economic and political climate.

The history of selecting grants for congressional censure by both parties is long, including the Golden Fleece awards handed out by former Senator Proxmire. Grants, I’m told, are selected largely by their titles and broadly critiqued for being a waste of taxpayer money. This year, the argument has focused on the peer review process itself with Rep. Lamar Smith, the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology drafting new legislation, the “High Quality Research Act” that he claims will “[maintain] the current peer review process and [improve] on it by adding a layer of accountability." The arguments are familiar as are the reactions on both sides of the political fence. Many news websites and blogs together with the comments posted to them summarize these arguments so I’ll only note the general contours here. One side argues that science funded by US taxpayers should not only be held accountable to the public but also be directly in the American public interest. How this will be done in practice is not yet clearly laid out in the draft bill (which can be seen here). The defense of peer review is vociferous–notably by another committee member, Eddie Bernice Johnson, but also in the comments on websites dedicated to science-related issues, higher education and the so-called liberal media. Even President Obama has weighed in. Critics of Smith’s draft legislation point out that the peer review process already pulls together experts to evaluate one another on scientific merit and potential value to society (broadly construed) rather than on the politics of the moment. The peer review process at NSF meets these goals with the requirement that research must meet both intellectual merit and broader impacts in order to be funded see discussion here. These basic requirements seek to ensure that promising scientific research with both immediate, practical benefits as well as work with long-term and unpredictable pay-offs receive funding.

Is anthropology paying attention? I certainly hope so. Out of the five grants targeted in Smith’s letter, two were funded primarily by NSF’s Cultural Anthropology program and a third received a small amount of support. As we all know, funding is tight and few avenues are available to conduct long-term research in our field. Political scientists spent time at a recent meeting discussing the issue and coming up with a list of tangible actions that could be taken by both the discipline and individuals (see here). Their suggestions are not discipline-specific and, especially for anthropologists like myself wondering how to respond without clear guidance yet from our discipline, certainly worth a look.

Megan Tracy is an assistant professor at James Madison University. She is currently in Beijing conducting her NSF-funded research on China’s evolving food safety regulatory system and the transformation process of regulatory measures into on-farm practices following a series of scandals in the domestic dairy industry.

Many of the problems were obvious from the beginning. The new ‘journal’ is not ‘open access’: all of the material on it is being released temporarily for a six month window, at which point it will be closed again. True, older material will be available for everyone, but this has been the AAA’s longstanding policy, not something new that has come to the journal.

This is also not a ‘journal’ in that it does not publish new peer reviewed papers. Open Anthropology is a curated reprint service — it puts together themed issues of previously published material. These sorts of curated best-of selections are now very popular in the world of academic journals for two reasons: first, because they provide free samples of journals to keep it popular and thus force libraries to buy it and second, because it creates the illusion that the journal cares about open access thereby placating the less perceptive open access advocates out there.

We knew the Open Anthropology would be broken in these ways before the first issue appeared. Now that it is out, one wonders: even given how broken this model is, are they at least publishing accessible work with real value, and making it more valuable by curating it in an intelligent way? The answer, unfortunately, is no.

I am a specialist on kinship and so I know a little about marriage, which is the topic of the first issue. Some of the pieces — like Augustin Fuentes’s — are good and worth reading (especially if you are bio-deficient cultural anthropologist). Anthony Wallace’s review of American Kinship was new to me and a very interesting (and, I reckon, forgotten) moment in the history of anthropology. The problem is that by themselves the articles lack coherence and (as in the case of McGee’s 1896 “The Beginning of Marriage”) give the impression that anthropology is caught in some Victorian nightmare of armchair evolutionism. The problem is that this is not an edited collection of essays that speak to the topic, it is a syllabus for a course that no one will ever take. The editor’s introduction by Alisse Waterston helps one see the logic of grouping these pieces together. Maybe. But average readers — all 13 of them — will probably not notice the part in the intro where Waterston says “By the way that McGee piece we included is totally wrong, but we liked the data in it so focus on that”. I don’t think it puts our discipline in a positive light. True, it’s early days and subsequent ‘issues’ might be better. But overall, I get the feeling that Open Access is public anthropology for public anthropologists: exactly what we think everyone needs (and wants) to know, portrayed in a way that no one can (or wants to) read it.

How different Open Anthropology is from an actual open access journal like Hau. Hau prints original research which is high quality, and it leaves it open forever. What’s more, it also reprints classic material, like Open Anthropology, but it takes genuinely important pieces and leaves them open forever. In fact, for Hau the license is the point of the reprint — they are actively ungating and liberating content that was buried in paper form, or with a restrictive copyright. This is open access publishing done right.

In fact, Open Anthropology doesn’t compare well to Sage. God bless Sage for their unvarnished commercialism — you know that they are driven by profit, and they have gotten very good at being driven by it. They put together professional looking products with a lot of thought put into them, and they tease their availability by briefly letting you get a glimpse at them. The AAA, on the other hand, pretends to something other than self-interest only to produce mediocre work which must be disguised as open access.

As far as I can tell, the AAA is trying to justify its screwed up business model by trying to do new and interesting things with the money it takes from its members and libraries. “You get the journals,” they seem to be telling subscribers, “and we use the money we make to produce new and interesting scholarly products which you get for free.” Sometimes this is a good strategy — the AAA’s syllabus exchange is a great example of one such product. But in my opinion, however much money it cost to produce Open Anthropology is too much. Everyone would be well-served by lower journal prices and less of these sorts of experiments.

Tax would have approved of this new volume. It provides a good overview of his activist work, and paints an excellent picture of him as a person. Above all, however, it has the same home-brewed, small-time, grassroots energy that typified so many of Tax’s projects.

As a graduate student, I came of age in the wake of Sol Tax. In small offices around the University of Chicago, small groups of people — often solitary individuals — seemed to be preparing newsletters or projects (often with impressive acronyms) which all seemed to have been started by Sol Tax. Like the power company, his handiwork was always present even if most people looked right past it.

In many ways, Tax’s legacy is a study in the successes (and failures) of personal influence. He left behind a cohort of people who were truly moved by him and his work, but that unique energy which galvanized so many people proved difficult to institutionalize once the man behind it passed away.

One gets the feeling that in this book, subtitled “the last word?” that Tax’s baby-boomer descendants are punting to the Internet and looking for a wider audience for Tax’s thought. I hope that several netizens try to make the catch, because the book is a fascinating and intimate portrait of a school of thought that deserves to be much more widely known.

If the readers don’t trust the author to provide just the right amount of information, in just the right doses, they will feel frustrated and confused. But if you can gain their trust they will be willing to go along for the ride, confident that all will be explained at the end. Unfortunately, the peer review process sometimes makes it difficult to have this discussion. In the end, we might settle for lazy signposting because it is easier than trying to convince an editor that the problem isn’t insufficient signposting, it’s insufficient trust.

The same problem plagues documentary filmmaking. Although the lack of peer review means filmmakers frequently have more editorial control, test screenings often result in calls for more signposting. Sometimes it is necessary, to be sure, but often the same problem can be solved in a more dramatic way.

And yes, I always tell my student that their papers need more signposting. Because they do…