Increasingly, our lives are mediated by the Internet and other digital technologies. For anthropologists like myself, this presents new opportunities for research, but the digitization, exchange, and storage of personal data also generate new privacy concerns for our participants. During my research on Brazilian Internet freedom activists, I learned about both the potentials of the Internet, as well as the way that digital technology can, and is, being abused to violate civil liberties. What I call the “privacy paradox,” refers to the situation in which the U.S. government at once defends research participants’ privacy through Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) while it simultaneously violates their privacy on a massive, global scale through mass surveillance national security apparatus.

The privacy paradox become apparent to me in July 2013, just a month after the Snowden leaks that exposed NSA mass surveillance, when I sat down to interview a high-level official of a Brazilian IT firm. Before the interview, I detailed the measures I was taking to ensure that his personal data would be protected and I explained that this was required by Vanderbilt’s IRB per U.S. law. Upon hearing this, the IT official looked at me incredulously. Over the previous two months the front pages of newspapers had been plastered with articles detailing U.S. government surveillance projects with codenames like PRISM, XKeyscore, and Stellar Wind that used the global telecommunications infrastructure to collect personal data on people around the world. My interviewee was well-versed in issues of privacy in the digital age, so to hear me state that the U.S. government was concerned with his privacy was laughable.

While I had already been paying attention to issues of privacy and mass surveillance in my research, this encounter forced me to re-evaluate the ways that U.S. government policy is impacting the work of researchers worldwide and why it is important for the academic community to defend the privacy rights of all people in a digital era.

Institutional Review Boards and Participant Privacy

In the U.S. virtually all researchers who perform research with human participants are required by federal law to have their methods evaluated and approved by an Institutional Review Board, or IRB, including social scientists like anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists. According to the federal Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP), which oversees IRBs in the U.S., the goal of this oversight is to protect “the rights, welfare, and wellbeing of subjects involved in research.” The current IRB system developed in the second half of the 20th century in response to a number of unethical research projects, which revealed that more oversight was necessary to protect participants. In 1974, the U.S. congress passed the National Research Act that created a government-supervised research evaluation system meant to diminish the possibility of unethical and overly risky research.

A primary concern of IRBs in evaluating research proposals is protecting the personal data of research participants, with good reason, because researchers often collect very personal and sensitive information about people that could negatively affect them if it became publicly available. For example, to protect against the accidental distribution of my participant data, Vanderbilt’s IRB required that all the information I collected digitally (i.e., notes, interview recordings, etc.) be stored on a password-protected computer that only I had access to. In many cases researchers are required to anonymize data and/or use pseudonyms when publishing. Such requirements show the extent to which IRBs are legitimately concerned with participant privacy.

Privacy is one of the topics specifically addressed on many Informed Consent documents –forms that participants must read that detail the research goals, potential risks and benefits to individuals, and rights of participants. For example, the final section in the Informed Consent form I used for my research in Brazil included this standard language:

Privacy: Your information may be shared with Vanderbilt or the government, such as the Vanderbilt University Institutional Review Board, Federal Government Office for Human Research Protections if you or someone else is in danger or if we are required to do so by law.

This language alerts participants that in certain, seemingly limited cases, the IRB and/or the U.S. government may seek to gain access to the researcher’s data. For non-U.S. citizens, it also gives the illusion that the U.S. government is concerned with their privacy and will not collect and store their data without cause. However, it is now apparent that the U.S. government is not always as concerned about individual privacy as it would appear in these informed consent forms. This is particularly true for non-U.S. citizens.

NSA Mass Surveillance

The revelations about NSA mass surveillance exposed how the U.S. government was invading the privacy of both Americans and foreigners in the name of fighting terrorism. The NSA’s mission had always been to collect foreign signals intelligence, but now it was revealed that it was performing a massive dragnet in which it was trying, as the former director General Keith Alexander put it, to “collect it all.” This meant that rather than targeting individuals or groups, the NSA was collecting as much telecommunications data as possible – sometimes all the telecommunications traffic in entire countries – and storing it in massive data warehouses.

The Snowden leaks generated a backlash in the U.S. because they revealed that the NSA was storing and analyzing the cell phone habits of millions of U.S. citizens. For many observers, the collection of such data without a warrant is a violation of the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable search and seizure. Indeed, a number of citizens are now suing the government, arguing this practice violates their civil liberties. In response, the Obama administration has pledged to make changes to the NSA program, in part to protect the rights of citizens.

However, there are virtually no protections for non-U.S. citizens. Thus, data collection outside of the U.S., which was always more intrusive because it had no legal limitations, most likely continues unabated. In practical terms, this means that every email and phone call of the Brazilian participants in my research project was fair game for NSA data collection. Furthermore, even U.S. citizens’ communications are swept up by the NSA when one of the people involved in the chain is thought to be outside the U.S. Indeed, just the mention of an individual thought to be under surveillance in an email or computer file is justification for its collection by the NSA under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Critics have called it a “backdoor loophole” to conduct surveillance on U.S. citizens. In any case, it is clear that all the communications of non-U.S. citizens, including communication with U.S.-based researchers, is currently being targeted and collected by the NSA.

In practical terms, this means that every email and phone conversation I had with my Brazilian research participants could have been collected by the NSA. Furthermore, had I posted any of the data I collected on my computer (Word document field note files, interview audio recordings, photos, etc.) to Vanderbilt’s server from Brazil, it likely would have been swept up the NSA, tapping the international telecommunications cables on which that data would be transferred. The likelihood is increased by the fact that the Brazilian government was a prime target of NSA surveillance, so my interviews with Brazilian government officials would be even more interesting to the NSA— meaning, as a researcher, I could have potentially abetted U.S. surveillance without being aware of it.

The Privacy Paradox

The privacy paradox emerges from these seemingly contradictory U.S. government policies to protect research participants from unethical studies while invading the privacy of people around the world using the telecommunications infrastructure. Recent attempts to reform the NSA surveillance system are mainly aimed at protecting the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. Thus, there is still little concern for the privacy of non-U.S. citizens whose information is being collected and stored in large data centers in the U.S.

What can researchers do practically and ethically given this difficult situation?  Here are a few ideas about what we can do to protect the rights of our participants:

Encryption:

The most urgent task for social scientists is to become proficient with the technological tools necessary to secure the data they collect and send. Secure encryption can significantly delay the ability of global security agencies to decipher emails, field notes, audio recordings etc. All social science research methods courses need to be updated to teach researchers how to use these tools. A recent Savage Minds post by Jonatan Kurzwelly offers a number of great resources for researchers interested in further protecting the data they collect.

IRB Reform: 

Researchers need to push IRBs to gain a more comprehensive grasp of cyber security issues taking into account government surveillance. For example, currently an IRB might require a researcher to store material on a secure, university-controlled serve. However, the IRB might not recognize that sending data to the server from abroad might put all of the privacy of that data at risk. No longer can IRBs ignore the actions of security agencies like the NSA and how they affect researchers working internationally.

An International Internet Rights Convention: 

Academics need to become strong advocates for national policies that protect civil liberties in the digital age. Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist best known as the creator of the World Wide Web, has called for a global Magna Carta on Internet rights. He launched an international campaign called The Web We Want to help people around the world create digital bills of rights in their respective countries. The Web We Want campaign was, in part, inspired by the success of Brazilian Internet freedom activists who successfully fought for the passage of a pioneering Internet freedom bill in 2014. Indeed, the Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, one of the primary topics of my own research, included provisions meant to protect Internet user privacy. More initiatives like this around the world and potentially a global convention on Internet rights would create an environment more conducive to ethical research.

Ultimately, the privacy paradox is not one that shows signs of being resolved in the near future. Thus, social scientists must be aware of how conflicting U.S. government policies regarding privacy impact their work. For starters, this will require thoughtful engagement with technology to protect research participants. Additionally, researchers who value their own privacy and the civil liberties of all individuals need to add their voices to discussions about how to protect privacy in the digital era.

When anthropologist Cathy Small enrolled as an undergraduate in her own university ten years ago to do the fieldwork that resulted in My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (2005), she knew that she wanted to protect the identities of her participants and institution by referring to them using pseudonyms. She called herself “Rebekah Nathan” (an excellent choice of pseudonym if you ask me) and Northern Arizona University “AnyU” (a play on its initials, NAU).

Small explained that she considered anonymity a standard anthropological practice and that she underestimated the interest her hidden identity would generate. Jacob Gershman, a reporter for the New York Sun, drew from the rich details she included in the book to unmask her and her university before it had even been published. Gershman wrote that, “whether by choice or accident, [she] also planted in her ethnographic study many clues about her identity[:] her university is located near Las Vegas, is surrounded by mountains, and has a hotel and restaurant management school.” The risk of my readers playing detective stuck in my mind as I started working through my own ethical commitments to my participants.

The organization where I did most of my fieldwork — a regional women’s weaving cooperative in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala that exports textiles to the U.S. and Europe — has a strong online presence: in addition to a website, it has accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. It has also hosted a large number of tourists, who have recorded their experiences in travel blogs, social media posts, and comments on travel review sites. These materials are typically available for public consumption (with the exception of social media sites that may permit varying degrees of access to their contents, like Facebook, which is an ethical discussion for another day) and present researchers with a tantalizingly rich source of self-presented commentary. However, this easy accessibility also makes it difficult to maintain pseudonyms for the organization and its leaders.

Why was it important for the cooperative federation to have its identity disguised? The board of directors had concerns on a few levels, the most prominent being concern about potential retaliation from members of the military for speaking out about the recent genocidal civil war in Guatemala (1960–1996), which is still highly contested. While the organization’s members spoke freely about their experiences in the war to visiting tourists, they wanted to control the audience and context of their testimonies.

The organization already makes its own decisions about how much information to share and withhold online, in negotiation with its international volunteers. US volunteer “Rosalyn” wanted to share some members’ personal stories of their suffering during the war on the website: “When I came in for a talk they were quite open about their own experiences. The one woman was telling us about how they burned her family alive in their house.” She interviewed the president of the cooperative, who spoke at length about the war and then said that she did not want that material to go on the Internet. Rosalyn discussed a couple of possibilities with the president, including focusing on the parts about her childhood and leaving the war out of the finished interview, or publishing the interview anonymously, without her name or town, and she opted for the former. In talking to tourists and allowing the volunteers to post certain stories and images, the organization is constantly weighing how much risk they are willing to take on, so I viewed my responsibility as mitigating any possible impacts of the stories I shared and using basic techniques to make it so that a casual reader would be less likely to be able to associate the name of the organization with my work.

Practically speaking, is there anything we can do to take advantage of the wealth of data available on blogs and websites without compromising our commitment to our participants? Asking a colleague about this issue, I realized that we had independently come to the same solution to incorporate some blog material without inviting the revelation of institutions’ actual names. We presented a few of the most enticing quotes from blogs, the ones we simply couldn’t let go, as interview material, to discourage readers from plugging the quotes into search engines and finding the original blogs. As a researcher, this is a somewhat unsatisfying compromise, because statements made in a blog, intended to be broadcast to an audience, have a different quality than statements solicited in an interview, and should be analyzed differently. However, our guiding principle has to be to restrict harm above all else.

At other times, I paraphrased what someone had said or deliberately cut out words to make it more difficult to search for the quote online. I also tried to use non-online sources such as flyers rather than web sources when talking about how the cooperative represents itself, and deliberately kept the web sources I used out of the final bibliography.

Once, when I was reading a dissertation about Quetzaltenango, I thought I recognized the organization where I was doing fieldwork, referred to with a pseudonym. The anthropologist cited a substantial amount of online material, and checking the bibliography revealed the organization’s actual name associated with its website! It seems likely that this researcher assigned pseudonyms as a matter of standard anthropological practice, counting on the relative obscurity of his research and site to limit the risk of discovery to the organization. This is the kind of pitfall I hope to avoid by using the strategies described above (and any other approaches you can suggest in the comments).

Scholars have pointed out that many groups and individuals may actually want to be identified by name, to gain recognition or aid in their struggles. However, we don’t always get to take the more straightforward approach of naming names. My goal here is to start a conversation about how to handle situations where our participants have explicitly asked to have their identities masked for reasons of reputation management, legal protection, or personal safety.

Our final prompt in this series asks about the possible virtues that emerge from the necessities of marginality or academic precarity, the effects on ethnography of such “new intellectual possibilities.”  On the whole I’ve so far stuck with the trajectory I laid out for these posts, engaging with precarity and ethnography first via my experience of living in a London suburb in over the last several years and then on the subway I used to get aroundwhile living there.  In both cases I focused on my own ethnographic practice and experience and particularly on observational practice.  For this final post though I want to shift the focus to the effects on ethnography not “as practiced” but “as taught or learned,” not as observational technique but as representational technique.  The post-millennial relevance of this seems clear, with a number of the conversational threads on SM proceeding from the observation that information technology and digital media are having an expanding range of effects not just in the field of anthropology but in education (that other domain inhabited by so many practicing anthropologists).

My earlier posts also (I note in looking back over them) relied pretty heavily on metaphor and pop culture/sci-fi references, but I can’t think of a good reason to change that now, so: for better and for worse, one of my last opportunities to be social before leaving the UK last month was spent in front of the IMAX screen at the British Film Institute (“the largest film screen in the UK”).  The BFI’s performative apparatus is matched only by the fantastic quality and diversity of films routinely screened there, but this particular outing (with several participating students and other friends) was centered around a pop-culture event with a dash of speculative pseudo-archaeology: Prometheus, Ridley Scott’s prequel to the 1979 film Alien.  Overall the film is pretty awful in largely predictable ways (did I mention this was a 3D screening?), but it serves to illustrate my point here, particularly in a fleeting reference the film makes to Lawrence of Arabia (a quite different film about a quite different type of alien).

I should first situate myself as an adherent to the school of the cinematic craft championed by Sir David Lean.  Whatever their bases in romantic grandeur and colonialist fantasy, I’d put myself in that camp that sees Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, and Lawrence of Arabia as rare and invaluable representational achievements.  In ethnographic film I’d likewise have to go back to Forest of Blissor Gardner’s other works as successful in the same way and similarly rare (I make no bones here that I may just be showing my age).  Two things impress me in particular about the epic as a cinematic form: first, its sweeping, spectacular visual character never seems to subordinate depth or nuance of character or plot.  Second, the raw fact of their duration seems crucial in the development of that depth and nuance, accommodating audiovisual subtleties that would otherwise might be impossible to sustain (e.g. the mirage-like entrance of Sherif Ali in the desert, or Lawrence’s long, slow first interaction with his thawb).

You can understand, then, why the (potentially significant but ultimately pretty empty) reference to this film in Prometheuswas especially annoying.  The two films may share something in the way of cinematic technique (long, slow pans of sweeping landscapes), but are worlds apart in terms of their development of character or how compelling their narratives are.  The admittedly fascinating visual surfaces–the bizarre landscapes, the ship and its various interfaces, the aliens themselves–dominate, relegating any narrative about humanity (whether literal or literary) to the background or erasing it entirely.  How could Ridley Scott (whose Ripley character from Alien is absent from this film) think enough of Lean’s epic to refer to it and yet still put his name on Prometheus?

The epic as a cinematic form may well be a thing of the past (at least within Western cinema), and I mean to be provocational in asking if there aren’t some noteworthy parallels to be made with the ethnographic tradition.  Both representational genres depend on specific affordances in productive process and in medium (e.g. the linearity and narrative temporality afforded by multi-hour films and the monograph).  The landscape of institutional structures and funding sources for film have changed dramatically since Lean’s time, though, trading many of those affordances for others (computer graphics in particular).  The academic precarity we’ve been discussing is similar in some ways, entailing shifts to shorter-term institutional memory, curricular modularization, flexibility of labor, loss of professional privileges, etc.  What does this do to the way ethnography should be taught as a writing technique?

Critical scholars of media have observed the rise of the “franchise.”  More and more often, filmic productions are made now as part of a larger narrative framework that includes other quite distinct formats: television spin-offs, merchandise, graphic novels, videogames and fan events (Prometheus, for example, can reasonably be viewed as one branch of the phantasmagoric Alien vs. Predatorfranchise).  Knowing beforehand that the characters or milieu of a film are also going to figure into other, largely distinct productions shapes not only the productive process of the film but its content (landscapes and costumes, for example, must be smoothly realizable as extruded plastic toy sets, computer renderings, or retail clothing).  We can judge the emergence of the franchise as a “bad” or “good” thing (in terms of media control and cultural vitality, say) and AvP is undeniably an indicator of the worst that franchises have to offer, but perhaps it also doesn’t really represent the zenith of what the franchise as a form could be.

Let me put that a different way.  There seems to be some general agreement that the precarity of academic work shapes the ethnography we do and in general this is neither a good or bad thing on its own.  The question is how can a critical edge be sustained even through that transformation?  Does the waning of the epic and the waxing of the franchise suggest a way that might happen?

I’ll close by broadening those questions a bit.  Given the forces under which ethnographic productions gestate (as we’ve articulated in this series), how do we navigate between tradition and innovation in the training of future ethnographers?  Is it possible we’re doing a disservice to students by directing them in a way framed by the traditional ethnographic monograph as the singular product of merit?  Does that practical association with writing obscures the more salient place of literacy?  The fascinating program in “digital ethnography” at Kansas State is among the most trenchant engagements with these questions, and in some of the well-known video productions of Mike Wesch and company I think their significance really becomes apparent.

I would hate to think that the AvP franchise is the future of the LoA epic, and we have plenty of examplesof the problems that can arise when ethnography is taught as a set of methods (without addressing ethnography as a literature or as an interpretive/representational approach).  I know I’m not alone, though, in occasionally wondering if we’re not walking on thin ice in presenting too nostalgic a vision of “ethnographic writing” to our students, one that bears deep contradictions with the realities of academic precarity under which they’ll have to work, if not thrive.

Lane DeNicola is a Lecturer in Anthropology at University College London and the inaugural convener of UCL’s masters program in Digital Anthropology. His PhD in Science & Technology Studies was completed at RPI in 2007.

Note: updated on 7/26/2012 for clarity.

For this final post in our series, I find myself returning to Carole McGranahan’s post from some weeks ago, going through her very useful 9-point schema to describe what makes things ethnographic these days—realizing that whatever the circumstances of ethnographic production, whatever our definitions of ethnography might be, they always presume the centrality of writing. And that is writing in a particular mould, one that satisfies most, if not all, of the criteria enumerated in McGranahan’s post. Specialized, often lengthy, mono-graphs or variants thereof.

Recipe for Pakistani-style Political Potatoes
[Click on the image for a more readable higher-res version]

Part of me wants to say: But of course, how could it be otherwise? The other part, perhaps handicapped by my present need to cobble together a professional identity while remaking myself in an almost completely new cultural landscape—and finding precious little time to devote to writing, is wondering about ethnographic end-products, and the centrality of conventional writing to the ethnographic enterprise. In this post, therefore, I’d like to think through the prospect of decentering writing [fully aware that writing can’t ever be entirely displaced; that there is an awkwardness to the idea, reflected in this post’s two-ing title].

Think for a moment about the text I’ve helped to draft for the website of the NGO on whose board I serve. Would that count in some measure as ethnography?  There’s history there, some of it detailed, rationale and argument at least for work undertaken, there’s analysis of failure and success, there’s certainly the attempt to articulate native points of view (an appreciation, in fact, of how villagers in the surrounding regions of Pondicherry talk back to social workers, government representatives and others claiming to have the solutions to their problems), there’re individual named people, a focus on ethnographic realities, on life lived; it’s a narrative in clear dialog with issues of pressing local concern. It’s all instrumentalized, yes, but so also was HapMap (my prior research investigating Indian views on genetics for the International HapMap Project), and so really is just about all research if it’s used as a means to career advancement.

But then again: there’s no theory, no. There’s no argument per se—but for a sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit appeal to donors. There’s no reflection on how knowledge was amassed (it’s the work of the organization, after all). And there’s no effort at all to establish the credibility or credentials of the author—in fact, there’s no one person who is formally assigned authorship. I’m not in that project as an ethnographer.

For these reasons, I retain a sense that the work done for the NGO represents something not-quite-ethnographic. But wait. Might it not be possible to think of it as ethnography that is—if I may hearken back to James Clifford’s words from Writing Culture and twist them just so slightly—partial: committed and incomplete?

After all, whoever said it was necessary to find all elements of ethnography only in one place? Our conventional outputs are sites of collection: empirical data, theories, history, context, analysis, critique are all present, and rolled together, ideally coherently. Writing seems inevitable, yes; for many of us, it’s a habit we(‘ve come to) love. But do we really have to do it all in our final outputs? Could it count as ethnography if we didn’t? What if we were to rethink the commitment we have to the “ethnographic monograph as the singular product of merit,” as Lane puts it?

I’ve been suggesting all along that conditions of precarity lead to a cobbling together of what’s available and what’s possible, making ethnographic virtue out of circumstances such as they are. To some extent, I presume this is true of all research—that it’s itself such a process of cobbling-together, and working with the data that is, rather than with the data that ideally should be. The sorts of research questions that can be asked are necessarily curtailed by circumstances; I suspect we all work all the time with stop-gaps and bypasses of one sort or other. [Cori Hayden’s When Nature Goes Public, for all its dense prose, is useful in explicating this aspect of contemporary research realities.]

Now although we acknowledge this reality of research, the point is that the cobbling and corralling of “ethnography” isn’t otherwise really reflected in much of the (specialized) writing we do produce. The “conference paper” reflects the process rather more at times, but then again we expect that because it is, almost by definition, a work in progress. What would it mean to think of conference papers, or the commissioned video ethnographies of which Laurel wrote or breathing practice (Ali’s post) or observational practice (Lane’s) as attuned ways of seeking, comprehending, analyzing that are the here-more-personal there-more-public but always full-fledged ethnographic products? How would such a re-thinking change how, what, for what audience, and indeed how much we write?

Briefly, I’d like to consider the work of blogging. I cannot exactly start in here on what blog writing has done to ethnographic writing; there’s much more to be said about the use of such formats in research and teaching than what I can cover in this post. I’d like to propose, however, that the open-endedness of the blog and the conversational space it opens up is almost perfectly suited to the sort of corralling and cobbling of “ethnography” that I find myself consistently undertaking—especially in the absence of the means or the time to more comprehensively study cultural phenomena. I hear increasingly from colleagues that blogging is now considered industry good practice to promote one’s own research or upcoming book. There’s research and discussion on using blogging as a means to fieldwork/ data collection in the age of online research. Even the group of us posting here on Savage Minds thought of this exercise as a means of testing out ideas for a more conventional edited volume or some other such project.

Such approaches presume still that “ethnography” is happening (primarily? only?) in the conventional elsewheres, and not on the blogs themselves; blogs are after all tools to other (more standard) ethnographic ends. I’m suggesting, however, that blog-like spaces compel us not just to de-center classic ethnographic writing, but also to more fully embrace the notion of ethnography as process rather than (just) product.

My own admittedly fledging venture into blogging was born of a desire to situate myself in Pondicherry, intellectually, gastronomically, aesthetically—albeit without letting go of my anthropological tethers, which appear never really to have left Houston. Pâticheri is an experiment in re-claiming ethnographic voice in the context of repatriation, in a way that melds auto-ethnography with cultural analysis, and representations or performances of (in this case) food practices. It’s actually deeply gratifying that (1) my audience is not only academic, even when academics are readers, and (2) readers have far more participatory room here than in my prior work–indeed the line between those being written about and those reading is almost non-existent, just as “ethnography” is at times quite marginal. Some readers make it into a technical how-to site (which reflects at times just how esoteric aspects of culinary praxis remain): Send a recipe for digestive biscuits! What on earth do you do with this gourd that has these striations on it? How do I cut a mango? Others are gawking at images of food, or drawn to narratives about the repat experience, refracted through food practices. Moms ask about how long you can store homemade playdough; others reference Bourdieu. As with the work with the NGO, not all of it is ethnographic—but some of it explicitly is about thinking through social categories and cultural politics, about the social life of objects, or the major cultural (gender, design, labor) shifts that can be tracked through individual tools or practices.

Here the blog is not so much a tool for data gathering, as a collection site that is sometimes more, sometimes less analytical. It’s a place where ingredients are assembled, where curious juxtapositions can make for analytical opportunities, or in which quotidian (though not necessarily marginal) elements, like snacks, can become clues to understanding wider, more complex, or far-flung phenomena. It’s a place of conversation, a virtual kitchen table even. Writing is still central, but sometimes not as central as other media/ objects: the graphics, a music video produced by three random Pakistani guys, a curious fruit, the experience of a new Indian restaurant, the recipe that caps it all off. After all, we’re told, this is the attention (deficit) economy (see Lane’s post on this also); lengthy writing is less likely to draw people in than other, more visually oriented elements. We’re usually prompted to feel despair at such a state of affairs. But perhaps, just perhaps, some new creative ethnographic spaces might open up as a result?

Food blogs are these days are about as precariously poised as adjuncts: they may get noticed and paid (usually modestly, unless you’re developing iphone jailbreaks on the side or exercising “franchise” options by writing cookbooks or giving talks) or not read at all. But for all that, and especially for me, they’re a space of free play, one whose existence requires only minimal justification in terms of research strategy, and one which can simultaneously engage multiple audiences, both within and without the academy, and that on multiple levels (as parents, cooking enthusiasts or novices, collaborators, students, peers, friends, fellow artists or lovers of food writing and more)—thus being of the field in ways that our specialized mono-graphs and conventional outputs so rarely are. And it’s a work-in-process end-product, unabashedly. In short, it’s everything my dissertation, my book, and just about all the professional outputs I’ve had were not. (What a relief!)

To bring this somewhat meandering discussion full circle, there is this one element of “ethnography” that I’d add to Carole McGranahan’s list: a commitment to process over product, and the decentering of the writing practice that seems the so-natural consequence of all our ethnographic undertakings. Such commitment is perhaps nothing new, but I cannot help but wonder: Would I have been blogging while I was full time faculty—in between administrative meetings, and eternally preoccupied with making a list of work done that could, with self-respect, be presented in my annual reviews—or else? Possibly, many of my colleagues have long been active bloggers, though the ethnography of that blog would have been of entirely another character if I wanted to claim academic mileage out of it. Would I have been able to see figures like Ree Drummond or David Lebovitz as guides and inspirations over, say, Levi Strauss and Appadurai? Ha! Would illustration have been so central? No. That’d have been in the realm of “the hobby,” a cute but extraneous adjunct (I use the word deliberately) to the ethnographic process. Would it have been possible to juxtapose “Aaloo Anday” with Nancy Ries’ “Potato Ontology” with Pakistani political satire and a recipe for Aalu Anday Salan? Sure, but I suspect that would have been better classroom strategy than ethnographic method in its own right.

Not to gloss the fact that financial uncertainties loom as never before, that “fieldwork” is an increasingly absurd demand in new ways, that I’ve no idea at all if blogging is a worthwhile exercise. I’m also not at all sure if what I’m crafting in each successive post counts in anyone’s eyes but my own as “ethnographic” at all. But it sure is fun to pretend. And to explore, in between so many other conventional undertakings, an alternative realm of some modest possibility.

Deepa S. Reddy is Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. She blogs on food, culture, and gastronomical life on Pâticheri: Ethno.graphic.Food

In this post I’m going to diverge a bit, writing not about my work for Cultural Anthropology, but about that other project of mine: an ethnography of breathing, and how the breath registers embodied signs of late capitalism (in the contemporary asthma epidemic and U.S. yoga industry). It’s a project grounded in my own yoga practice, a risky set-up, I think, for someone already working on the margins.

Deepa’s weekly prompt asks us about the relationship between form and content in our work. This prompt called to mind the way I position myself to my project, leveraging embodied practice for ethnography. Rereading Carole McGranahan’s post on teaching ethnography, I keep coming back to Ortner’s understanding of ethnography as “the attempt to understand another life world using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing.” Tomie Hahn’s ethnography of dance transmission, Sensational Knowledge (2007), is a powerful example of how body and self become instruments of knowing. Working in the Japanese tradition of nihon buyo, Hahn shows how cultural knowledge is embodied through her own experience and practice of nihon buyo, a practice sustained over three decades. What I find most interesting about Hahn’s work is the way she translates movement and sensation into graspable material for analysis. The argument that culture flows through dance transmission is performed back to readers through Hahn’s own transmission; thick descriptions of sight, sound, and touch.

Hahn also speaks to the challenges and drawbacks of embodied ethnography – studying her own culture, wearing various hats, and negotiating multiple identities. Although my project, and my relationship to it, is quite different from Hahn’s, Sensational Knowledge is an enduring touchstone that inspires my work. It’s important to have one or a few of those in reach.

In the sections that follow I put yoga in conversation with ethnography. In the first section, breathing becomes an instrument of knowing; in the second, I consider how my yoga practice situates me as ethnographer.

BREATHING ALTITUDE

Just about every morning, at about the same time, I start the day with a series of meditations that involve pranayama, a yogic breathing practice. There are dozens of breathing exercises to choose from, perhaps even hundreds. In the Kundalini tradition, breath is measured by mantra, a rhythmic repetition of sounds. Practice a particular meditation every day for three months (or for three years, as the case may be) and you will begin to notice things – how far you can pull your belly button back towards your spine, where you overworked your body the day before, the difference between sleepy and exhausted, and of course, the quality of your breath. You will also notice your surroundings, like the early morning smell of businesses down the hill and what time your neighbors leave for work and school. With a consistent daily practice you may begin to associate disparate observations, drawing tentative causal relationships between body and environment. On nights when I eat ice cream before bed, for example, I find I’m more congested in the morning, my breath shallow.

Daily pranayama will make you more attuned to air quality. The difference between the high desert of Northern New Mexico and the guest bedroom of a Woods Hole cottage is striking, as I discovered in my travels last month. The New Mexico air dries you out to the extent that your breath stops short, an involuntary visceral measure to protect the nasal passages. On the coast of Massachusetts, on the other hand, the air is so thick with matter you can’t get the oxygen you need. Although the length and depth of my inhale was the same, the air felt like mud, sticking to my air passages, reducing the flow of breath. It’s one thing to know this from looking at EPA generated maps or by talking with environmental engineers. It’s another to know air quality in your body.

The high desert of New Mexico and the Southern coast of Massachusetts make for a fascinating climate contrast. Experiencing these two extremes back to back gave me embodied insight into how air quality matters for those with breathing disorders, like asthma. Most asthmatics I talk to reference their environment a lot – dust, mold, humidity, pollen, temperature. That’s a good sign since asthma care today is as much about avoiding environmental triggers as it is using an inhaler. Attuning to sensation in environmental context is critical for asthmatics. It’s also knowledge gained over time, by living in the body and paying close attention when the body is talking at you, or screaming, as the case may be. This is a tall order when you’re fighting to breath.

Most of us are not fighting to breathe. Most of us are not even conscious we’re breathing. How many times a day do you say to yourself, “Hey, look at me! I’m breathing!” But there are many people (asthmatics and yoga practitioners are two prominent, contrasted, examples) who are very aware of their breath, albeit for different reasons, in different contexts. Analysis of breathing in the U.S. today reveals a lot about class, race, and gender; health assemblages and environmental imaginaries; late industrial culture, and its hoped for cure. This analysis is made using my breath – as a vehicle that provides access to sensations and situations; as a space for reflection and analysis; and as a constant medium that gives firm ground to stand on. Asthmatics do not get this kind of stability from the breath – for asthmatics, breathing can be the ultimate form of precarity.

As described above, sadhana, a daily yoga practice grounded in the breath, provides the kind of long-term relationship I’d like to have as an ethnographer. Exactly the kind of relationship that is so difficult to maintain in the contemporary academy.

FIGURING OUT ALIGNMENT

The first time I found myself noticing alignment I was standing in line waiting to board a flight home from New Mexico. When the man in front of me set his bag down, rolled his neck, and then stood at attention, I noticed his shoulders – his right shoulder rose about two inches above his left, the scapula bulging to a degree unmatched on the other side. Moving my gaze down to his hips, I could not detect further asymmetry (ultimately due to my lack of training and the man’s clothing), but it would undoubtedly be there – misalignment in one sector of the body indicates misalignment in other areas. The hips and shoulders are like roommates in a dorm, proximity matters; the state of one will impact the state of the other. Of course, surface analysis is never sufficient. If you’ve got shoulder problems, it’s probably effect that should be read as sign. Referent is a bit trickier to track down. This I learned from my own misaligned, pained, body, and the bodyworkers and yoga teachers who I’ve studied with over the past four years. Time spent with my dear friend and teacher Tanya Zayhowski, for example, taught me volumes about structure, freeplay, and history. Our lessons always took place around a yoga mat.

In the Albuquerque airport, I found myself wanting to strike up a conversation with the man in front of me, hoping that I could somehow tell him his alignment was off. I remember being at once horrified and curious – amused by my observation of a stranger’s structure (clearly, my yoga practice and training was cultivating a new kind of sensibility), and concerned by my desire to do something with that observation. Here is a moment where “critical distance” would be most useful (see Deepa’s reflection on Kelty’s quote). Although this whole experience was unsettling – witnessing myself seeing the world in a different way, or perhaps just a different slice of the world (shoulders?) – that’s part of the job, right? Wait, which job – yoga instructor or ethnographer?

While the Albuquerque airport scene offers an acute example of how my yoga practice provides perspective – and the inclination to intervene – it also speaks to the flip side of being an instrument of knowing. Teaching vinyasa (a flow of physical postures that constitute asana, the third limb of yoga) means looking at student alignment and providing corrections. It also means that when a student comes to you with tight hamstrings, a bad back, or after recovering from wrist surgery, it’s your responsibility to provide that student with postures that will be safe and can address their needs. “Distance” may be long gone, but in front of a yoga class, it’s best to carry that “critical” stripe in your back pocket.

For me, “joining in and becoming part of the field” has been productive and rewarding. Admittedly, its not becoming part of the field that makes me nervous – it’s turning my yoga practice into ethnography that gives me pause. But the play between these pairs, ethnography and asana, writing and breathing, has been too interesting and rich not to engage.

I wonder how my situatedness will translate into writing, as it must. Kerim’s post on dissemination has me wondering if my position today will produce a sunflower or bougainvillea in the future.

Ali Kenner is managing editor and program director at Cultural Anthropology, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She also teaches Vinyasa and Kundalini yoga in Upstate New York.

Interdisciplinarity has been another definitive condition of ethnographic production for me. My formal graduate education has been in an interdisciplinary department, I go to conferences that are interdisciplinary in their scope, I teach within contexts that are highly interdisciplinary, and interdisciplinarity has also been an object of inquiry in some of my previous collaborations. Depending on the day and the audience, my (inter)disciplinary affiliations are located somewhere in between the fields of Cultural Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and South Asian Studies. And I do not really anticipate not being interdisciplinary in this sense any time in the foreseeable future. For one, I really enjoy working in such spaces. Reading broadly, connecting laterally across a wide range of scholarship is a highly stimulating experience. And too, interdisciplines can be extraordinarily rich sites of intellectual production: they are, after all, the “trading zones”—in all their pidginny messiness (and “busy” talk)—where new knowledges emerge. They are also, as a colleague reminded me recently, the spaces where the disciplinary aspects of disciplines are somewhat less pronounced. Equally also, not being a credentialed anthropologist makes it that much more difficult to imagine myself as part of a traditional anthropology department, in the context of U.S. higher education at least. For better or for worse, the sidelines, for me, are necessarily interdisciplinary.

And indeed, working within the space of STS has been extraordinarily exciting. For someone previously unschooled in the Humanities & Social Sciences, STS provided an excellent space from which to transition into these very different modes of scientific inquiry. It provided a broad introduction to the breadth of humanistic and social scientific inquiry: our graduate coursework was carried out under the supervision of anthropologists, historians, philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and STSers alike.

STS also offered a set of tools from which to interrogate the epistemologies in which I had been previously schooled: we read and debated how scientific knowledge comes to assume a seemingly universal character, how science travels, and how it can be complicit with various modes of domination. Needless to say, the experience wasn’t always comfortable: what was being deconstructed, after all, was an entire worldview—my own worldview at that. And this was a fraught exercise from the very onset: much like anthropology’s past complicity with colonialism, STS too had its own demons to contend with. The memory of the science wars was all too recent, and appropriation of STS-like critiques towards delegitimizing scientific authority in politically charged contexts (like those of climate change and evolutionary theory) was an ever-present risk. And yet, the tools for putting back together what we had pulled apart weren’t always readily available: the challenge for us, as I have come to understand it, was to formulate critique while also being attuned to the ecologies in which such critique circulated. It was this kind of figuring out, I think, that animated much of my graduate schooling.

But theorizing from within such interdisciplinary locations was accompanied by its own set of (sometimes unanticipated) challenges. At the Annual STS Graduate Student Conference that rotates between the STS Departments at Cornell University, MIT, and RPI (and in future, York University in Toronto), our post-conference roundtables would inevitably hone in on what we came to label as our “annual identity crisis”: the existential dilemmas posed on account of being a soon-to-be STS graduate ((Some version of this discussion continues, even as I write this post: c.f. here). What exactly is STS? A field in itself that can stake claim to its own body of scholarship? An interdisciplinary area whose boundaries are necessarily unstable and always in flux? A particular disposition which takes the science-society nexus as its legitimate domain of inquiry? All of these, obviously. We charted timelines of STS to articulate our genealogy, we reflected critically on the discourse of STS, we mapped “expertise” to lay claim to our own expertise.

Expertise [Image credit: Jonathan Cluck. Click on image for larger version]

And yet, the sum total of these still did not provide a convincing, leave alone satisfying, articulation of who we are or what we do—even to ourselves. What then were we supposed to say to potential funders and employers? How were we to make ourselves more marketable and more readily recognizable? When disciplines mostly hire their own, and worse, when our own interdiscipline tends to hire those with disciplinary groundings, what exactly were we to do? What were the—mostly academic—niches welcoming of STS?

In contrast, in my (limited) experience of being in the Netherlands, STS is more straightforwardly an entity in its own right: there exists a national STS graduate school, the WTMC, and interdisciplinarity, more generally, is more valued institutionally (through funding agencies, through department organization) than I think is true of the U.S. academy: my present faculty, for example, is organized as a matrix of interdisciplinary departments and research groups, including Arts, Media & Culture, European Studies, the Globalization and Development Initiative, and STS. History, Philosophy, and Political Science are the only disciplinary departments present. My teaching is equally interdisciplinary, and sometimes quite far-field: I am as likely to be teaching an STS course as I am to be teaching one in European Studies. B.A. in European Studies and Arts & Culture (with an option of additional minors) are the only degrees that the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) awards at the undergraduate level. Interdisciplinarity, that is, is the norm rather than the exception.

And this is no small thing: the institutionalization of STS makes it more easily recognizable, and STS graduates can perhaps more readily find opportunities to, well, sell out. Offices of Technology Assessment, greater societal investment in democratic governance of technoscience, and the existence of a large(r) civil service sector more generally are not be dismissed lightly in this regard.

But increased institutionalization brings with it a unique set of challenges also: it becomes much more important, I believe, to define what canonical STS is and should look like. The same ambiguity that resulted in our yearly identity crises also provided us with the space to claim ownership of the field in ways that we deemed fit: after all, if there really was no way of defining what STS is, we were free to make of the field what we wanted to it be. Indeed, there was no better way to prompt disagreement—amongst faculty and graduate students alike—than an attempt to standardize a core set of readings towards our field exams in Science Studies, Technology Studies, and Policy Studies. Does the space of play for creative appropriation of theories and methods become more constrained as STS becomes more mainstream? Does critique really run out of steam as the faultlines that articulated the interdiscipline—the coming together of the postmodernist currents of anthropology, postcolonial studies, science studies, and women’s studies that gave the 90s so much its intellectual charge (and lest we forget, disagreements (science) wars), for example—seem to shift elsewhere?

More immediately relevant to the matter at hand, interdisciplinarity results also in a displacement of purpose. Not surprisingly, perhaps, STS privileges its object of analysis over any particular methodological disposition or anthropological purpose. What defines an STS project, that is, is its concern with technoscience writ large as a domain of inquiry. A methodological commitment to ethnographic (or any other) rigor is secondary. Culture, site, ethnography, thick description come to be imported into the analysis more-or-less unproblematically, without a corresponding “deep” engagement with the particular conversations and debates through which each of these ideas have historically evolved. Stripped of context, universalized, ethnography—ever so ironically—risks facilitating a “view from nowhere”: threatening to pull the very “god trick” that we often accuse the sciences of. Somewhere along the way to the holy grail (of interdisciplinarity), reflexivity—perhaps the most distinctive feature of anthropology’s epistemic engagements—is often lost in translation.

And so, then: what are meaningful ways of preserving the affinities between anthropology and STS that have been so incredibly productive? What kinds of spaces and what kinds of projects can we envision within the affordances and constraints that interdisciplinarity creates? How do we cultivate an openness towards newer theories, methods, and practices as newer affinities—those between STS and the Arts, for example—seem to emerge? What is the value of interdisciplinarity, at a time when it has come to dominate contemporary scholarly landscapes, both as a privileged means and as an end in itself?

Aalok Khandekar is currently lecturer at the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastircht University in the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Aug 2010. His personal website can be found here.

I keep hearing the voice of Harding from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in my head with this post–I’m talking about form!  I’m talking about content!–but let me go out on a limb here with a colorful analogy: professional precarity (as we’ve been talking about it in this series) is to ethnography a bit like the London Underground is to…well, I was thinking London originally, but better to say “London Below,” the reimagined and mythological rendition of the London Underground in which Neil Gaiman’s television serial Neverwhere is set.  That’s at least as confusing as it is colorful, especially if you didn’t happen to catch the show, so let me try and explain.

I learned quickly to lift my toes toward the end of the escalators on the Tube.  Why?  Because the pace is frenetic, almost always.  Fast enough in fact that you become hyper-aware of not just your pace but your stride.  The “walking” you normally experience as a mostly fluid rhythm becomes a staccato series of “moves.”  Regulars seem to the outsider like formula 1 racers clustered on a straightaway: they can’t simply start moving faster if (say) they realize they’re running late, they have to anticipate and strategize.  Those who break the synchrony of the group are showing “bad form” and may get a snort of disapproval, or worse, get stigmatized as tourists.  If you don’t raise your toes at the escalator landing you’re just begging for an ill-timed trip, and heaven help you if pause mid-stream to look around for guidance.  You can practically discern the middle of Spring, Stonehenge-like, by observing the sharp up-tick of gruesome multi-passenger escalator-landing misshaps.

Anyway, the Underground may be part of “British culture” or “being a Londoner,” but at this point I’m confident that that doesn’t say much.  To use the framing of grad school colleague Jason Patton, the Underground is a “transportation world” all to itself, in ways many Brits (even many Londoners) only experience peripherally if at all (my downstairs neighbor, for example, an immigrant from Cyprus, eschewed the Underground in favor of her own automobile or taxicabs).  Yet the unbridled sense of individual mobility I felt even over three years without owning an automobile is, I suspect, going to be a difficult loss (apologies to my friends from Japan, who experience the Tube as painfully unreliable).  The sensual experience of the stations and lines, the soot and the phantasmagoric adverstising, intermingle with the visual culture of the Tube, the descendents of Beck’s famous map, the popularized photographs of the “Deep Level Lines, and especially the Transport for London’s “Film Office,” which oversees a parallel franchise in the sale of licenses to film on the Tube.

This interlaced quality was especially driven home for me in mid-December of 2009.  Heavy snow was falling across most of Western Europe and the southern UK.  The snowplows at Heathrow were overwhelmed and it quickly became impossible to move the de-icing trucks around to the planes that needed de-icing.  My partner, returning from a three-week trip to India, had her flight diverted to Brussels when officials finally threw in the towel and closed Heathrow.  When she confirmed this by phone, I went online and (like countless others expecting family home for the holiday) began checking the availability of Eurostar trains from Brussels to London.

Now, I can’t avoid a slight digression: whatever technical fluencies I may have I’ve never been especially big on Twitter (this is getting circuitous, but stick with me here).  I do have an account, have tried it out, and generally find it just isn’t “tuned” for most of the types of things I want or need to do.  These particular circumstances, however, had me wondering about the weirdly rosy picture I seemed to be getting (via the websites of the Guardian and Eurostar itself) of what I imagined was a situation in rapid flux.  So, to Twitter I went–#Eurorail!  #Brussels!  #StPancras!  As most would probably guess this painted quite a different scene, but it also held me spellbound for several hours in my first experience of the full power of Twitter on the experience of place.

First were the complaints from those on trains headed to Paris: nothing seemed to be leaving as scheduled.  Then were the general observations that the St. Pancras International Station seemed to be getting a bit crowded, even more than usual.  Within an hour of the first report of problems people were noting important discrepancies in the statements of different representatives in different parts of the station.  Queues overflowed into the falling snow outside the building.  Few trains were seen arriving, and several of the passengers on those that did tweeted that they had stopped without explanation a few miles down the tracks.  By the time Eurostar finally confirmed that the snow and ice had caused several trains to fail in the Chunnel tempers had already become heated, yet travelers were also sharing details on the layout of the station, water and bathroom access, and any trickles of information from station employees.

This is the type of story that is now old hat for most here, but it also struck me as an exemplar of the kind of meaning-maelstrom that has been the subject of recent discussion on how ethnographies are to happen in the Network Era (Faubion and Marcus 2009).  A major cosmopolitan transportation hub like St. Pancras is in clear ways a “placeless space,” but the fine-grained stitching together of experience and the specificities of place via digital media disrupts that reading.

These kinds of issues were certainly within the broad arc of the research program I was working to establish, but it was also far enough afield that it would be a quite a stretch to work it in somehow as “fieldwork.”  The masters programme I’d just begun coordinating, however, had one facet that was sorely in need of a structuring project, a practical component focused on experimentation with the use of digital video as data-gathering.  In the typical fashion of bricoleur-pedagogues everywhere, I connected with station film offices and (with the help of a small e-Learning and Development grant from my institution) rewrote this practical component as an examination of the digital mediation of a major rail and subway transport hub.

Exploring the digital mediation of the King’s Cross/St. Pancras rail/subway station (London, UK)

Now of course this hardly constitutes an “ethnographic study,” but this is where Neverwhere comes into play.  Think of the London Underground as simultaneously an infrastructural substratum for London itself AND as a diverse material and visual culture, a symbolic reservoir for producing a “London imaginary.”  Academicprecarity–the pace and stride it implies, the strategies, constraints, and contingencies–certainly structures ethnographic work, provides its form in a very literal way and also unavoidably shapes its content.  In this instance, a “field excursion” simultaneously operates as an armature for a course in Digital Anthropology AND does work as a vehicle for data-gathering in pursuit of my own longer-term ethnographic productions.  The data is fragmentary, certainly, partial in perspective and spotty in quality and utility.  Whether and where those shards end up in any ethnographic mosaic could be a real surprise, but that’s a feature.  London Below was not a representation of the London Underground, nor did every bit of the latter contribute usefully to the former, yet it’s clear the two are entangled.

Lane DeNicola is a Lecturer in Anthropology at University College London and the inaugural convener of UCL’s masters program in Digital Anthropology. His PhD in Science & Technology Studies was completed at RPI in 2007.

So, in my last post I spoke mainly about my current situation as a post-graduate in employment limbo, experiencing the strain of potentially leaving academia. In this post, I want to start to unpack what I meant by “selling out” through a discussion of some of my own experiences on the job market. Specifically, I’ve chosen the two positions I’ve applied for that most clearly evoked the stigma of selling out. None of this is to say that I think there should be a stigma attached to leaving academia in all cases, or that people who have taken jobs outside of academia have “sold out,” but rather that leaving academia comes with baggage that deserves at least some attention.

On any given weekday, you’ll likely find me in the hanging chair on my front porch, with an aging MacBook open in my lap and two black cats sprawled at my feet. My job hunting process is simple – I use various job listing sites to search for positions which contain the term “qualitative” within the state of New York. Beyond that, I progressively widen my search to more inclusive terms such as “internet,” “PhD,” and “research”. The first search tends to bring the results I’m most interested in – and I am often pleasantly surprised to find employers who are aware of, and looking for, applicants with backgrounds in ethnographic research. As I mentioned previously, a wide range of employers are looking for individuals with research experience, including strategic consulting firms, media companies, marketing firms, and think tanks. These positions tend to be located in major metropolitan areas however, so my initial rounds of applications were more frequently directed towards more local, non-research positions where I imagined a background in ethnographic research might give me an advantage.

My first round of interviews included one with a wholly-owned subsidiary of Goldman Sachs. In many ways, the position would have distanced me from research work and ethnographic practice, bringing me closer to my former life as an IT worker. As an Information Security Analyst, I would have been engaged in various forms of training, investigatory work, and contract analysis. In my mind, I had still envisioned a site for ethnographic practice – after all, information security is universally concerned with networks of trust and authority, and fostering a culture of security is often more important than strong technical safeguards. How do everyday employees within a particular corporate culture frame information security risks? What is the discursive work of a contractual agreement to protect sensitive financial information? While it may seem slightly idealistic, I genuinely think that ethnographic practice can provide new and useful insight into these kinds of issues.

Further, thinking about the position as ethnographic work provided me with an explanation for how my background made me a candidate suited for the job in ways that distinguished me from others – which excited the employer enough to garner me an invitation to the final round of interviews. Through my experience with Goldman Sachs, and those with other employers that followed, I started working out exactly how non academic employers viewed my background. Having a PhD in the social sciences, I was simultaneously overqualified and underqualified for just about every position I applied to, and I believe that I was frequently framed as something of a novelty. One interviewer with a market research firm actually told me this in an interview – as he explained, other candidates were technically a better fit given their background and experience, but I demonstrated a broad skill set, strong curiosity, and a perspective that set me apart from the other candidates. I imagine the same could be said for most PhDs, particularly the interdisciplinary weirdos like myself.

Considering Goldman Sachs as an employer led me to joke about selling out with friends, which was more of a means to casually judge the acceptability of my pursuit than an attempt at genuine humor. It was my first encounter with the discomfort of potentially leaving academia, but that said, much of my discomfort was due to the reputation of Goldman Sachs. This form of discomfort is at the core of selling out – the idea that one is abandoning what Laurel described as the pure and disinterested pursuit of knowledge in search of a paycheck. It is a difficult transition, at best, to go from criticizing neoliberal endeavors to supporting them from within. Regardless, my friends and colleagues quickly dismissed my concerns, correctly noting that it was unlikely I would be directly involved in any unethical practices – and more importantly, everyone understood the need to find sustainable employment.

Not all positions I’ve applied for have been so distanced from my background in research, however. At least, not in ways that would require a form of surreptitious ethnographic work in service of what are ostensibly non-ethnographic corporate tasks. This became particularly true as I expanded my job search to include the New York City area. However, these kinds of positions evoked another aspect of selling out – the sense that I would be abandoning my area of expertise. I’ve spent nearly a decade working on youth Internet safety research, and nearly all of the positions I’ve applied to would be a radical departure from that work. Effectively, by taking any such position I would lose the freedom of being able to choose my own research. Although, it can just as easily be argued that given the political nature of funding decisions, even career academics do not have complete freedom of choice. For me, at least, the actual work of doing research is a large part of what makes it attractive as a career choice, more so than the topic itself, but there is still a sense of loss associated with changing course away from nearly a decade of research.

Shortly after my encounter with Goldman Sachs, I stumbled on a opening for a “Social Scientist – Human Terrain” in New York. At the time, I had vaguely heard of the Human Terrain program, having had some brief conversations about the ties between anthropology and the military during my time working with the Journal of Cultural Anthropology. Thinking that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the position was located in New York, and given that the application process was a simple resume submission, I gave it a shot. Within two hours I had a representative on the phone with me, explaining that I had the kind of background they were looking for, and that I would be moved to the next stage of the application process, with a 14-month deployment to Afghanistan in my future with a successful completion. Politely, I ended our conversation.

I think, at this point, the arguments against the Human Terrain System have already been thoroughly discussed. I bring it up, however, for two reasons. First, it is an example of a career option which clearly evokes selling out, perhaps better than any other. It is research in service of an institution commonly criticized by those doing ethnographic work, applicants effectively ignore their current research trajectory and position within their academic networks, and further, has the real potential for harm. While the military use of ethnographic work brings this into focus best, the element of harm is present in other career opportunities as well. Someone with a skill set like mine could easily set up a research project which served to develop more compelling digital casino and social media games. Second, I bring this example up because even after they told me I would be deployed to Afghanistan to actually do the dirty work, with enough pay on the line to keep me afloat for years, I actually considered it. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t need to turn my life into the social science rewrite of Breaking Bad – whether it be to map human terrain, or to “drive” use of gambling devices – regardless of how desperate things seemed.

Now, let me be perfectly clear on one point – all of my colleagues and friends have been completely supportive of my endeavors. Beyond the threatening comments on the Human Terrain incident, none of my colleagues or former faculty mentors have been anything less than encouraging. That said, there’s still a feeling that I’m going against my training, and that I’m abandoning the righteous pursuit of knowledge in favor of a bigger paycheck. Do I genuinely think I’m abandoning the moral high ground – or even that such an academic moral high ground exists given the current state of affairs? Not really. Further, I’m genuinely interested in work outside of academia, along with all of the very real benefits such work entails. However, I would argue that the academic ideal of the tenured professor is still deeply entrenched in the culture of doctoral and academic work, and continues to exert pressure on us all. After all, the entire system is oriented towards producing scholars and professors, not professionals – and in the current academic climate, perhaps that’s not a good thing.

So, coming up in my post for next week, I’ll actually get around to addressing Gottlieb’s comment from my previous post and discuss what I think can be done to counteract the stigma of “selling out” for future cohorts. As Amy mentioned in her comment, and I hope to discuss further in the next post – staying in academia increasingly involves a mode of selling out as well.

In his late 19th Century sci-fi classic News from Nowhere, Arts & Crafts figurehead William Morris posited an agrarian utopia in which private property, centralized government, money, prisons and many other modern institutions were non-existent.  The work was intended to respond to a common criticism of socialist projects: the “innately human” lack of incentive to work in communitarian societies.  While some socialist advocates sought to deal with this issue by reducing the menial labor of humans via technology and industrialization, Morris’ work is predicated on the idea that most if not all work could and should be creative and pleasurable, with the introduction of machinery being reserved only for those rarer instances where not just labor but painis to be reduced.  For all its romantic pastoralism, Morris’ works (and this idea in particular) seem compelling to me in the context of ethnographic work “on the sidelines.”

The erosion (in the Digital Era) of the Industrial Era segregation of play and labor has been a regular theme in UCL’s Digital Anthropology programme, but even more immanently I’ve been thinking about the ways that fieldwork, writing, and all the other activities comprising the best ethnography are as much play as they are work. Take the advantages of long-term participant-observation as an example.  The likelihood of experiencing events or observing patterns impossible to plan for or foresee is increased, and all those “artificially-induced formalisms” that can plague interviews or other highly-structured modes of data-gathering are gradually relaxed with the passage of time and greater familiarity between researchers and informants.  The ethnographer relies, that is, on contingency–the unforeseen and serendipitous, the “possibility that things might have been otherwise” (Malaby 2007)–and informality.  Both conceptually underpin play.  The outcome of games, for example, must be indeterminate, and some of the most important aspects of gameplay come not in the form of rules but in what we learn or negotiate around the rules.  Obviously ethnography entails bothlabor (or maybe more appropriately “struggle”) as well as pleasure and creativity, but for a variety of good and bad reasons we talk about it principally as a work activity.

My reflection on William Morris isn’t just a passing theoretical musing though, it’s been a regular and quite concrete presence for me over the last three years.  A three-minute walk down the street from my flat in Walthamstow is the William Morris Gallery, a public gallery and museum devoted to the English initiation of the Arts and Crafts movement (and Morris’ family home during the late 1840s and early 1850s).  Recently the surrounding grounds have been torn up in the process of refurbishment in an effort to tap into the Olympic crowds forming as I write.

The odds would’ve had us finding accommodations somewhere south of the river since I was staying at a friend’s flat down near Crystal Palace while flat-hunting in the summer of 2009, but we were attracted to the north Walthamstow area in part because of the William Morris Gallery and especially the adjacent Lloyd Park. A sprawling mosaic of planted flowerbeds, ivy-covered paths, tennis courts, an aviary, a central performance space with surrounding moat, and a broad, multi-acre expanse of open field, the park was an unparalleled attraction for one reason in particular: we own a dog.

I’d argue that I came to know more about where I’ve lived and worked over the last three years (and possibly British culture in general) because I own a dog than for any other single reason.  Though they’re especially challenging to bring “into the field,” I’d argue that in an important sense dogs are nearly as effective as cigarettes as foils for initiating social interaction.  Most dogs not only demand regular walks in one’s local vicinity, the dog-owning reader will know that they introduce considerable contingency (e.g. sudden bolts into the midst of picnicers) and enforce a high degree of informality (dealing with fecal matter involves some rules, but at least as much negotiation).  Dog care involves an often public display of nurturing behavior but is also usually much less gender-segregated than childcare (though on the other hand many cultures see dogs almost as vermin and to be avoided as potential disease-carriers).

Labor, play, and negotiation in Lloyd Park (London, UK)

The first 18 months of twice-daily walks around the expansive perimeter of Lloyd Park introduced us to many of our neighbors, who we first knew only as “Poppy’s owner” or “the bald guy who walks the husky.”  They opened up countless conversations, not just on the best places to find pet supplies and veterinary care but eventually on, say, the differences between American and British television and politics, or everyday and sometimes much more intimate aspects of people’s lives.  They also eventually brought thorny or sensitive issues–gang activity and ethnicity in the park, or the appropriate way to broach the death of a friend or companion–right to the front-and-center.  On more than one occasion someone within our group of 10-15 dog owners mused that we should have “Lloyd Park Dog Club” t-shirts made up, and when my partner relocated back to the US (dog in tow), she was presented with a moving and beautifully composed bound volume of photos taken of our group and their dogs at the park.

Now, true enough, I never wrote anything up about this aspect of life in the UK (this post aside).  I’ve yet to go through the more laborious project of attempting the difficult translation of meaning-making from one culture to another, and in fact I’d rarely (if ever) thought of this dog-owning community or Lloyd Park as a “fieldsite,” at least not formally.  They were undoubtedly “sidelines.”  But the deep, long-term cross-cultural exchange and self-interrogation they provoked–wholly outside my formal research program–seems likely at this point to have as potent an effect on future ethnographic projects and thinking as any activity I engaged in within my department or institution.  This was an especially crucial recognition, it should be said, in those moments when any realistic opportunity for formal fieldwork seemed remote.

This leaves me wondering, finally, about the constraints of framing “ethnography” as principally or exclusively our “work.”  I understand, of course, that to suggest otherwise is to invite those tired critiques of participant-observation as simply “hanging out,” cultural anthropology as more a leisure activity than a vocation, etc.  This may even encroach on the recent controversy over whether anthropology can or should be labeled a science.  But we’re talking in the sidelines right now, and I have little interest in debating whether my dog-walking can legitimately be labeled an “ethnographic activity.”  All I can say is that the dogs enjoyed it and learned quite a bit about each other over those three years despite the effort and challenges it often involved.  So did the humans.

Lane DeNicola is a Lecturer in Anthropology at University College London and the inaugural convener of UCL’s masters program in Digital Anthropology. His PhD in Science & Technology Studies was completed at RPI in 2007.

Note: post updated for clarity

Fieldwork is one of those extraordinarily-difficult-to-bracket experiences, as it blithely ignores any sort of compartmentalization of practical issues, professional demands, family, work, even time. Most conversations I’ve had about the hardship of fieldwork have invariably been cognizant of the sorts of practical-professional-personal negotiations involved—which often can become frustrating, overwhelming. In this post, I consider how such circumstances compel certain sorts of research decisions, serving as the often unspoken frameworks for the questions we ask and the projects we choose.

Fieldwork for my dissertation research followed a fairly classical/conventional trajectory, but for the break I took at the 6-month mark so as not to be away from my husband for a continuous year. India was far, tickets were expensive, but this was workable, still. I lived in Hyderabad, studying women’s activist organizations and their responses to Hindutva. I thoroughly enjoyed the vagrancy that fieldwork in an urban setting demands—and realized it was easiest to do this sort of work when one was away from family, so that it was informants and leads that set my pace and defined my agendas, not the realities of child- or parent-care. But it took the year and much stubbornness and persistence besides to move out of what Geertz has called one’s “ghosthood” into a more recognized position in a network, from which information was more accessible, and fieldwork as an experience much more enjoyable.

Our first baby arrived on the heels of the tenure-track job at a teaching-focused institution with a 3-3 load and neither research money nor any assured sabbaticals, but with research requirements to meet at tenure review nonetheless. Summers were all the dedicated time there was, but summers are hard in India, India was half the world away, childcare was not ever easy to organize, and getting there and back in time to teach again with research planned in between was beginning to sound exhausting, near-impossible, and almost not worthwhile.

[I read the narratives of other anthropologists who had carried their babies to the field [Margaret Trawick’s Notes on Love in a Tamil Family stands out in my memory for a description of a small child held in the crook of an ex-husband’s arm, somewhere in Chennai] and watched, in awed admiration, colleagues who could carry their infants to conferences and nurse them without skipping a beat or missing an analytical thread. The models were out there, but they were never ones I could emulate.]

So I couldn’t have been happier (or more relieved) when the HapMap Project community consultation research fell into my lap in Houston: an NIH-funded collaboration between Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Houston (Main and Clear Lake campuses) that charged me with charting Indian community views of genetics, blood donation, and basic science research. If I was struggling to find ways to return to my community, my community came to me in this project—and that in a spiffily professional package. I didn’t need to figure out Houston in the way I’d had to figure out Bangalore or Hyderabad. I knew the city already; I knew the community. I rode on institutional authority: everyone knew and respected UH and Baylor [in contrast to my Indian fieldwork experience, where I had constantly to laugh off jokes and explain that Rice University, really, was no agricultural college]. I could set my own schedule, most of the time. There was sufficient funding for research expenses, and an assistant besides. As a research team we didn’t always agree, but we met regularly and vetted issues collectively. It was, all things considered, an entirely professionalized research experience which, above all else, required me to remain just where I was: in Houston.

As cushy as the HapMap fieldwork process was in all these ways, however, it was also somewhat strange: booths at community fairs for subject recruitment, focus groups as ethnographic method, the conclusion in blood sample collection drives and so on, fieldwork less as immersive and much more piecemeal and formal, many subjects met once and never again, a depersonalized model of research interaction the prevailing norm. There was also a significant gap between the instrumental role the project was asking me to play (find out whether the community would consent to provide blood samples for the International HapMap project) and what research I wanted to do (be positioned within a science ethics project to understand how ethics happens, what gift economies were at stake, how the solicitation process works etc.). One was the price I paid for access to the other.

Indeed, to borrow the title of a workshop-produced-volume to which I (and many others from Rice) contributed some years ago, fieldwork is not what it used to be. The older classical models are not so much insufficient (as village studies become obsolete and multi-sited field-is-everywhere approaches take over) as absurd, all the more given the ways in which the year is parceled out into two long semesters, summer and winter breaks, “May-mesters,” “winterim semesters,” and the like. Where’s the time for fieldwork, even in tenured jobs that demand it? We wait for sabbaticals (if we’re lucky enough to have them at all), we leave the week of final exams only to return the week when classes re-commence, we figure out and furiously juggle personal lives and childcare, and feel happy that our kids are, at least, growing up in diverse contexts. And even then, the model that works best is that of professional fieldworker: no lengthy immersion, straight pre-defined questions and targets (only so much room for the “correction” motif, as Marcus calls the process of defining a project and then needing to correct it based on empirical realities), all IRB scrutinized, relatively de-personalized, often instrumentalized. 2-3 months, start to finish. Boom.

Of course, corporate ethnography has deviated from anthropology’s classic model all along. “Two years hanging with the Masaai” is hardly a viable model of data collection if one has a defined budget, deadlines and targets, and (most important) useable, implementable deliverables. My point here is that that model, which I know we all once pooh-poohed at some stage in our professional development or other, is increasingly attractive as a workable approach to fieldwork, for pragmatic reasons: it more readily attracts funding, and it’s actually more doable. The methodological rationalization follows, but later.

Perhaps I was being overly nostalgic in ways, but HapMap left me increasingly clear that I needed to return to India as field-site both to retain the “international expert” credentials that were quite critical to me institutionally (given continued area studies emphasis and the multiculturalist commitment to teaching about diverse groups) and to recover some of the depth and dimension I’d associated with my earlier fieldwork. Making the decision to repatriate was great because of course the move returned India to me as a fieldsite in a way that no single summer ever could have. [Of course it was a decision of considerable magnitude made for all manner of other reasons, and with all manner of other consequences—all of which are both relevant and tangential to this conversation.] The profound irony was that I had to trade the job that required fieldwork (as part of an active research program) for an adjunct position that cares little for active research programs, in order to return to the field in any meaningful long-term way.

What’s fieldwork like in India now that I’m back here, you ask? I haven’t the faintest. Profound irony #2: I’ve been so busy adjuncting and advising Indian students about their prospects of studying abroad and trying to keep up with some writing just-in-case, not saying no to any collaboration that comes my way, and being bendable and flexible in ways that put my immune system to shame, that I’ve not even come around to thinking about fieldwork per se, after all these years in the field.

Now that doesn’t mean that fieldwork is not happening. It is, very much [I’ll say more about this in subsequent posts, and you could read my fellow blogger Lane’s take on this matter, too]. It’s just not at all in the ways it ever did before, or as I imagined it would.

The point I’m trying to make in some circular way is that every last notion I’ve had about “fieldwork” as anthropology’s signature method has hopelessly broken down—and that that has at least as much to do with the changing ways in which we now pose research questions, as with our increasingly limiting professional-practical constraints. The professionalized model that caused discomfort once makes perfect sense now, at least because the piecemeal is eminently doable, and seems equitable besides. Truth is, I’d become an anthropologist-for-hire long before I went adjunct—not because I’m marketing services to a company, but because that’s the way in which I was starting to think about my work and my time: as piecemeal parcelable, and ultimately a trade-off. I have a skill, a niche expertise, a way of getting at human habits, of explaining “Indian and hindu” views of genetics, of understanding “the human factor,” the “cultural factor.” It’s part of the rationale by which “Anthropology” exists in smaller schools and corporate environments anyway: the way we don’t do things any more, or perhaps even the way we never did. So, buy me out of teaching or pay me consulting fees by the hour, and I’ll figure out whether Indians will consent to blood donation or a smaller scoop of laundry detergent. In exchange, I reserve the right to use data for my own research, and to reflect critically on the entire process—the right not to join the field. Anthropology turned instrumental in exchange for time and invaluable positioning to other, more reflective, critical ends. “Ethnography” is what happens on the sidelines of for-hire research–which even gold-standard positions within the academy are often generating anyway.

Over the past year, I’ve had to carefully consider the meaning of “selling out”.

Of my blogger colleagues, I’m probably the farthest removed from academia – or, at least I’m moving in that general direction. This certainly does not mean I’m abandoning research, quite the opposite in fact. It does, however, mean that I’ve all but given up on the idea of staying in academia and searching out a tenure-track position. For the time being, anyway. Instead, I’m looking to transition into the corporate world, but ideally in a way which would allow me to still do interesting ethnographic research. But, before I get ahead of myself, let me explain a little bit about my background and current position.

In 2011, I wrapped up my doctoral degree in STS – the first to graduate from my program under the soft four-year deadline slowly hardening under increasing institutional pressures. For years, I had labored, perhaps delusionally, under the hopes that if I was working on a “hot” and highly visible topic a job would simply materialize by the time I reached the end of the doctoral plank. For me, that topic was youth Internet safety. I developed my dissertation research with jobs beyond academia in mind, and deliberately built into the project opportunities to meet with school administrators across New York, in the hopes of expanding my contact network for eventual consulting work. I envisioned possibilites in state government, doing technology policy work. I thought I could even keep writing, given the two freelance books already under my belt.

The imagined job never really materialized. Between the economic downturn and my failure to anticipate what I’ve come to describe and recognize in others as post-dissertation slump, things simply stalled out. My dissertation research panned out in a way that made consulting difficult – schools want someone to come in and talk to kids about cyberbullying, not so much someone to tell them that the idea of cyberbullying is fundamentally problematic. State positions dried up during budget cutbacks, and I never really figured out how to get into a position that would allow me to write policy briefings. In terms of more writing, merely considering the idea of returning to Internet safety issues after almost a decade of research on the topic made me nauseous.

Thankfully, the unofficial departmental safety net sprung into action, and I was hired on as an adjunct to teach two courses per semester. Deepa mentioned that adjuncting “ain’t no fun at all,” but my experience was a little different, despite the fact that I dreaded the idea of teaching from the start. Once I got over the neurotic terror – “What the hell am I going to talk about for 4 hours a week?!?” – things went really well. Sure, the pay was terrible and I was excluded from faculty governance, but I also had reduced responsibility and a level of insulation. I could focus on teaching, and engage with departmental politics more or less on my terms. After the first semester, I managed to garner something of a student fan base, and I was offered the opportunity to develop and teach a class based on my dissertation (Youth and Teens Online). I had a great time, was tremendously lucky, and the students loved the course. For me, it offered not only an easy return to my work, but also numerous opportunities to see it from new perspectives and to reflect on my own ethnographic practices – a topic I’ll return to in later posts.

But, my time as an adjunct came at a cost. I find myself in a position where only one thing really matters – a stable and livable paycheck. Despite the fact that the department wants to keep me around as an adjunct, I simply can’t afford to stay, particularly when faced with newly activated student loan costs, rising costs of living, and the realities of adjunct salaries. While pay is the issue that keeps me up at night, I also find myself frequently considering my social status as an adjunct. I can critique gender roles and class status all day, and my wife, family and friends are all tremendously supportive, but none of that allows me to simply ignore the tropes/positions of “deadbeat husband” and “professional student.”

Obviously, I’m on the job market, if a very small one. My wife and I purchased a home here in Upstate NY when I started my doctoral work, she is doing her own doctoral work (and working full time) locally, and our families live nearby. In other words, the price of moving for an academic position is simply too high, particularly when considered against often temporary, contract or low-paying jobs. As teaching locally full-time (or sustainably part-time) ceases to be a possibility, I have increasingly positioned myself as what my former committee member Kim Fortun described as a “methods man.” Qualitative and quantitative research methods skills are in demand, particularly in a corporate world increasingly focused on data mining, niche marketing, and forecasting. Market research firms, strategic consulting firms, and various media industries all need researchers, and typically offer salaries which are far beyond what can be found in entry-level tenure track positions.

In some ways, I find the range of opportunities available to me to be liberating. There are genuinely interesting ethnographic research projects to be had out there, and while I don’t want to over idealize, I’m willing to bet that corporate research has a slightly higher chance of actually being used for business and policy decisions. I’m even finding calls for positions – both in the corporate and non-profit realms – which are looking specifically for Internet safety experts. That said, there’s still something a little unsettling about considering a corporate position.

So, this is where I’m going to focus the posts that follow – what ethnographic research is coming to mean to me as an individual in a state of employment limbo, between the academic and corporate worlds. Because I’m not really actively doing research at the moment, my discussion will focus a little more on my experiences with the job search and the anxieties that come with considering research outside of traditional academic channels and support networks. Next up, a return to selling out, from Goldman Sachs to Human Terrain…

Nathan Fisk is an Adjunct Lecturer in the Science and Technology Studies department at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he teaches Sociology, and Youth and Teens Online. His research has focused primarily on issues of youth Internet safety, although he has been occasionally been known to make vaguely interesting statements concerning video games, childhood, digital democracy, and hacking. He is the author of two books, “Understanding Online Piracy,” and “Digital Piracy.”

What might one find on the sidelines of academia? If you’re the managing editor of an academic journal, such as Cultural Anthropology (CA), the sidelines are rich with activity – trouble-shooting Open Journal Systems and managing content on http://culanth.org/; staying up on open access conversations; running CA’s editorial intern program; coordinating various projects and figuring out how best to archive them; overseeing the production of the journal, in print and online; and managing the redesign of CA’s website. You’ll spend untold hours with your email client, and talk about how much time you spend there (this is part of your “busy” talk).

I didn’t see my work with CA as academic, or ethnographic, until recently. “Sidelines” is a fitting concept for the work I do at CA – managing editor by day, and ethnographer – of asthma, yoga, and alternative healthcare systems – by night, and weekend. I told myself I would stay on the sideline just until my partner finished grad school, then we could go on the job market together. But this isn’t honest – CA is much more than a day job for me (especially when you consider how I really spend my nights and weekends). I am compelled by our professional gold standard, the tenure-track position. That’s the endgame for many of us, I think. On the other hand, I love the work I do at CA. It’s an incredible space of production, if not in terms of conventional social science research.

As for my precarious position – I work on a 12-month contract and I ignore this fact. For now.

In this first post I’ll sketch some of what I’ve done in the last six or seven years, focusing on details most important for where I am today – full-time managing editor and program director (I’ll come back to “program director” in Post #2) of Cultural Anthropology, and adjunct professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). A year ago I filed my dissertation, completing my PhD in Science and Technology Studies at RPI. I’m currently trying to figure out what postgraduate research looks like and how to build an academic career outside a tenure-track line. I’m also trying to figure out where and how my work with CA can be understood, in part, as social science. This figuring marks a shift for me – for the past five years I diligently bracketed my work as managing editor from my dissertation research. Practically speaking, there were very good reasons to separate the two. But as it turns out, bracketing has several meanings, which may help to explain why I haven’t been able to keep things properly parsed out.

My work with CA began at the end of my first year in RPI’s Science and Technology Studies doctoral program. Kim Fortun and Mike Fortun were then editors; the Fortuns had just published their second issue and launched CA’s first website. With Casey O’Donnell and Shailaja Validya (also editorial assistants at the time), I would learn the peer-review process, inside and out; work with digital platforms that supported journal publication; and build a repository of supplemental material for CA essays. The internship (from May 2007-August 2008) gave me the opportunity to work closely with the Fortuns. It also kept me in the digital humanities world, a world I thought I had left for the PhD.

Prior to RPI’s PhD program, I earned my M.A. in Women’s Studies from the University at Albany, SUNY. My work there brought feminist praxis to emerging digital humanities projects – exploring how digital space allows for (and produces) different pedagogies; analyzing the landscape of digital research and its pitfalls; and working with forms of representation made possible with digital infrastructure. My thesis was a historical hypertext fiction, a story written around the Triangle Factory Fire and presented in digital form. Imagine a 100+ page website with images from public archives, maps and technical drawings created with Adobe, all presented with fictional and nonfiction accounts of the Triangle Factory Fire. I assumed I would never be able to undertake this kind of work in a PhD program, even if the program was “interdisciplinary”.

Thankfully, this wasn’t the case.

My doctoral research focused on chronic disease epidemics and the various forms of care that emerged around these epidemics. My original project looked at Alzheimer’s disease and aging; my later, dissertation work turned to asthma, a complex and poorly understood environmental health problem. This later project was embedded within the Fortuns’ larger digital humanities project, The Asthma Files. At RPI, digital projects are everywhere – built into course curriculum, a key component of grants, and, increasingly, a site of ethnographic practice. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences has been a productive space in this regard; digital scholarship proliferates. My colleagues inspire me, and the context infuses the work I do. Although I’ve often felt discontinuity and fragmentation in my training and research, a solid thread can be found in the mash-up. It’s just not the thread I’ve desired or focused on.

Maybe all I need is a slight shift in perspective and practice, a move that could merge my day job and night work. The split identity is tiring. If I were to continue being honest I might admit that my split sense of identity – my struggle to maintain an ethnographic project while working at CA AND teaching at RPI – is produced on the sideline, because of the sideline. A sideline I ran to with open arms and much enthusiasm.

Can precarity really be ignored?

Production from the sideline sustains academia today, that’s the story. It’s my story, and my ethnography. It’s an ethnography informed by my interdisciplinary training in STS and Women’s Studies. The study is project-oriented, and lives on several scales. Projects embedded within projects. The projects are collaborative, envisioned with colleagues from various fields and situations. We trade in technical tricks and specialized language. It’s ethnography directed by the problems and possibilities of academia. It unfolds in the relationship between the “field” and its sideline, the space where I catch myself doing ethnography, on the job, everyday.

Collaborative, interdisciplinary work – the kind that I find myself doing at CA – is increasingly needed in/from the humanities and social sciences. I don’t want to romanticize the digital humanities or interdisciplinary projects. Collaboration can be incredibly difficult. “Production” often happens at a snail’s pace. Yet it’s the problem areas, the problematic, where care is most needed, where care is practiced – open-ended process characterized by “various hands working together (over time) towards a result” (Mol, 2009).

What might it look like to turn my sideline into ethnographic project? Living as a digital anthropologist instead of managing editor + ethnographer of contemporary care + adjunct professor + …

Ali Kenner is managing editor and program director at Cultural Anthropology, and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She also teaches Vinyasa and Kundalini yoga in Upstate New York.

In this discussion by and about anthropologists working at the boundaries of academia, a reasonable place to start is with a statement of academic situatedness.  But in academia today—and especially on its sidelines—talking about situatedness can be tricky business.  In the traditional U.S. academic trajectory with a tenured academic position as the ultimate goal, a simple name, rank, and affiliation answer was sufficient and expected. Moreover, that small piece of information could offer a good amount of information about one’s intellectual pedigree and leanings, relative degree of success, and likely fields of expertise. For so many today, though,  both within academia in contingent positions and those working outside of academia, describing one’s institutional situadedness requires qualifiying language of  temporality, multiplicity, and fluidity. These qualifications we make, offered apologetically or not, stem, I believe, from the gap between the reality of academic careers in the U.S. today and the ideal(ized) traditional tenure-track career trajectory, which we still hold as the norm.  This despite the fact that those with tenure and on the tenure-track comprise a distinct minority of faculty in U.S. colleges and universities. Recent statistics and studies indicate that somewhere between 65% and 75% of all faculty in U.S. colleges and universities are in part-time or adjunct positions while only 25%-30% are tenured or on the tenure track. And these numbers do not account for those who went into academe aspring to careers that looked like those of their own professors and mentors, but who now work fully or partly outside of academia. The next few weeks will take up these issues as they pertain to the field of anthropology and the practice of ethnography, and in doing so will offer ideas about centers and margins, success and failure, and tradition and innovation.

First, though, a quick look to my academic and professional trajectory, offered as a kind of case study.  After getting an undergraduate degree in anthropology (with a big dose of dance thrown in), I decided to work for a year or two before going for my doctorate in anthropology.  At the encouragement of an esteemed professor, I applied to work in the Dance Program at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), attracted by the possibility of immersion in a completely different world. Months went by with no word from the NEA. I took that as a sign that I’d better get on with the grad school plan without the detours,  so I applied to doctoral programs in anthropology.  Mere days before replies were to go out from graduate programs and almost a year after applying to the NEA, I was called down to Washington, D.C. for a job interview.  I was offered and accepted the job, deferred my acceptance into Rice University’s Cultural Anthropology Ph.D. program, and stayed at the NEA for a year and a half. It was the right move—not only did I learn about arts funding, concert dance in the U.S., and how to work outside of an academic environment, I also gathered information for my eventual doctoral disseration, a multi-site ethnography on contemporary dance in the U.S. which included the NEA as one of the field sites.  (The other field sites were dance organizations and communities of dancers in New York City, where I moved to do fieldwork  in 1997 and have never left.)

So, finally, my qualified, contingent answer about professional situatedness: right now, I’m an adjunct assistant professor at New York University; a humanities scholar with The Paul Taylor Dance Company; a freelance academic editor; and a consultant/collaborator with various choreographers and visual artists.  At other times, I’ve also worked as a market research ethnographer (more on this next week); an adjunct professor at two other New York City colleges; and, for three years, as a post-doctoral teaching fellow at NYU’s John Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought.

With all of these multiple and contingent roles, what and where are the constants? How and where do I (and we all) locate ourselves from moment to moment and from gig to gig? For me, rootedness in a particular place has been one part of the answer, and a clear antidote to vocational precariousness.  To wit, all of these various undertakings took place in the city I moved to over a decade ago to do fieldwork on the professionalization of contemporary U.S. choreographers. In addition to spatial rootedness, my own intellectual training and projects are what orients and guides me, a fact that I would venture holds true for most of us, on the academic sidelines or not.  For me, ethnographic ways of seeing and knowing serve as an internalized intellectual compass. Similarly, ongoing fieldwork with choreographers–including sustained conversations, the questions we ask of one another, and what we learn from one another—serves as a constant (albeit evolving) practice.  These elements—my training and my own work—are what I carry with me on my peregrinations through academic, corporate and non-profit arts worlds, even when I am not hired to do or teach ethnography per se.

In the weeks that follow, I’ll say more about working as an anthropologist and ethnographer outside of academic contexts and as a contingent worker within academia, and will offer concrete examples of how ethnography gets shaped and deployed in these contexts.  Next week, I’ll talk about my work as an ethnographic market researcher and examine how ethnography was understood and practiced in this context.  In the third week, I’ll talk more about my original research with contemporary choreographers, focusing on the parallels and divergences in how deprofessionalization occurs in academia and in the experiences of the choreographers I study.  Here I’ll also discuss the neoliberal jargon of flexibility and free agency and suggest ways in which seeing professionals (whether dancers or anthropologists) as “bodies for hire” may affect the nature and quality of the art and knowledge produced. In the final week, I loop back to academia and discuss how  I teach fieldwork methods and workplace anthropology to undergraduates doing unpaid internships in for-profit companies as well as in non-profit and in governmental organizations.  I’ll consider not only how to supply students with ethnographic  tools and methods, but also how to help them orient themselves ethically and intellectually within a work environment.  Finally, I also briefly interrogate the role of the internship in undergraduate study in the U.S. and argue that it is of a piece with the general environment of precarity and deprofessionalization in which knowledge workers exist today.

Laurel George is an adjunct assistant professor in New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Gallatin Division, as well as a humanities scholar with The Paul Taylor Dance Company. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Rice University in 2002.

My scholarly trajectory leading up to these series of posts on an anthropology blog is perhaps somewhat unconventional, and yet, also more straightforwardly located within the aspirational tenure-track model of the academy than some of my fellow contributors here—for the moment, at least. Even though I have worked closely with anthropologists since the earliest days of graduate school, been associated with Cultural Anthropology in good measure (c.f. here), my graduate degree—like quite a few contributors to this series—is in Science and Technology Studies (STS). And my university education prior to that was in Electrical Engineering: at Mumbai University (India) at the Bachelor’s level, and at Pennsylvania State University at the Master’s level. My dissertation research, in turn, went on to investigate the conditions of transnational mobility for Indian engineering students and professionals (between India and the United States): it was designed as a multi-sited ethnography with fieldwork components in Mumbai and in parts of the United States (more on that in my upcoming posts). I received my Ph.D. in STS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Aug 2010, after which I worked as an Adjunct Professor at my graduate department for a year, and since July 2011, I have been based at the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastricht University in the Netherlands: first as a post-doc, and currently in the capacity of a Lecturer.

So, what does doing ethnography on/from the sidelines mean for me? What exactly do the “sidelines” look like when viewed from behind my work desk? In many ways, the sidelines, at present, do not relegate me to the margins of the academic hierarchy. Sure, I did was a freshly-out-of-school looking-for-jobs adjunct at my graduate department for a year. But since, I have been fortunate to find a position, which albeit temporary, affords me all the benefits of a full-time academic scholar: I have a (small) personal research budget, a printing-and-copying budget, regular library access, I don’t have an overly demanding teaching load (my time is evenly split between research and teaching), and I have access to a wide array of institutional resources including research funding specialists and a range of administrative support staff. There are certainly ways in which academic hierarchies do matter, but often, these are equally issues of navigating through a new work environment with a significantly different organization of higher education. My position at present, that is, is hardly anything that can be termed precarious.

The precarity that does exist comes in the form of (short) limited-term employment contracts: my initial work-contract was for a period of six months, my present one for a year, and will be up for renewal soon. And while this is somewhat atypical for my current employer, work contracts ranging in-between a period of 1-4 years (with significantly higher teaching loads) are a fairly standard way in which the university maintains a flexible workforce. And this is by no means something unique to my university: limited-term work contracts, often based on pre-existing projects, seem to be a more general feature of the European research landscape. (So much so, contract-lengths often becomes a topic of conversation: much like “what’s your research about?” was a question that I dreaded as a first-year graduate student, I have come to dread the question, “how long is your contract for?” as a first-year junior member of the staff.) The big difference between adjunctdom in the U.S. and my current employer, of course, is that I am entitled to all the regular benefits of being a full-time university employee: including (a luxurious) vacation time, research budgets, health insurance. But the possibility of work contracts not being renewed, the prospect of being on the job market again, the prospect of picking up and moving again—perhaps even transnationally—is ever present. And while this is anxiety-provoking in-and-of itself, it also presents a range of practical, professional, and sometimes very mundane dilemmas: including finding the time and resources to simultaneously be a productive scholar and be on the job-market, maintaining a steady e-mail address for professional correspondence, figuring out adequate housing arrangements, shipping solutions etc. That condition and the resulting anxieties and uncertainties, I am sure, are recognizable to many on this forum: the challenge, indeed, is to make virtue out of necessity, even while remaining critical of the being in that position to begin with.

Equally, there are other ways in which I can understand being on the sidelines as well: operating on the sidelines of the tenure-track model, operating in interdisciplinary spaces on the sidelines of mainstream anthropology, and operating in collaborative modes on the sidelines of dominant models of academic production in the humanistic social sciences. And all of these happen, for me, in the context of two key factors: transnational mobility (between India-U.S.-The Netherlands, in my case), and limited-term work contracts. All of these cumulatively shape how I, in turn, operationalize my own research projects.

In the series of posts that will follow, I unpack each one of these to a limited extent: my next post will focus on the idea of doing ethnography in transnational contexts. Transnationalism, of course, has been a dominant frame in/for much of contemporary ethnographic theorizing, including mine. But what I am interested in drawing attention to is not so much the theoretical tradition, but rather reflecting on what being transnationally mobile myself has meant in terms of the work I do. When place-based assumptions and commitments about research and teaching are not viable, what kind of ethnographies seem plausible? What constraints—and opportunities—present themselves to further ethnographic theorizing? What does making virtue out of necessity entail in this context?

My third post will focus on the idea of interdisciplinarity. Having graduated from an interdisciplinary field and continuing to do ethnography within interdisciplinary spaces, I tease out the relationship between interdisciplinarity and ethnographic production. What happens to ethnography when operationalized in interdisciplinary spaces, such as those of STS? What are the constraints and possibilities that interdisciplinarity poses? My last post will focus on the idea of collaboration: as a way of keeping exiting networks vital, as a way of finding continuity even as I am on the move,  and as a mode of scholarship that I find particularly compelling and enjoyable. I reflect on the exercise of collaboration itself and the kinds of ethnographies that emerge.

Each of these—transnationalism, interdisciplinarity, and collaboration—are definitive aspects of ethnographic production for me, and I am sure, for many others as well. My hope, then, is to flesh out what these imply for the kinds of research (and teaching) that I (can) undertake, and hear from Savage Minds readers about the conditions that define their own scholarly trajectories and the kinds of strategies available for navigating those.

Stay tuned! And join the conversation!!

Aalok Khandekar is currently lecturer at the Department of Technology and Society Studies at Maastircht University in the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Aug 2010. His personal website can be found here.

This post is part of a series on the relationship between academic precarity and the production of ethnography, introduced here.

Last month I was involved as a planning committee member for a neat little event, the annual Anthropology in London Conference.  Each June the anthropology departments at SOAS, Goldsmiths, LSE, UCL, Brunel, and UEL (and occasionally the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine) come together as a community for a full day of talks and panels by doctoral students, academic staff, and anthropologists at large (mostly but not exclusively based in London).  Unsurprisingly, the planning committee had wanted the theme for the event to somehow reflect both the current atmosphere of the discipline but also of London, the confluence of the 2012 Summer Olympics, the European economic crisis, and the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts. The theme we settled on—Certainty? (with a question mark)—struck a resonant and suitably interrogative chord.

If the waxing and waning drive for “certainty” deeply frames the academic profession (e.g. the tenure-track as canonical objective) I suppose I’ve had to contend with only a typical overall level of it, but it rarely feels that way.  When I slid from technical employment and a BS in physics and computer science into the social sciences, it kicked off a cognitive and professional butterfly effect I couldn’t return to order even if I wanted to.  Though several of my graduate mentors were anthropologists, I came not out of an anthropology program but rather a program in science & technology studies.  I suspect that many here would concur with my own (mercifully limited) experience as an STS-person the academic job market: the thaumatrope-like character of the field is usually received within more conventionally-disciplined departments as either powerfully “interdisciplinary” or suspiciously “everywhere and nowhere at once.”

Even my dissertation fieldwork—nine months in north India—largely took the form of participant-observation within a school, specifically an institution for the training of satellite image interpreters.  Most SM readers will be familiar with the often dicey proposition of having to explain their fieldwork to funding organizations or governmental agencies charged with evaluation, auditing, or border control.  It may well be that you can’t throw a rock in South Asia without hitting an anthropologist, but throw satellite images and “school as fieldsite” into the mix and you’re pretty much guaranteed to confuse people before you’ve really gotten anywhere.  If I’d had to choose a one-word theme for that work, Uncertainty! (with an exclamation point) might have worked fairly well.

From that perspective my current post is in many ways simply a continuation of that trajectory.  Apart from the time I spent as a graduate teaching or research assistant at my alma mater, to date I’ve been employed by five universities, but in 2009 I was hired into my first permanent post since finishing graduate school, a lectureship with the Anthropology Department at University College London.  My envelope for precarity has been pushed in new directions as the coordinator of an innovative new masters program in Digital Anthropology (see Alex Golub’s nicely relevant post from Oct 2009).  My hire was clearly a bit of a gambit both on UCL’s part (I’m in the vast minority of staff whose PhD is notin anthropology) and my own, but it was also a “no-brainer,” an unmitigated opportunity in the rarified job market and enforced cosmopolitanism of the academy.

It also represented, however, a good bit more than the typical tumult of a first permanent post.  It would simultaneously be my first experience teaching at the graduate level (“postgraduate” in UK-parlance), my introduction to teaching outside the US, and for both me and my partner our first time living in a foreign country (fieldwork aside).  Crucially, it was also my first deep exposure to the British anthropological tradition, the European funding landscape, and higher education in the UK.  I’d love to say the ubiquity of English softened that maelstrom, but anthropology and academia are as rife with idiom and colloquialism as any other culture.  The US-UK shift in language, in fact, is a lot like the shift in driving: in the abstract not so alien…and in fact that’s the problem.  It’s a little too familiar, just enough to seduce you into thinking you know what’s going on as you zip into that roundabout.

There’s been some great discussion on SM over the last year about various “digital anthropologies,” and I may try and engage a bit with that in later posts, but key at the moment is the shimmering mirage that “my fieldsite,” in retrospect, has become in this perpetually disorienting milieu.  Digital Anthropology was a bold move, a long fly ball to left field (a slog over deep forward?) for the house of Purity and Danger, and the intellectual and administrative overhead involved in inaugurating that project has been all-consuming (the forthcoming volume from Berg is only its latest manifestation).  Not least among those challenges has been the immediate relevance of a perennial question near and dear to the heart of contemporary anthropology—the precise constitution of “fieldwork” and “the fieldsite” in an era of accelerating global flows—a question whose checkered lineage would stretch back through work not just on virtual worlds and telecommunications, but diasporic migrations, the expansion of off-shoring, globalization writ large.

Image caption: A protest against cuts to UK education staged in the London Hyde Park recreation on Second Life, including an effigy of UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg (screengrab by the author, 2010).

It wasn’t long at all before I noticed a parallel—sometimes disheartening, other times catalyzing—in these two contingent dimensions of my work.  First, the task of translating innovation in anthropological approaches to “the Network Society” into a fertile, coherent, and practical masters programme (only a single year within the UK).  Second, the relentless push to extend my own well-funded and fieldwork-driven research programme—while living and working in one of the acknowledged “core nodes” of that Network Society.  Both these dimensions had as their vanishing point the same question: how to evaluate claims that such-and-such is a “community” or “fieldsite,” that this-or-that activity constitutes “fieldwork” or “ethnography” (see Carole McGranahan’s recent and illuminating post on the latter).

The academic job market in the UK has been no stronger than that of the US of late, and so it was statistically unsurprising when my partner (an anthropologist) landed her own tenure-track post back in the States last summer.  The all-too-common precarities of academic coupledom have meant a year apart, and while we’d had plenty of previous experience with long separations we agreed to reevaluate after the first year.  The fatigue of a trans-Atlantic relationship, London’s cost-of-living, and the affordances of my more malleable professional profile have left us, in this effervescent fountain of precarity, with yet another no-brainer.  I’ll formally be leaving UCL at the end of the summer, with very little in the way of professional “certainty” on my immediate horizon.
At the risk of sounding like I’m making excuses, despite my hopes for a return “my fieldsite” in India has inexorably receded out of view with the official demands of my institution and post.  What is equally clear, however, is that the bulk of my engagement with “the spirit” of fieldwork and ethnographic practice has come largely from outside of any established “research program.”  Instead, some of my most “ethnographic” work and thinking has come in getting to know the places I actually live and work(Walthamstow, a northeastern borough of Greater London, and Bloomsbury in central London), how to get around (primarily walking and public transportation, especially the Victoria Line on the London Underground), and the courses I’ve taught(especially my course on the Anthropology of Games and Simulation, where “contingency” is thematic).  It’s from those “sidelines” of life here I’ll be discussing my own career compulsions and ethnographic uncertainties.

Lane DeNicola is a Lecturer in Anthropology at University College London and the inaugural convener of UCL’s masters program in Digital Anthropology. His PhD in Science & Technology Studies was completed at RPI in 2007.