Anthropology matters for professionals!
Anthropology matters for professionals!
About
Forging non-academic career pathways at the graduate and undergraduate level
Roundtable held at the 116th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association
Thursday, November 30, 2017
Abstract: Anthropology departments and the American Anthropological Association proudly advertise the diversity of non-academic professional career paths for anthropology trainees. A growing number of departments offer dual degree programs and Applied MA or Certificate programs that promote professional training and opportunities, with particular strengths in cultural resource management, health services and sciences, and medical and public anthropology. However, there are many other subfields of anthropology that, while not traditionally affiliated with such programs, combine theoretically rigorous approaches to understanding human behavior with field, quantitative, and mixed methods of data collection and analysis. Training in these disciplines can foster proficiency in cultural competency, data science and visualization—all highly marketable skills in a globally connected, service-and data-oriented professional economy.
More formal integration of non-academic skills training and professional opportunities in these subfields, at both the graduate and undergraduate level, could boost programs’ campus visibility, vitality, and student diversity, while ultimately expanding the influence of anthropological perspectives outside of academia. This roundtable brought together faculty who are active in existing Methods Training or Applied certificate and MA programs, and quantitative evolutionary and sociocultural anthropology PhDs now working in industry and government. The panel addressed specific courses of action that current graduate and undergraduate students, who are not presently affiliated with Applied programs, can take to forge non-academic careers, and proposed a framework to encourage future faculty and departmental support in this area.Presenters: Karla Davis-Salazar (University of South Florida), Kendall V. House (Boise State University), Luke J. Matthews (RAND Corporation), Rosalyn Negrón (University of Massachusetts Boston), Lisa Rende Taylor (Issara Institute), Paul Joseph Scanlon (National Center for Health Statistics), Jeffrey C. Johnson (University of Florida)
Organizers: Melanie A. Martin (Yale University), Kathrine E. Starkweather (Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology), Wesley Allen-Arave (University of New Mexico)
Discussion summary
A recap of the roundtable discussion
General themes
Methods training and concrete skills are key
- Anthropologists are valued for: interview skills, a holistic viewpoint, ethical research practices, advocating on behalf of participants, and mixed-methods research skills (a definite competitive edge)
- Anthropologists with skills in statistics and formal, systematized methods of analysis are competitive candidates for jobs that predominately go to sociology, public health, and economics majors who routinely receive training in formal research methods
- Anthropologists with mixed-methods training who can collect, analyze, and integrate both qualitative and quantitative data have an invaluable skill set; they are able to walk all the way from qualitative data to formal statistical models
- Dr. Negrón felt that she had such a rich methods training in graduate school that she had plenty of opportunities, and could see herself working in a think tank, government, and many different organizations.
Valuable opportunities are out there
- Drs. Matthews, Rende Taylor, and Scanlon each decided that non-academic options were more in line with their values and ambitions, and purposefully pursued them. Dr. Matthews was excited by successful predictions in his primate behavioral research, and thought his modeling skills could be applied more widely to predict all kinds of phenomena. Dr. Rende Taylor felt that her dissertation research on human trafficking could be put to use immediately, and was frustrated by the academic model—from the long duration of the publishing cycle to the limited scope of its reach. Dr. Scanlon took one of Dr. Johnson’s NSF Summer Research Methods courses, which “changed his life”. He fell in love with the mechanics of research methods, and pursued a career that would focus on methods development.
- Drs. Negrón, Johnson, Matthews, Scanlon, and House each criticized the field’s stigmatization of corporate and non-academic jobs. Dr. Scanlon questioned why faculty wouldn’t want their best students in positions where they could really make a difference. Drs. Matthews and Scanlon bemoaned the fact that anthropologists just don’t apply to positions in their fields—the jobs go to sociologists, statisticians, economists, and Masters in Public Health applicants who are qualified, but lack the qualitative skills and holistic view that qualified anthropologists would have. Dr. Rende Taylor noted that in International Development, anthropologists and their skill sets are highly esteemed—but those anthropologists are mostly coming from other countries, and U.S. anthropologists just aren’t a presence.
- Dr. Davis-Salazar emphasized considering non-faculty academic options. She noted that at her campus, MA and PhD Anthropologists had been hired as Academic Advisors, Faculty Developers, and in the Office for Community Engagement—positions that explicitly drew on anthropologists’ knowledge of academia and ability to forge community relationships.
Departments can attract more undergrads through joint or certification programs that impart employable skill sets to students
- Dr. House encouraged departments to take a more proactive role in helping students, including at the BA and MA level, get work that is anthropological. He warned that when faculty think it is not their responsibility to consider students' job prospects, major counts fall and universities cut programs or invent "bridge to career" options for students that involve adding "practical" coursework (e.g. accounting) to declining majors. Dr. House recommended that departments build a better bridge to help students get work that is authentically rooted in and an extension of anthropology.
- Departments can offer students core skill sets that are employable in the current job market (e.g. design anthropology). Anthropology students at the MA level, and increasingly at the BA level, are employable in pursuits that are rooted in anthropology, given the right packaging of their skill set.
Actionable steps for students
- Look for mentors and opportunities in and outside your department that will provide you with diverse methods training
- Translate your skills to non-academic terminologies
- Look at required/desired skills listed under job descriptions posted to Linked In and other relevant sites (for International Development check: devex, DevNetJobs, UNjobs)
- Describe your research experience in terms of years of experience, personnel and money management, and specific skills exercised
- Choose Research Assistantships (RAs) over Teaching Assistantships (TAs) if possible
- Apply to non-teaching postdocs
- With faculty mentors, be clear about your vision. Don’t ask for general help. Ask for their assistance in acquiring a skill set, charting a path to a specific career, and making introductions to their non-academic colleagues. Avoid faculty who will divest in you if you tell them you plan to leave academia.
- For PhDs, choose your PhD topic strategically—i.e. one that is broadly applicable to many fields, one that will incorporate diverse methods and skills training, etc.
Actionable steps for faculty and departments
- Don’t contribute to the stigmatization of non-academic jobs
- Communicate research to the public, this will help employers better understand the value of anthropological perspectives
- Teach and use language of the non-academic world
- Make funding grad student RAs a priority in research grants
- Set up RAs and independent study opportunities for undergrads
- Reward team research
- Foster co-mentoring relationships between your grad and undergrad students (both gain skill sets)
- Be particularly mindful of women and people of color and the kind of mentorship they receive – take them seriously as researchers
- Take the time to understand career opportunities outside of academia (look at job databases)
- Study the current job market and identify what anthropologists are doing for a living.
- Guarantee certain methods classes will be taught on a regular basis so students can get methods training they need
- Look for collaborative opportunities with private foundations and the private sector to increase anthropological presence and opportunities for students in these areas
- Make links between class material and career opportunities
Useful links
Learning and training
Distance learning offered by the University of Florida
Online certificate program offered through Boise State University
National Science Foundation funded training opportunities in methods for cultural anthropologists
Training program offered by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Insider accounts from professional anthropologists edited by Riall W. Nolan
Information, including stories, about anthropologists working in diverse fields
Fellowships and internships
Opportunities offered through the American Association for the Advancement of Science to address today's most pressing societal challenges while learning first-hand about federal policy-making
Summer student internships at Google that give first-hand experience in industry research and end with a "conversation interview" for a full-time position
Organizations and groups
AAA section to promote the work of practicing, professional, and applied anthropologists
Online community centered around applying ethnographic techniques and social sciences theory to industrial, software, and other types of product and organizational design
Online community dedicated to non-academic and non-faculty careers for PhDs in humanities, social science, and STEM
Mentoring and advice
Blog aimed at PhDs and post-docs who want to market themselves for careers outside academia
Provides on-demand access to mentoring, tools, and support to assist with writing and research productivity strategies, grant writing, and work-life balance
A career exploration and planning tool for PhD students and post-doctoral scholars in the humanities and social sciences
Advisement tools for Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences students and postdocs, containing tips and advice any PhD job seeker can use
Panel Members
Presenters
Dr. Karla Davis-Salazar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at The University of South Florida. She recently served as an associate dean in USF’s Office of Undergraduate Studies for four years and led the planning, development, and implementation of USF’s Quality Enhancement Plan, the Global Citizens Project, as part of the university’s reaffirmation of accreditation. As a result of her experience in higher education administration, Dr. Davis-Salazar's research interests now lie in the anthropology of higher education, with a current focus on educational policy and practice.
Dr. Davis-Salazar earned her B.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Michigan and her A.M. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University.In January 2017, The College of Innovation and Design at Boise State University launched a new, fully online, 12 credit Design Ethnography Certificate (DEC) after a two-year process of collaboration with the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Kendall V. House, Lecturer in Anthropology at Boise State University, participated in winning approval for the DEC, served as lead content developer, and is currently lead instructor/advisor for the ten new DEC courses.
Dr. House earned his PhD at UC Davis in 1999. Dr. House’s professional interests include design anthropology, social evolution, labor and exploitation, and the history of anthropology.
Dr. Luke J. Matthews is a behavioral and social scientist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at Pardee RAND Graduate School. Much of his work focuses on studying cultural diffusion on social networks, that is, how people influence each other. He has applied social network analysis, simulation models, and machine learning to mixed qualitative-quantitative data.
Dr. Matthews first studied cultural diffusion in the social networks of capuchin monkeys in the Ecuadorian Amazon. He subsequently studied diffusion dynamics in systems ranging from ancient human migrations to contemporaneous Christian groups before bringing his experience to the applied sector. His applied work has used both quantitative and qualitative data to examine how cultural transmission influences a variety of decisions including religious violence and management of patient referrals by physicians.
Dr. Matthews' research has been featured in New Scientist, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. Prior to joining RAND, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and worked in private industry for a startup social network analytics company. Matthews holds a doctorate in anthropology from New York University.Dr. Rosalyn Negrón is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, specializing in urban social anthropology. Broadly, her research deals with the interpersonal dimensions of ethnicity in diverse cities, with a special focus on social interaction and social networks. With a range of applications, her work bridges multiple substantive and methodological areas, including social network analysis, sociolinguistics, health disparities, and disparities in STEM participation. She teaches several research methods courses at the undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral levels, with specialties in problem-centered trans-disciplinary and mixed methods research training.
Dr. Negrón’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the Ford Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, and her work as a research methods instructor and doctoral student mentor has been funded by the Social Science Research Council.Dr. Lisa Rende Taylor founded the Issara Institute, which focuses on innovative anti-trafficking research, technology, and programs, in 2014 and as the Executive Director she oversees all strategy and programming for the Institute. Dr. Rende Taylor has worked in the field of child welfare and anti-trafficking in Asia for almost 20 years. She started as an NSF-funded field researcher investigating parental decision-making and child welfare outcomes from an evolutionary perspective, in a location on the Thai-Burma border that ended up being one of the region’s top sources and hubs for internal and international sex and drug trafficking. Her dissertation work developed the world’s first predictive risk models for human trafficking, which ran counter to morally driven assumptions of trafficking risk at the time. She worked as a AAAS fellow in the U.S. State Department to impact human rights and anti-trafficking policy and programming, then returned to Asia to design and run anti-trafficking policy advocacy, research, and programming as Regional Director for the Asia Foundation, an evaluation specialist in the ILO, and Chief Technical Advisor for UNIAP, the UN body focused on anti-human trafficking in Asia.
Dr. Rende Taylor is a recognized authority on anti-human trafficking, regularly appearing in global televised, print, and internet media. Her doctorate (University of Washington, 2003) is in biocultural anthropology (human behavioral ecology) and her BS (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, 1996) is in biology (molecular genetics).Dr. Paul Joseph Scanlon is a research social scientist and survey methodologist with the National Center for Health Statistics’ Collaborating Center for Questionnaire Design and Evaluation Research. He has been with NCHS since 2012 and leads survey methodology research and questionnaire evaluation projects. He directs NCHS’ Research and Development Survey (RANDS), which serves as a platform to test new ways for NCHS and CDC to capture health data and evaluate measurement error.
Dr. Scanlon’s research interests include proxy and cross-cultural response patterns, how respondents’ privacy and confidentiality concerns effect survey response, and the development of techniques to quantify measurement error.
Dr. Scanlon holds a B.S. and a B.Phil. from the Pennsylvania State University and received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Georgia, where his dissertation research focused on cognitive anthropology and food studies. Prior to NCHS, he was a Presidential Management Fellow, and worked at both the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey Office and the Office of Management and Budget’s office of Statistical and Science Policy.Discussant
Dr. Jeffrey C. Johnson has been active in research projects funded by Sea Grant and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for more than three decades. He has conducted extensive long-term research supported by the National Science Foundation comparing group dynamics of over-wintering crews at the American South Pole Station, with those at the Polish, Russian, Chinese, and Indian Antarctic Stations. In addition, he is interested in network models of complex biological systems and has been working on the application of continuous time Markov chain and exponential random graph models to the study of trophic dynamics in food webs. His most recent work, funded by the Office of Naval Research, involves the development of methods for the reliable tagging, coding and network modeling of large corpora of related texts. He has published extensively in anthropological, sociological, biological and marine science journals and was the founding editor of the Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, and co-editor of the journal Human Organization. He is currently an associate editor for the Journal of Social Structure and the journal Social Networks. Dr. Johnson is the Director of the Summer Institute for Research Design in Cultural Anthropology funded by the National Science Foundation and is the author of Selecting Ethnographic Informants, Sage, 1990 and is co-author (with Borgatti and Everett) of the book Analyzing Social Networks, Sage, 2013.
Organizers
Thank you
Reviewing AAA section
(Yale University)
Roundtable chair
(Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)
Roundtable organizer
(University of New Mexico)
Roundtable organizer
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