Disturbing Disruptions and Aspirational Participation as an Academic Anthropologist: Reflections on COVID‐19, Neoliberalism, and Climate Change

Abstract

In this article, I outline my aspirational participation as an academic anthropologist in the three arenas wherein my worth, and hence expendability, is measured: teaching, scholarship, and service. I reflect on the personal, social, and ecological impacts of my anthropological fieldwork and development over the last two decades in light of the life-altering effects of COVID-19. While reflexive turns continue to guide the accountability of researchers to ourselves and our interlocutors in writing and research processes, further consideration of how and where we show up in our teaching and at professional meetings will help to address how neoliberalism has shaped our discipline, leading to a greater realization of anthropology's transformative potential to address social justice and ecological concerns. I suggest that rather than lamenting the pause provided by COVID-19 and longing for anthropology and academia as it was, or as we imagined it to be, this disruption might give us pause to draw from our reflexive tradition. The world has been remade, providing anthropologists with additional tools to address our elitism and ecological footprint, including the destruction wrought by our contribution to climate change on some of the same communities for whom we advocate. [academic anthropology, anthropological professionalism, climate change, reflexivity, social justice] My development as a professional anthropologist throughout the 2000s informs this article. I write as a privileged full-time tenured and promoted midcareer academic anthropologist, white, cisgender male with a middle-class upbringing and existence. I have lived nearly five decades in the United States of America. My privilege means I do not have that much to worry about in my everyday existence if I do not want to. Professionally, if I want that one last brass ring-to be promoted to full professor-I must accelerate productivity along the three broad categories of review: teaching, research, and service. I am competing for promotion against previously unsustainably productive versions of myself and colleagues university-wide who would also like the acknowledgment, prestige, and pay rate that comes with promotion.