About
the GBAC Public Anthropology Roundtable

In public anthropology, we take anthropology out of the academy and into the community. It is a publicly engaged anthropology at the intersection of theory and practice, of intellectual and ethical concerns, of the global and the local. As with other forms of public scholarship, it requires us to become involved in issues of public interest both across the world and down the street. These issues include not only such urgent public concerns as immigrants’ lives, eating disorders, women in the workplace, AIDS, human rights, transitions from mass violence, and the legacies of slavery, but also such locally specific concerns as place and public memory. By incorporating public anthropology into our teaching, moreover, our students learn to practice ethnography and anthropological analysis in hands-on projects in which they collaborate with members of local communities.

Anthropologists engaged in different institutional settings-the academy, the policy world, and the private research sector-have few opportunities to discuss public anthropology with each other. In this roundtable, six anthropologists from these settings, either based in or affiliated to Brandeis University, Tufts University, Wellesley College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will discuss their research, teaching, and practice of public anthropology. Both in the roundtable presentations and in the ensuing discussion, we will reflect upon our place within anthropology, and examine how public anthropology might reshape our discipline. Questions we will address include our location within the flows of anthropological theory and method, our interpretive authority in contexts of advocacy, contradictions arising from our collaboration with community organizations, and how public anthropology is regarded in the institutions in which we are located.