Academic Precarity in American Anthropology: A Forum

Photo by Tim Sackton, licensed under CC BY SA.

If as many as 80 percent of doctoral students in cultural anthropology are not getting tenure-track jobs, then why are PhD programs in the United States almost exclusively training them for a professional life that few will realize? A new essay from David Platzer and Anne Allison tackles this question head-on, drawing on their own experiences in elite departments and on interviews with tenure-stream faculty, recent PhDs, current graduate students, and staff members of the American Anthropological Association. Recognizing the critical importance of this issue to our discipline, the Cultural Anthropology editorial team has convened a forum around Platzer and Allison’s essay, inviting responses from both senior scholars and recent PhDs who are contending with precarity firsthand. We invite our readers to engage with the analysis and the proposals for change offered here, and we hope the forum can play a part in reframing the private troubles of those “on the market” as a pressing public issue.

Posts in This Series

Academic Precarity in American Anthropology

Academic Precarity in American Anthropology

This essay addresses the precariousness of the job market for U.S.-based PhDs in sociocultural anthropology. While a tenure-track job remains the career goal of... More

Epistemologies of the Job-Seeker

Epistemologies of the Job-Seeker

I came to academia not to stay in academia. Having worked in the development sector for many years, I embarked on a PhD with the goal of satisfying my intellect... More

Nested Precarities: On the Limits of Solidarity and the Future of Knowledge

Nested Precarities: On the Limits of Solidarity and the Future of Knowledge

Sigmund Freud once famously asked, “What does a woman want?” The question was rhetorical: after thirty years of research, he declared it unanswerable. With the ... More

Beyond Precarity

Beyond Precarity

As we read David Platzer and Anne Allison’s essay and the initial round of responses to it, we were struck by two things. First, we noted sincere concern about ... More

Precarious Love: On Solidarity in Times of Collapse

Precarious Love: On Solidarity in Times of Collapse

Recently, a senior anthropologist advised me that “academia is dead, but you might as well keep applying. After all, it’s a job.” While this advice provocativel... More

Applying Anthropology

Applying Anthropology

We hope to add to recent discussions of academic precarity in American anthropology our story of a modest, but nonetheless significant, success in growing a gra... More

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Academics often police the boundaries between academia and the corporate world, showing a preference for those who choose the academic route with a million smal... More

Academic Precarity and Anthropology as a Discipline

Academic Precarity and Anthropology as a Discipline

David Platzer and Anne Allison’s immensely stimulating and provocative essay draws attention to one of the most pressing problems facing anthropology today. The... More

Enough Outsourcing of Precarity

Enough Outsourcing of Precarity

Let me start by stipulating that some of my observations here are more related to the European job market, which is characterized by the dominance of public uni... More

How Academic Hierarchy Shapes the Distribution of Precarity

How Academic Hierarchy Shapes the Distribution of Precarity

Many anthropologists proclaim a commitment to fighting structural inequalities, but academic anthropology often reproduces the very inequities its practitioners... More

The Invisible Labor of the Academic Job Market

The Invisible Labor of the Academic Job Market

David Platzer and Anne Allison’s essay on academic precarity in American anthropology is both sobering and coldly reassuring. In the five years since earning my... More

Personal Precarity

Personal Precarity

As a graduate student, what I found most striking about the initial round of responses to this forum was their silence on the matter of poverty. The fear and an... More

The Brightest Will Rise, and Other Errors

The Brightest Will Rise, and Other Errors

As always, the best questions make for the best thinking and writing. The four incisive questions that David Platzer and Anne Allison pose concern whether tenur... More

On Training Anthropologists Rather than Professors

On Training Anthropologists Rather than Professors

There is something rotten in academia right now. This idea is at the heart of David Platzer and Anne Allison’s essay “Academic Precarity in American Anthropolog... More

On Complaint in the Face of Precarity

On Complaint in the Face of Precarity

Recently, I had a conversation with one of my dearest friends from graduate school in which we reflected on our experiences over the past five years. We were pa... More

Graduate Student Family Precarity and the Impossible Balance, or, Why We Can’t Do It All

Graduate Student Family Precarity and the Impossible Balance, or, Why We Can’t Do It All

Our peers ask us: “How do you do it? I barely survive graduate school just taking care of myself. I could never also take care of a child!” Yet they often go on... More

The Precarity of Academic Work, The Work of Academic Precarity

The Precarity of Academic Work, The Work of Academic Precarity

Ethan and I were sitting on the gaudy red carpet of the Marriott, waiting for a panel to begin. “I just used to be so confident,” he blurted out, as if he had b... More

Provincializing Precarity

Provincializing Precarity

Sometime in the early 1990s, I first encountered George Stocking’s (1979) historical sketch of the anthropology department at the University of Chicago. This si... More

Notes from the Bat Cave

Notes from the Bat Cave

I’m going to make this personal. The office space for adjuncts in the social sciences at the University of Houston–Downtown has no windows. I call it “the bat c... More

Precarity in Perspective

Precarity in Perspective

Recently, there has been a great deal of concern regarding both the place of anthropology in the university curriculum and the fate of graduate students who wil... More

Suddenly, Statistics?

Suddenly, Statistics?

One theme shared by many of the contributions to this forum is a call to attend more closely to statistics. Yet, as this proposal is made in the name of underst... More

Teaching Precarity

Teaching Precarity

“I plan to become an anthropology professor,” declared A., a student who came to my office last October soon after I began teaching anthropology in Stellenbosch... More

Let’s Design New Possibilities for Graduate Training in Anthropology

Let’s Design New Possibilities for Graduate Training in Anthropology

Over the last ten years, since the financial implosion of the Great Recession, there has been intense interest in rethinking graduate training and the overabund... More