Just how bleak is the academic job market for anthropologists? Job ads over the past twenty years reveal some surprises and point to ways departments are seeking to change themselves and the discipline

Pyramid Scheme. #hautalk

Forget the tut-tutting of politicians: The skills you learn in the humanities are exactly the skills you use in a job search.

The quitting economy

“A Friend of a Friend” Is No Longer the Best Way to Find a Job

In this homage to David Graeber, I turn to Americans’ experiences working in person during the pandemic as an ethnographic lens for understanding how workers respond when implicit social contracts are violated and when ideas about the common good are being contested. Because the United States federal government and many state governments refused t…[Read more]

Digital Economy and Labor

In the early decades of the internet, many saw new channels of communication as potentially beneficial disruptions, analyzing largely through a utopic lens, albeit often with a technolibertarian bent. This did not last, and by the 2020s, scholars were increasingly pessimistic about how neoliberal logics structured the ways these technologies…[Read more]

Every fall, some lucky anthropology departments get to hire. The search for a new colleague happens behind the scenes for a while before it goes public—five-year plans have been written, external reviews have been navigated, lots of conversations have occurred, and some pleading with a dean has taken place. But the first public hint that the d…[Read more]

Many job applicants spend an inordinate amount of time struggling with the task of fashioning the most appealing biography of the increasingly skillful self out of interwoven genres that can also circulate individually. These struggles are most frequently articulated as questions of how best to manage different genres’ chronotopic expectations. U…[Read more]

This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and misaligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people – as examples, the genre repertoires of job a…[Read more]

To understand how people navigate shifting media ecologies, linguistic anthropologists have turned to an array of analytical concepts that address how people communicate when using multiple channels: media ideologies, remediation, participant structures, heteroglossia, and entextualization. After demonstrating how these concepts are pertinent to…[Read more]

Online work distribution platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk or Uber alter how work tasks are chosen or assigned. Put succinctly, instead of the employer choosing the employee, the worker chooses the task. Responses to these new technological possibilities for distributing tasks are all deeply influenced by the contemporary historical moment,…[Read more]

Many of the tasks involved in looking for a job these days involve sharing and storing
digital data. Digital technology is now required for job seekers to research employers,
store resumes, complete applications, and schedule interviews. What is the employment
process for people who are living on the poverty line, without reliable access to…[Read more]

The special issue brings together anthropologists working at the intersection of language and economy to draw attention to the dynamics of how people’s experiences of social change are articulated through genre work in different institutional contexts. In recent years, many scholars working in cultural economy have turned to language as an a…[Read more]

On the art of refusing work and the labour of refusing art.

In this article we place the discussions of automation in post-work imaginaries within and alongside feminist critiques
and understandings of domestic technology. Structured in three parts, the first surveys debates on the future of work,
showing how feminist materialist critiques of technology would lend themselves to an anti-work rather than…[Read more]

The depth and significance of the shifts associated with the post-work society has pro-voked a newfound interest in the role of imagination in political thinking, made explicit by many authors who turned to the literary genre of utopian and sci-fi writing to sketch possible scenarios of the near future. This paper turns to another mode of…[Read more]

La crise sanitaire a précipité la généralisation du télétravail à domicile dans bon nombre de secteurs. S’il présente une situation privilégiée face aux risques de contagion ainsi que des avantages non négligeables en termes de flexibilité, il attaque aussi nos capacités d’auto-organisation en milieux de travail et contribue à moyens termes à l…[Read more]

John R. Palandech was a well-known immigrant publisher, politician, and entrepreneur in Chicago from the Gilded Age to the post–World War II era. This article retraces his biography and crosses it with the transatlantic political, cultural, and economic world Palandech was a part of and actor in. At the core of this study is a collection of l…[Read more]