This week on TFS, the Strangers continue with our new panel format and dive deeper into the topics of entrepreneurism and ethics. They talk about how universities and by extension academia is becoming more and more business-like with academics having to “build their brands” in order to find success. The conversation then shifts to discuss the current ethical framework of Anthropology. The Strangers share their experiences with fieldwork ethics and how modern anthropology has started to slowly adopt new ethical practises. 

Links

If you wanted to read further about the relationship between Entrepreneurism and Neolibralism read more here: 

Aihwa Ong’s Neoliberalism as Exception Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty
https://www.dukeupress.edu/neoliberalism-as-exception?fbclid=IwAR2mVTw5abARYaUnVAHb1tjsHRPqPbRQICJ6w68yGMg1SJs-Zf7IbzafY-k

Carla Freeman’s Entrepreneurial Selves: Neoliberal Respectability and the Making of a Caribbean Middle Class
https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Entrepreneurial_Selves.html?id=ZZ2iBgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y&fbclid=IwAR3s8-OkiwdV-J0VjPAby-7VHKzK4FRsNb1XctZy3nES1OGNtnHbzT5wezw

Quotes

“Couldn’t we say that entrepreneurism is kind of a lifestyle?” 

“But I feel like its the worst part of academia, the kind of late capitalist, precarization of academic work that requires you to build a brand like this” 

“But obviously that’s not possible anymore and universities are increasingly businesses as much as they are institutes of higher education” 

“I feel like we’re doing this the wrong way round though, we should be anthropologizing entrepreneurism, as opposed to entremenpuraisling anthropology” 

“The advice we were kind of given was that ethics was something we had to manage, that anthropology wasn’t amenable to the bioethical, biomedical model” 

“Because the idea of having research like “subjects” is something that is anathema to a lot of the things that a kind of more modern and more contemporary anthropology is trying to do” 

“It’s hard to put a blanket set of ethics over anthropology as a whole in general because there’s so much that is very arbitrary about each and every individual person’s niche.” 

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This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific and College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, and is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com
Shownotes by Matthew Phung
Podcast edited by Alex D’Aloia and Matthew Phung 

Feature image “Rush Hour” by André Hofmeister (2014)
https://flic.kr/p/jdmGR8