We have been motivated to write this project for two reasons. Firstly, we want to help anthropologists work through ideas in more informal ways and to familiarise a wider audience with uncommon, and often estranging, knowledge of anthropologists. Secondly, we want to assert anthropological thinking styles in light of current far-reaching social and political  uncertainties.

This project comes in the form of a blog and podcast. We are looking to create an opportunity for anthropologists and other social scientists to engage more openly with critical questions of the anthropological concern, including those that can be at times confronting.  We want to make anthropological theory, practice, activism, and also space for personal reflection more accessible. We specifically wish to engage theory in a manner that is more relatable to a non-academic audience, to help both anthropologists and non-anthropologists alike to support anthropology’s relevance. As the frontiers of anthropology have moved significantly from its’ non-reflexive beginnings, we would like to capture some of the experiences of anthropologists today and the impact that their field sites have on them.

Our second aim responds to the critical political events of 2016 – explicitly the rise of potent anti-intellectual movements on the fringes of politics that now appears to be moving into the mainstream. We hope that The Familiar Strange can be part of the intellectual push to keep these movements accountable, to explore, expose and examine their positions. We acknowledge that within the leftist and liberal position, there are many contradictions, and part of our aim is to grapple with these just as we similarly take to task slippages of cultural relativism into ‘moral relativism’, and conservative ethnocentrism.

In sum, we want to broaden understanding of anthropology among students and the wider community, and to provide our teachers and academics with an attractive and accessible platform for their ‘unpolished’ ideas. We want to raise awareness and provide stepping stones for good debate and personal reflection.