the unobservant anthropologist

I graduated last month from the University of North Texas online masters program in applied anthropology. Finally. My practicum consumed most of my life for the last year as I was also working full-time in a market research agency. No excuse really, but I’m back now and that’s what counts.

Since May 15, 2008 (the last year post) sort of in this order:

• Changed my blog name from Synthesis of Thought (but I’m not sure what I’ve changed it to yet)
• Got an internship at Intrepid Consultants, Inc – a Seattle based market research firm specializing in technology
• Moved to Seattle and started my internship/practicum in “Translating Virtual Ethnography from Academia into Practice”
• Got married – eloped in San Francisco on the second day of the AAA last November
• Gone back-and-forth on if I want to go by “Jen Kersey” or “Jen Cardew Kersey” or “Jen Cardew” professionally, but Kersey legally… it’s tough
• Continued to work on the SfAA Podcasts (the quality is SO much better this year, check them out www.sfaapodcasts.net)
• Wrote a 99 page write-up about my practicum
• Went to Hawaii
• Graduated!
• Went to EPIC2009 in Chicago

I’m still working on fixing links on this site and getting it organized. Once that’s set, I’m going to start a series about my practicum.  The work itself is confidential but the issues I encountered in translating an academic methodology into practice are ones that I can talk about.

More soon.

This is an article I wrote for Anthropology News in 2008:

As a third year student in the University of North Texas’ (UNT) online master’s program in applied anthropology, I see graduate school as my introduction to a community of practitioners. As with students in more traditional programs, I have expectations that through my graduate experience I will learn about anthropological theory and research, meet other anthropologists and begin contributing to the discipline by producing my own work. I also expect—and have participated in—an experience that is in some ways quite different from the traditional.

The UNT program was designed to take advantage of the opportunities an online educational forum provides, and to manage the challenges that online students can encounter. For example, students are required to take a qualitative methods course that requires a class project conducted for a real client, which gives them experience not only with conducting anthropological research, but also with long distance collaboration and presentations. A lack of face-to-face communication can be a real challenge in developing close relationships with people you have not yet met. For this reason, each cohort of online students begins the program with a face-to-face orientation on campus. Relationships established during this time can be continued through communication in online forums.

Opportunities outside of the online classroom can also strengthen students’ educational experiences. In addition to working as a research assistant in the department and traveling to professional conferences, I have also been encouraged to join a local practitioner organization. An essential part of becoming an anthropologist is learning about the culture of the discipline through dialog with others in the field, which can be experienced through these local groups or online through blogs, listservs and various digital anthropological networks.

Jennifer Cardew is a graduate student in the online anthropology master’s program at the University of North Texas. In 2007 she initiated a project to make the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting more accessible to students by providing selected sessions as free podcasts online at www.SfAApodcasts.net. She is currently researching the graduate experience of on-campus and online students with Christina Wasson.

“Copyright 2008 American Anthropological Association. Reprinted from Anthropology News, Vol 49, issue 6, with the permission of the American Anthropological Association.”

Happy New Year!

Planning for the 2009 round of SfAA Podcasts is now underway. We’re asking for your help in selecting the 20 sessions that will be recorded so that we can ensure a wide range of topics and interests are covered.

Suggested selection criteria include:

• Topic is “hot”
• Topic is of widespread interest to many people
• Famous speakers

The preliminary program can be found here. In listing sessions, it would be helpful if you could copy and paste the session number and the session name, e.g. “W-01 Lessons and Questions from Applied Settings” directly from the program into an email or Word doc. We would like to request your suggestions by Friday, January 15. Please send them to Jen Cardew at jencardew@gmail.com or post them here in the comments field.

Every year people come up to me at the conference and ask why their session wasn’t recorded or how we select sessions so now is your chance to speak up

My advisor, Christina Wasson, and I have been doing research comparing students’ experiences in the same graduate course for the last year and a half. The data that was collected came from an on-campus and online version of the same course, taught at the same time, and by the same professor.

Our panel was selected to be in the 2008 SfAA Podcasts. It’s a coincidence that I was on the panel- a group of people vote on the sessions. You can find the blog post containing the podcast, our PowerPoint, and our paper here.

It was an excellent panel and I really enjoyed it so I recommend you listen to it

There was a two part series at the SfAA meeting entitled “Working with Governmental Agencies.” The sessions did not get as much attention as I expected them too. After all, Montgomery McFate is one of the most talked about anthropologists in the world these days and she was on the first part of the panel.

The SfAA Podcast team received permission to record four speakers from this two part panel. McFate’s paper is not included. The others are interesting though. You can find them here.

The second and third podcasts from the 2008 SfAA Podcasts are now available at SfAApodcasts.net

The session chairs Phil Young and Carla Guerrón-Montero have put together a nice summary of the main points for this two part COPAA sponsored session.  All of the speakers in this session have a NAPA Bulletin in-press that will be a more throughout account of the SfAA papers.