Cool Anthropology: How to engage the public with academic research

As the discipline of Anthropology has grown and changed over the past century, its focus has expanded from a detached documentation of human behavior around the world to an engaged exploration of human behavior across an uneven and ever-changing global landscape. As what we think of as cultures and societies became less bounded, Anthropology began to tackle “big concepts” like globalization, development and, more recently, climate change. But Anthropology has always taken on challenging topics, albeit through its imperfect academic lens.

Evolution, kinship, race, migration, conflict: these foundational areas of study are as relevant now as they were in Boas’s time. Hurston’s anthropological novels have received a resurgence of interest and celebration in light of ongoing, and more public, conversations around the silencing of Black voices. Mead’s ethnography in slim, yellowing paperback still lines shelves in used bookstores. They remind us that public anthropology is not new. Writing for the public – tackling hard issues and making sense of them in ways that informed and engaged non-academics – is part of our disciplinary history. While “writing culture” – and writing culture for the public, however we define this remains an essential part of what anthropologists do, our tool kit has been responsive to changing moments in history, understandings and affordances, and has grown. Digital spaces not only create new publics for anthropological writing, they can redefine the research and dissemination process in ways that allow for a redefinition of what it means to understand humans “across time and space.”