Category: Professionalization

Standard caveat: talk this plan over with your adviser and committee — everyone has different ideas about progressing towards being a professional anthropologist. That being said, as a general timeline, I think this works for most people, as it helps to introduce you to the many facets of anthropology as a profession.

I’m basing this on the current average time to graduation in anthropology, which is about 8 years. This means 1-2 years of fieldwork followed by 2-3 years of writing. If you’re moving faster than that, the post-fieldwork phase will need to be condensed appropriately.

Years 1-3

It’s assumed that for your first 3 years you’re in the midst of coursework, passing your qualifying or preliminary exams, and grant writing to support your fieldwork. While you do all of that, try and do these things too:

1) Attend a national conference — the AAA would be the most likely candidate. It’s really helpful to see what the various roles people fill while they’re there, and to get a sense of what conference presentations look like.

2) Attend a subfield or area studies conference — these tend to be much smaller (5-10% of the size of the AAA), and you’re much more likely to run into people who’s work you’ve read. Presentations can often be longer, and sometimes follow different generic formats, all of which is useful to experience.

3) Attend a workshop or small conference — this can be hard to pull off, in part because workshops are often only for the people presenting work, but if there’s one nearby and it’s public, it can be useful to attend one. They tend to favor much longer presentations, and have much more intense and detailed discussions. Since they’re very often comprised of specialists, it can be really helpful to get a sense of what people are talking about in the present moment.

4) Get started on your CV — it can be difficult to reconstruct years of your education and service if you don’t start your CV early. Since it includes things like awards, teaching assistant positions, and departmental service, you will start accruing content early, and it’s best to stay on top of it.

5) Take a stab at your future job letter — yes, your dissertation will probably look entirely different by the time you’re writing your actual job letter, but having a draft to work from can be really helpful. This is especially the case when you go onto the job market in the throes of writing your dissertation — sometimes the most difficult period to talk about what your research is actually about.

6) Sign up for listservs in your area of interest — you can find these on sites like HNET, and they’re a great place to eavesdrop on discussions by more seasoned scholars. They can also be a great venue to find calls for papers for both conferences and publications.

While You’re in the Field (or Similar Situation)

…don’t worry about any of this stuff. It can be helpful to attend a conference if it happens locally, but don’t go out of your way to do anything.

Graduation -3 Years

7) Write a book review — journals often have books for review listed on their websites. Get in touch with the reviews editor and request a book or two — try and pick stuff that’s close to what you work on, but not too close. Often people return from the field and have a hard time getting back into academic production — this can be an easy way back in, or, at least a fairly straightforward way to start thinking academically again.

8) Develop syllabuses for general and topical courses — any academic job you apply for in the U.S. is going to have teaching expectations. Most institutions ask you to teach anywhere from 3-6 classes per year, and if it’s on the higher end of the scale, that generally means there is a lot of duplication, i.e. 3 sections of Intro to Cultural Anthropology each year. I cover this in more depth elsewhere, but for the time being, plan on 3-4 syllabuses, 2 of general interest and 2 in your area. Some good general topics are things like: Intro to Cultural/4-Field Anthro, Ethnographic Methods, and Anthropological Theory; good area syllabuses are things like: Intro to your Subfield, Intro to your Geographic Area, Intro to your Theoretical Concerns — so, in my case, Intro to Medical Anthropology, Intro to American Studies, and a course called The Biology of Everyday Life.

Graduation -2 Years

9) Write another book review — as above. You might stay with the same journal or look elsewhere. You can also choose your own book to review (i.e. not something that the journal has), and see if the reviews editor is interested in a review of it.

10) Prepare a short article manuscript for a subfield or area studies journal — I cover publishing strategies elsewhere, so I’ll keep it short here: identify a subfield or area studies journal that you like, and prepare a manuscript for them. Often, these are in the 6,000 word range, which is substantially shorter than the flagship journals. There’s no need to aim your sights too high, either in terms of journal or intervention. Prepare an article that adds a little nuance to already established subfield or area studies interests, and let people know what you do.

11) Present at a national & subfield or area studies conference — since you’ve already attended one of each, you should have a sense of what you’re getting yourself into. If you signed up for some listservs way back in years 1-3, you can find calls for papers there. For your first time out, send an abstract to someone who is organizing a panel — it’s less work than organizing one yourself, and has a better chance of making it into the conference than just submitting a solo paper. But if nothing seems to match your interests, you an always try a solo paper submission…

12) Revise your job letter — as you close in on going onto the market, take another stab at your job letter. If you’ve done all of the above, you should have some fresher material to update the letter, and if you take the time to look at some jobs ads, you’ll have a good sense of what market interests are in the present.

13) Get involved with a Special Interest section at the AAA (or similar) — many of the sections have graduate student essay awards, which can be a great place to send your first article manuscript. It might be nice to win an award, but just getting on the radar of people in your subfield or who share interests with you can be helpful in the long run.

Graduation -1 Year

14) Prepare a longer article manuscript for a general anthropology journal (but not necessarily a flagship journal) — again, I cover this in more depth elsewhere, but in short: prepare an 8,000 word article manuscript for a general audience — that is, if your first article is about something really subfield-focused, try out something more generally interesting to anthropologists . It’s probably going to take longer to develop, and once written, longer to get published, so it’s important to get this into your queue early.

15) Organize panels for a national & subfield or area studies conference — now that you’ve done at least a couple presentations, and have the start of a social network interested in your area, put together a panel for the AAA and a subfield or area studies meeting. You might present on it as well, or present on another panel, choosing to chair the ones your organize (or provide introductions to them). And try and get at least one discussant on your panel — someone in your area who you’ve had limited or no interaction with so far.

16) Present at a national & subfield or area studies conference — as above, although you may be presenting on your own panels. I make a goal of doing two panels at the AAA each year, one with people I know and have worked with before, and one of people who I know of, but have never presented with. It’s a good way to constantly be expanding your network, and many times people enjoy the opportunity to present on panels of strangers.

17) Apply for inclusion in a topical workshop — you’ll see calls for papers for topical workshops on listservs, and it’s worth applying to one in your area. The odds of getting accepted are usually pretty low — there are limited slots and lots of applicants. But if you do get in, it can be a great networking opportunity.

18) Get involved with a special interest group or subfield organization through the AAA — sometimes there’s room for a graduate student representative or other graduate student positions with special interest groups, which can be a great way to interact with senior people in your areas of interest.

19) Finalize your job letter, and start applying for jobs — I talk about this in depth elsewhere, but in your final year of writing it’s finally time to commit to applying for jobs (and postdocs).

At Graduation:

If you follow these guidelines, at the time of your graduation you should have:

An up-to-date CV, a job letter, 1 book review published and 1 in press, 1 article published and 1 in press (or under revision), a few conference presentations under your belt, and 2-3 syllabuses ready to teach. You should be well on your way to establishing a diverse social network, which will help you in publishing, teaching, and presenting in the future — and might lead to job prospects. And this all means that you should be ready for the next phase… Graduation +1.

I think it’s better to have a steady track record of getting stuff published in “respectable” journals than it is to have one piece in a flagship journal. There’s a few reasons for this:

The flagships have pretty high rejection rates, and because of the number of submissions they get, editors have less ability to step in and try and recover a rejection into a revise & resubmit. Subfield or area-focused journals receive fewer submissions, and editors are more likely to be able to see the innovation in a piece of work (even if the reviewers don’t). So whereas you might get very general critiques from a flagship journal, a subfield journal might yield more knowing and specific reports (which might also be a little more likely to be cranky — hence the need for editors to recover good submissions from their peer reviewers). So the acceptance rates at small journals can be a little misleading: If they revise & resubmit a lot, but get very few good pieces, they’ll naturally have a much higher rate than flagships which have to turn everything away.

In addition, the flagships have very long acceptance to publication times, due to the volume of stuff they agree to publish and their limited space — smaller journals are a little more hand to mouth, and
if you want to be able to send out offprints of articles, they’ll get your stuff to press more quickly.

The flagships are better off saved for your intervention into the field of anthropology, whereas subfield or area journals allow you to make more modest interventions into the subfield or area studies. So if you have something to say about theories of capitalism, globalization, secularization, etc., then send it to the flagships; if it’s about the social construction of a particular illness, subfield journals are the way to go.

Along those lines, if you don’t have a job, people don’t expect you to be shaking up the field of anthropology — hence no need to publish in the big journals yet. But they do want to see that your peers respect your work and that you steadily publish stuff — which is what the smaller journals are for.

And, lastly, any institution that gives you a tenure track position is going to diminish whatever you published before joining them. If you’ve published your two big early career articles before taking a job, they might not count towards tenure. If, on the other hand, you have a smattering of small pubs in small journals, you can write those off knowing that you have two or three big contributions to make in the six years before tenure review.

Some Other Things to Consider

Don’t publish in an edited collection until you have tenure. Often conferences and conference panels will lead people to thinking about publishing the proceedings as a collection, and while you might like all the people you worked with at the conference, there are a number of reasons why you shouldn’t publish in an edited collection early in your career: 1) The time to publication is much slower than an article in a journal. When you think about everyone involved in the collection, all the pressures they have and all the deadlines they face, it’s incredibly likely that one or more people will be behind deadline on the collection’s many deadlines. That means that they hold up the whole project. And if someone is holding up each of the points in production (initial submission, revised submission, copy edits, page proofs), the time to publication can easily be three to four years from when the idea first came up. 2) Book chapters aren’t always peer reviewed. If you’re publishing with a university press or an academic press, it’s likely that the book will be peer reviewed. And, if so, you should keep copies of the peer reviews as proof. But, if it’s a smaller publisher, it’s possible that the peer review will be perfunctory. As such, it might not end up counting as a publication in the long run. 3) Don’t bury your publications. Unless you know that there’s an ebook deal for the edited collection, it’s entirely likely that the circulation of the book will be meager at best (i.e. libraries only). Only people who seek it out will be able to find it. As a result, you may be burying a publication in an out of the way place, when you should be publishing your early work in venues where specialists will be able to find it with a minimum amount of effort. And, 4) A journal article is almost always worth more than a chapter in a book. The one exception to this is the occasional edited collection that brings together a number of luminaries, but that’s usually not the collection that freshly minted PhDs are invited to contribute to. Instead of an edited collection, try and propose a special issue of a journal — and an area studies or subfield journal (for all the reasons outlined above). It can still be slow to publication, but it’ll be faster than a book.

Don’t double dip. Sometimes you’ll have a great experience with a journal and want to send something else to them. That’s generally a bad idea, and mostly for the purpose of building an audience. If you consistently publish in one or two journals, your audience will remain relatively static. Instead, you need to be constantly widening your scope of readers, and the best way to do this is through publishing in different journals (even if they’re only slightly different in orientation). It can be fine to go back to a journal you have a positive experience with, but make sure that there’s at least two years between when the last thing you published with the journal appeared in print and the next thing you submit to them begins the peer review process. (I should also say that sometimes when people only publish in one or two journals it looks like cronyism, which is also worth avoiding.)

More to come… If you have questions, post them in the comments.

There’s a genre to AAA presentations — like for all conferences — and there’s pragmatic reasons for the genre. Basically, it goes like this:

1) A paragraph long anecdote from your fieldwork
2) The presentation of your argument and brief mention of relevant literature
3) Case #1 to explicate your argument — something ethnographically rich, but no longer than one and a half or two pages
4) Case #2, as above
5) Conclusion, including a recapitulation of your argument

Anthropologists love their introductory anecdote — especially one that presents a conundrum or puzzle. This should lead pretty naturally into your argument, so you should pick something that has a logical relation to your thesis. If you’re coming from a different disciplinary background — or are an anthropologist going to a conference in a different field — the format may differ slightly, but, generally, leading with one’s evidence is a strong way to approach a paper. If you can lead in with a quandary of some sort, it tends to pique audience member’s attention; if you start with some dry theoretical debate, chances are you’re going to lose everyone in the audience who isn’t particularly invested in that debate…

Your argument should be rather straightforward — don’t give people too much to think about: just one idea will do. Remember, your paper is only 7-8 pages long, and thoroughly explaining one idea will take up that space quickly. Your mention of relevant literature can be quite short — just a couple names will do, if that. Assume that your audience knows the genealogy of your argument, unless it originates from some other, uncommon source. But even if that’s the case, keep your discussion of sources rather short — interested audience members can always ask you about it later or look it up online. You’re there to present your ideas, not someone else’s.

I may be alone in this, but most of what I remember from past AAA presentations are the empirical cases that people present in their papers. They don’t need to be especially long, but they should be good ones — you want your audience remembering what you do and what your research is based on. If you have a website — either a personal one or one hosted by your university or academia.edu — make sure that the keywords that people might take away from a presentation are reflected in that website. I often remember what people talk about, sometimes their institutions, and rarely their full names. Years later, when I try and look someone up, those are pretty much the keywords I plug into Google. You want to make sure that your conference keywords are the keywords that will bring people to your work. That might seem commonsensical, but it’s important to keep in mind that there is often drift between how one presents oneself online and in person (and his or her research) and what has been presented in the past. Keep your metadata fresh, but also make sure it reflects what you’ve done historically.

If your panel has a discussant (or two), please be kind to them. Usually discussants will ask for papers by a specific date; be respectful of that deadline. Yes, things come up, and sure, there can be delays. But your discussant is probably counting on those kinds of things happening in her or his life too. So a rough draft of a paper is better than no paper or a late paper. Also: sending things like the whole chapter that the presentation is going to be carved out of or a published article that you plan on basing your presentation on are not appropriate things to do. Yes, you’re busy, but so is your discussant (presumably, that’s what he or she is your discussant, after all). Trying to guess what your presentation is going to be — based on too much or the wrong information — isn’t going to lead to a very good discussion. And, it’s likely to just mean that your presentation isn’t going to be included in any formal remarks about the panel. That can be okay: some discussants are great at winging it and might be able to fit in a discussion of your paper based on what they hear. Rather than burden your discussant with a guessing game, you can always just make the suggestion that you’d be happy to have more freewheeling comments based on the presentation you eventually give.

If a panel goes especially well, panel organizers often get the idea that it could become something more, and conference presentations sometimes get spun into articles or book chapters in edited collections. That can be a fine afterlife for a conference presentation, with the caveat that guest-edited journal issues can sometimes be treacherous, and edited collections are sometimes not counted as peer-reviewed (which may or may not be important given your professional needs). For more on publishing strategies, look here.

Here’s an example of a paper (my AAA presentation from a panel in 2012) and the book chapter it eventually became. If you’re looking for other examples, you can always look up old presentations in conference proceedings and email the author to see if she or he will share the paper as presented. Some people (like me) keep this stuff for years…

Finally, be sure to keep in mind the recommendations for accessible presentations. Printing out copies of your talk can be helpful for many audience members, and ensuring that any visual component is high contrast (e.g. having a white or black background with the opposite colored text) helps people make sense of what they see.