Anthropology Department Members Publish Essay on Community-Engaged PhDs
February 16, 2024
Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Jonathan Anjaria, Associate Professor of Anthropology and GSAS’s Faculty Director of Professional Development, and Moriah King, PhD student in Anthropology, published the essay “Enabling Community-Engaged and Public-Facing PhDs'' in the American Council of Learned Societies report Preparing Publicly Engaged Scholars, which came out on February 1, 2024. In their essay, Anjaria (who is King’s advisor) and King shared their perspectives on the ongoing conversation about how doctoral students can conduct community-engaged projects while enmeshed in an academic world that is not always set up for them.
King discussed her experience as a PhD student who came from a role in government at the Corporation of National and Community Service. Having engaged in community-led research there, she brought that experience to her doctoral studies and is now working with a community in her dissertation project, which centers the experiences of a group of mainly Black women farmers in Georgia. Anjaria wrote of his own experience working with Cambridge Community Development as the recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society fellowship, aimed at using applied research experience to rethink doctoral education. Both shared advice for doctoral students and academic departments and agreed on the need for space for a wider range of dissertation projects as PhD students look into a variety of post-graduate careers. As they wrote, “Jonathan’s message to faculty is that our suggestions are meant to strengthen scholarship and enable people to reconnect with why they were attracted to the PhD in the first place, whereas Moriah’s message to students is to encourage them to honor the ways their doctoral work is shaped by the relations, curiosities, mentors, and texts that travel with them before, in, and beyond graduate school.”
Anjaria and King also spoke at the ACLS seminar Vocation and Location: Pursuing Grounded Knowledge Within and Beyond the Academy on February 6. In conversation with Desiree Barron-Callaci, senior program officer at the ACLS; Ashley Cheyemi McNeill, director of education and research at film production company Full Spectrum Features; and John Paul Christy, senior director at the ACLS, they discussed educational and career journeys for PhD students working on community-engaged projects and how PhD programs can support them.
For more details, take a look at Anjaria and King’s article in the full ACLS report!