Independence with others: Lessons for anthropology from postdocs in team science

Abstract

Despite critiques from inside the discipline of anthropology, the figure of the “lone wolf” anthropologist perdures in the ways sociocultural doctoral students are (and are not) trained. Failure to prepare graduates to engage in substantive interdisciplinary collaboration poorly prepares them for careers inside and outside academia, and limits their capacity to meaningfully apply their research to pressing problems of the day. An increasing share of graduates occupy precarious postdoctoral positions in the humanities and social sciences; these are temporary posts from which they might continue to conduct research in precarity and relative isolation. To the extent that they are acknowledged at all, postdocs are worried over as signs of the crisis in academic hiring. Certain postdoctoral positions, however, can offer training in “team science,” research conducted by interdisciplinary teams whose members meaningfully work together to apply for funding, design a research protocol, collect data, analyze data, and publish and present findings. Drawing on our own experiences, we propose taking the “fellowship” in “postdoctoral fellowship” as an epistemological challenge to anthropology to produce knowledge in the company of others.