National Association for the Practice of Anthropology
On the first Tuesday of the month from June 2019 through March 2020, anthropologists working in user experience (or UX, a broad term covering many aspects of design, product usability and improvement, consumer research, and related areas) have posted detailed information and reflections in this space on this growing area of opportunity for anthropologists. An…
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Last year, I reviewed over 150 User Experience (UX) Researcher applications to fill an open position on my team. Of those, less than twenty percent were crafted in a way that made my job as a hiring manager easy. I was looking for scannable materials that eagerly exhibited the value of each candidate. In contrast,…
In the second half of grad school, as I began to weigh my post-PhD career options, one of the things that strongly appealed to me about an academic career was the prospect of teaching. Through several years of working as a graduate teaching assistant for introductory anthropology courses, I found that I genuinely enjoyed helping…
A sought after attribute of researchers from private companies is an aptitude to work cross-functionally, or work with colleagues outside of those from your own domain. Anthropologists are well poised to understand the importance of – and possess the ability to – embed themselves in teams and build relationships across them. In academics, the term…
Anthropologists are particularly suited to be qualitative UX researchers, and applied Anthropologists are well trained for careers in industry. I can only write about my personal experience, but if you earned a degree in anthropology, I would love to hear how similar or different your experiences have been. At the University of Memphis’ Masters of Applied Anthropology Program, we learned how to execute research methods and analysis, determine which method was best suited to particular research questions, and how to manage stakeholders. That’s all you really need to know to start your career as a User Experience Researcher (UER).
I work as a user experience (UX) researcher. When I sat down to write this post for NAPA, I was faced with a question. Am I also an anthropologist? I never thought of myself as a practitioner of anthropology. Maybe it’s because I didn’t study anthropology in school. Maybe it’s because when I hear the…
In 2011, when I first began my career as a researcher in the context of business and design, I knew almost nothing about the field I had decided to work in. I lacked a basic understanding of how products are designed, how businesses work, and how to work with people in this world. What I…
As anthropologists, whether we are undergraduate students or are pursuing/have pursued masters or doctorate degrees, whether we work in industry or in academia, we have a lot in common with each other: we learn the history of our discipline, the methods and theories, and we all learn to do ethnographic research. We have a common language and shared understanding of terms. Beyond our disciplinary boundaries, however, language and terminology get less common and understanding is less shared.
The National Association For The Practice of Anthropology is a section of The American Anthropological Association (AAA) – contact GC