sNAPAshots: Briana Nichols

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Transcript

0:07
[On Screen] NAPA Logo sNAPAshots

Interviewer 0:07
Welcome to sNAPAshots, conversations with practicing, professional, and applied anthropologists. Let’s meet our next practicing anthropologist.

Briana Nichols 0:17
My name is Brianna Nichols. And I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Latin American Studies at Rutgers University right now. And my subfield of practice is…I am a cultural anthropologist with some linguistic leanings, and I work on topics of migration and education in Guatemala.

Interviewer 0:39
How did you get interested in anthropology?

Briana Nichols 0:43
When I was in undergrad, I went to a school that had a core curriculum. And I was taking a class on like power and resistance. And I went up to the instructor afterwards, and I was like, What is this that we’re doing here? What is this thing? You know, what do we call this? Is this, like, sociology is this History? What are we doing? Because I really love it. This is working for my brain. And the instructor told me Well, I think this is probably most like anthropology, at which point, I started taking just a slew of anthropology courses and fell in love with, you know, I think I’ve always been the type of person who finds people fascinating and the way in which we operate and organize our social worlds fascinating. And I fell in love with a study that allows us to hold that and cherish that. And, you know, and honor people’s stories in a way that has the potential to hopefully then also make a difference in people’s experiences. So that is what got me interested in anthropology. And then I actually became a teacher. For a number of years in the Chicago Public Schools. I got a master’s in education after graduating. And I think I approached teaching anthropologically, right, like, I wanted to learn from my students, I found the educational context really fascinating and upsetting, in many ways. And I was working with students who were themselves migrants, often undocumented. And so witnessing, you know, as we would go through this educational process together, the ways in which the system was just not set up to accommodate them, their needs, their families, you know, a very easy example of this are things like parent teacher conferences, and parents would be really looked down upon by the institution, if they didn’t show up, right? There were a lot of judgments that came with that. And I found out later that a number of the parents in my classroom hadn’t been able to show up because they were afraid to drive because they weren’t documented. And if they drove to school, you know, what put them at risk in a way that wasn’t acceptable to them. And does that make them a bad parent? You know, it doesn’t, right. But you can’t, you know, when the system isn’t set up to accommodate the realities of different people’s lives, then we create a really unequal system. And so that motivated me to go back to grad school and pursue a PhD. And I actually received a joint PhD in education in the school of education, as well as in the anthrology department.

Interviewer 3:29
How has the anthropological perspective or training enhanced your contribution to your workplace?

Briana Nichols 3:35
I hope that my experience as an anthropologist, and the way in which I think I see the world as an anthropologist, it’s really kind of part of intrinsically who I am at this point. I hope it enables me to approach the workplace with curiosity, as opposed to judgment. Right. And that includes, you know, I’ve done a lot of consulting work for NGOs, who are doing work in challenging contexts and struggling to do that work. And approaching that struggle with curiosity allows for me to help build bridges between things that seem incommensurate. And that is something that anthropology has enabled for me in a way that, you know, I don’t know if other disciplines would, in the same way with my students, you know, I teach undergraduates right now. And, you know, what they are bringing to the classroom is as important if not more so than what I’m bringing as their instructor and I feel like that’s an anthropological stance, right, valuing the EMIC. And, you know, that’s valued in education as well, but I don’t know if as explicitly as it is in anthropology.

Interviewer 4:55
Do you recall a moment that changed the way you practiced anthropology

Briana Nichols 5:00
I had a really important experience in the field in Guatemala, when I was starting my dissertation research and experience that fundamentally changed me as an anthropologist where I had started working, I had a couple of organizations I was working with, and I had started working with one of the organizations. And I came to realize retrospectively that I hadn’t developed the types of relationships in the organization that I needed to, and a lot of it came from fear, right? I was new in the field, I felt awkward and scared and like, didn’t know how to be me in that space. And that organization had had some pretty negative experiences with researchers in the past, and ended up asking me not to work with them anymore not to do research there basically because because of the fact that they had had negative experiences with researchers in the past, and they didn’t want to risk it anymore, but instead wanted to be taught how to do qualitative research. And so that became my role, right. And it was no longer a research site, I no longer collected any data, I got rid of all the data I had previously collected. And I ended up just working in tandem, doing instruction on qualitative research research methods. And then that ended up being something that I worked on with a number of my interlocutors at other organizations realizing that, you know, it’s much more powerful to have the tools even though it this is complicated, right? Because like, it shouldn’t be that the only way you can become legible is to tell your story in this way, right. But nonetheless, having the tools to do it is is is something that is powerful, right. And so I, you know, have worked with various young people on like, how to use Atlas.ti how to conduct a qualitative interview, how to, you know, kind of writing myself out of a job in some ways, but that’s good, right? I mean, ultimately, that’s that’s not a bad thing. And that changed me, you know, having that experience of having an organization say, No, we’ve been to hurt by this in the past. I don’t think I realized how inherently weaponized I mean, I knew it intellectually, but I’m not so sure I knew it internally, how weaponized research in the context where I was had become, and how important it is for us to do that repair work as anthropologists.

Interviewer 7:42
Thank you, Brianna, for sharing your experience as a practicing anthropologist for more snapshots Find us at practicing anthropology.org Mehta, LinkedIn and Twitter.

7:51
[On Screen] Meta, LinkedIn, and Twitter logos

Interviewer 7:55
Save the date practicing anthropologist! Join NAPA at the Careers Expo November 10, 2023 in Toronto, Canada. See you there!

Credits 8:06
PRODUCED BY
Niel Tashima
Cathleen Crain
Joshua Liggett

DIRECTED BY
Reshama Damle
Suanna Crowley

MUSIC BY

by Alex Productions “Do It”

CREATIVE LEAD
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Conversations with
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Professional,
and Applied
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Join us in person
at the Careers Expo
in Toronto, CA
November 10
2023!

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Briana Nichols 8:04
[Outtakes] You know, inevitably she was coming with me on interviews and stuff like that. That really my job was to be with people in the fullness of who they are and the fullness of who I am and that sometimes includes having a screaming five month old right

Interviewer 8:27
sNAPAshots!

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