How can a Business Anthropologist and Data Analyst dance together?
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How can a Business Anthropologist and Data Analyst dance together?

Pure Logical Thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world; all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.” (Einstein, A. Ideas and Opinions (p.271). Crown Publishing Group. Anthropology, at its core, is known for its work in places that seem exotic and unknown. Yet, at present, there has been a…

Esports and the Built Environment: Where the Digital Meets Reality
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Esports and the Built Environment: Where the Digital Meets Reality

IntroEsports has emerged as a multibillion dollar industry, all within the past few decades. The global games industry is predicted to have produced $152.1 billion in 2019, with esports events in the last year handing out over $700 million in prize pools. As esports and video games have grown and evolved, becoming more mainstream, it…

Skip the CV. Reinvent the Resume: A discussion of how to present the content of your career
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Skip the CV. Reinvent the Resume: A discussion of how to present the content of your career

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,…

The unexpected pedagogies of working in UX
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The unexpected pedagogies of working in UX

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…

Three skills that make anthropologists great cross-functional team players
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Three skills that make anthropologists great cross-functional team players

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…

Learn This; Do That: Translating Anthropology to UX Research
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Learn This; Do That: Translating Anthropology to UX Research

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).

“Do You Do UX Research?”: Articulating User Experience Research and  Its Value to Clients

“Do You Do UX Research?”: Articulating User Experience Research and Its Value to Clients

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.