Steven Heine

Excellent piece by Dr. Lisa Mckenzie defending sociology. I particularly appreciated her call to action for her fellow academic sociologists: “I also make a plea to my fellow academics: stop allowing this to happen. Stop allowing academic institutions to make appointments and pursue policies that denigrate everything we do. We need to go back to first principles. We need to forget the identity politics, the DEI quotas and the tick-boxes, and support and fund what we do best – deepening knowledge of what is really happening in society and arguing why that matters.” In my view, anthropologists need to do the same. If we don’t, we’ll find our departments and our discipline even worse off with respect to faculty positions, student enrollments, grant funding, and public support. The situation is already bad. If we’re not careful, instead of there being just a few jobs for our PhD students and postdocs to apply for each year, there’ll be virtually none. My sense is that sociologists and anthropologists need something akin to the discipline-wide reform process that medical researchers initiated in the early 1990s and which has become known as the evidence-based medicine movement. We need to begin pushing for an ‘evidence-based sociology’ and an ‘evidence-based anthropology’. We could do this together as closely related disciplines, perhaps with colleagues elsewhere in the social sciences, thereby creating the evidence-based social sciences movement. The lowest hanging fruit in such a reform process would be for us, when we’re acting as reviewers, to agree not to approve any paper or book for publication that makes claims based solely on autoethnography. Autoethnography should be regarded as a means of generating hypotheses and research questions, not as a research method. Reconceptualising autoethnography this way would immediately improve the rigour and reliability of sociological and anthropological research. Multiple reforms are needed but this is the most obvious and easiest place to start, I reckon. @drianpace, @redrumlisa, @HamesRaymond