Caprice Corona and James River Robbins
Read an introduction to this series written by Jose Leonardo Santos here.
In the face of rising anti-intellectualism, the political takeover of education, and a drastic restructuring of student aid in the U.S., anthropology students are increasingly trepid, anxious, and frustrated as they face growing uncertainty in job markets and institutional futures. A June 2026 Vanderbilt report took direct aim at anthropology, accusing it of being the forerunner among so-called politicized social sciences, and asserting that scholarship is meant to pursue supposedly disinterested inquiry. This criticism sits within a growing trend of the demonization of scholarship and higher education that falsely caricatures them as enemies of society rather than sites of innovation and advancement. So, how are anthropology students handling these attacks?
In March 2026, anthropologists gathered at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology. We (the authors) co-moderated an Invited Presidential Session titled “Recombinant Student Futures: From Everyday Crisis to Everyday Camaraderie Among Anthropologists-in-Training.” Our goal was to facilitate a supportive space for student-driven conversations with respect to the present crisis and to brainstorm actionable strategies alongside peers.
During the session, we allowed our backgrounds as performers to inform how we fostered audience participation. We asked attendees to reflect on what it felt like to be an anthropologist-in-training and then to role-play how to navigate decreased funding for research and travel, departmental reductions, political pressure to limit the teaching of certain topics, and the threat of our discipline’s erasure. There was some performance anxiety at first, as we expected, but creative juices began to flow, we listened, watched, and reacted as participants bravely shared their feelings and ideas. To close out our session, we encouraged participants to express their final impressions in visual form, using markers and art paper.
Markers on art paper at the end of our session; miscellaneous anthropologists’ feet nearby
Although the session was designed for and mostly attended by students, our participants also included current faculty and practitioners. We worked through how students and faculty can come together to secure the future of anthropology. Several important themes emerged from this session:
- Independence must be taught. Undergraduate and graduate students alike depend on teachers, mentors, and role models to help them grow and develop into critically-minded scholars and practitioners. In program navigation, cultivating research interests, designing fieldwork, professional development, and job searching, students need adequate support from faculty/mentors/departments in these areas and more as they work to gain the confidence and competence to work independently.
- Everyone is feeling the pressure. While faculty lose research funding and practicing anthropologists lose jobs, students lose assistantships, dissertation funding, and a sense of their future. These are interconnected issues and we’re all feeling them. Empathy from and between established anthropologists and those in training is critical.
- Vulnerability is better than stoicism. Many of us – students, faculty, and mentors alike – think that we can muscle our way through the challenges, and that expressing our frustrations, doubts, and struggles will either present us as weak or be burdensome to others. This may do more harm than good though, as students look to faculty and practicing anthropologists not only for guidance on how to navigate the current moment, but for emotional validation. As the landscape is evolving rapidly, the experiences of current anthropology students are different from those of previous generations. Checking in with and learning from each other is how we stay on the same page.
- Build communities of networks, now. Among faculty members, anthropology practitioners, graduate students, and undergraduate students, a commitment to the discipline of anthropology unites us. Practices of care among and between anthropologists at all career levels nurture channels of communication that are essential for personal and professional support. This is important now more than ever as policies and strategies of division creep into our work and our classrooms.
- Anthropology is valuable. This discipline not only pushes our understanding of human potential, but unlocks it through practice. Anthropology continues to attract scholars from diverse academic backgrounds, largely due to its holistic, human-centered approach, creativity, and methodological rigor. No science is ever value-neutral, . Anthropology recognizes this principle by requiring direct and open acknowledgement of how our identity, background, and bodies may affect the work we do with other humans. This reflexivity is not a weakness; it is a strength.
Now is a deeply unsettling time to be a student in the social sciences, particularly so for students of anthropology. That the recent Vanderbilt report singled out the discipline as “extreme” and lacking meaningful value in advancing an understanding of the world has only added to an atmosphere of unease and uncertainty. All scholarship is inherently political, and denying this is a political act which harms our society. Targeting scholarship in this way shows a disturbing trend toward a deteriorating research agenda controlled by fascist political actors.
As doctoral students in applied anthropology, we stand firmly behind the creative and transformative potential of anthropological practice and seek to reaffirm a commitment to the field and to one another by serving as connective conduits for fellow anthropologists-in-training during what feels like an especially fraught time. As we saw from our conference session, despite significant challenges, anthropologists can and must come together in communities of support and solidarity to protect the future of the discipline.
Crisis may be shaping this moment in anthropology, but camaraderie will define its next chapter.
Contributors:
Caprice Corona
Caprice Corona is a Mexican-American doctoral student in Applied Anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her dissertation research is a multi-sited ethnography of the intersection of performance and caregiving among professional opera singers in the U.S in the context of neoliberal retrenchment of artistic funding and social services. She was a professional opera singer for over a decade and holds MMs in Vocal Performance and Opera Studies from the New England Conservatory, and a BA in Music and Anthropology from Harvard College.
James River Robbins
James River Robbins (he/him) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Applied Medical Anthropology and an MA student in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of South Florida. His dissertation research focuses on language access and the experiences of Spanish-speaking Latine individuals seeking abortion care in NYC. He serves on the boards for USF Graduate Assistants United, the AAA Council on Anthropology and Reproduction, the SfAA Human Rights and Social Justice Committee, and the Crisis in Public Anthropology Working Group.
