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The Social Network of US Academic Anthropology and Its Inequalities
Author(s) -
Kawa Nicholas C.,
Clavijo Michelangeli José A.,
Clark Jessica L.,
Ginsberg Daniel,
McCarty Christopher
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/aman.13158
Subject(s) - prestige , sociology , inequality , hierarchy , institution , social inequality , structural inequality , productivity , social network (sociolinguistics) , social science , political science , economic growth , law , economics , mathematical analysis , philosophy , linguistics , mathematics , social media
Anthropologists often call attention to the problems posed by social inequality, but academic anthropology also reproduces many of the very inequalities that its practitioners work to critique. Past research on US academic hiring networks has shown evidence of systematic inequality and hierarchy, attributed in significant part to the influence of academic prestige, which is not necessarily a reflection of merit or academic productivity. Using anthropology departments’ websites, we gathered information on all tenured and tenure‐track faculty in PhD‐granting anthropology programs in the United States, totaling 1,918 individuals in all. For each faculty member, we noted their current institution and PhD‐granting institution, which we treated as a “tie” between those academic programs. With those data, we applied both statistical and social network analysis (SNA) methods to explain variation in faculty placement as well as the network's overall structure. In this article, we report on our findings and discuss how they can be used to help rethink academic reproduction in American anthropology. [ academia, anthropology, social inequality, hiring networks, social network analysis ]