ABSTRACT
The difference in coming out into the world with a PhD before the global economic crash and the increased tightening of neoliberal agendas is quite substantial. Caught in the spectacular entanglements of the neoliberal university, academic work is being actively ‘bullshitized’. Inherent in such neoliberal goals is the quantitative measurement by universities of collaboration and impact – a practice which ultimately undermines the work of anthropology, and indeed, the social sciences and humanities more broadly. The controversy in 2018 regarding the anthropological journal HAU and its playing out on social media is indeed a synecdoche for the entrenched and unwavering dominance of such work practices and institutional culture in the discipline of anthropology and the university at large. It is an interesting controversy to reflect on, given how it brought about a larger discussion on the nature of precarity within anthropology more specifically as well as collaborations between different kinds of scholars.
