ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book challenges notions of how a collaborative anthropology should be fashioned to the backdrop of neoliberalism. It also questions and reflects on the role of the collaborating anthropologist in the neoliberal university. The book includes reflections, many autoethnographic, on the experiences of anthropologists who work in diverse settings beyond traditional anthropology departments. It examines more engaged and applied collaborative projects across a number of different contexts. The book explores how the high unemployment and emigration that defined the 1980s and much of the early 1990s – the dawn of the ‘Celtic Tiger’ – was a time of huge social and economic change in Ireland.
