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ACADEMIA IS FULL OF UNSPOKEN RULES

While academia is meant to be meritocratic, there are unspoken rules that people from other countries struggle to navigate. 

My anthropological research focused on the subtle prejudices scholars from the Global South face when they work in the US or with US researchers. US-born scholars from minority backgrounds, including first-gen academics from working class families, deal with similar obstacles.

 
Between 2008-12 ​I conducted an ethnography of a transnational academic community, Andean Archaeology. My fieldwork was carried out at the places where the community was created: on archaeological excavations in Bolivia; in classrooms and anthropology departments at four universities in the US, Canada, & Chile; and at national & international conferences across North and South America.

After completing my PhD I worked in student support, in higher education administration, and adjunted. I started a historical research project looking at the plight of refugee scholars during the C20th. And I held a postdoc position, during which I was involved in an attempt to create an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers from Mexico and the US, that avoided the power dynamics I'd identified in my doctoral research.  

In total I spent 16 years studying the structure and culture of higher education from many different angles. I lived the life of an academic as well. But by 2019 I was ready to try a different approach. I decided to stop studying and writing about the problems I saw, and instead retrain as a mental health therapist so I could directly help the individuals affected. I am now a licensed mental health professional in the State of Illinois, where I specialize in working with academics and immigrants.

Academic Publications

2020

Myths of meritocracy, friendship, and fun work: class and gender in North American academic communitiesAmerican Anthropologist (2020), 122(3), 444-458.

2019

Exploring dietary patterns in a Mexican adolescent population: A mixed methods approach. Appetite (2019): 104542. Jansen, Erica C., Hannah Marcovitch, Julia A. Wolfson, Mary Leighton, Karen E. Peterson, Martha Maria Téllez Rojo, Alejandra Cantoral, and Elizabeth FS Roberts

2018

Bioethnography as a Methodological Approach to Social and Chemical Life in Mexico City.  Anthropology News website, March 27, 2018. Mary Leighton and Elizabeth F.S. Roberts.

2016

Indigenous Field Technicians at Tiwanaku, Bolivia: A Hybrid Form of Scientific Labor.  American Anthropologist (2016) 118: 742–754 

2015

Excavation Methodologies and Labour as Epistemic Concerns in the Practice of Archaeology. Comparing examples from British and Andean archaeology. Archaeological Dialogues (2015), 22 (01): 65-88

2012

Personifying Objects/Objectifying People: The Ambiguity of

Human Remains in the Practice of Contemporary Archaeologists. Ethnos (2012), 75 (1): 78–101

2004

Breathing Life into the Archives: reflections upon decontextualisation and the curatorial history of V.G. Childe and the material from Toszeg. European Journal of Archaeology 7 (1): 41-60. (2004). Mary Leighton, and M.L. Sorenson

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