Applied anthropology’s invisibility in Europe

All anthropology has practical applications, which are certainly relevant for members of the Society for Applied Anthropology. An increasingly militant academic anthropology has been evident at recent meetings of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA), with papers and panels focusing on social justice, self-determination for indigenous peoples, the fight against racialization and ghettoization, the violence of international borders, land exploitation, climate change, and the Anthropocene.

But few spaces at conferences such as the EASA biennial are dedicated to applied anthropologists outside the academy. Although anthropologists in Europe are playing a major role in shaping social responses, their impact remains largely invisible. Our focus here is on this invisibility and the associated difficulty of imagining applied careers for anthropologists in Europe. As a way of providing a platform to exchange and promote initiatives of practicing and applied anthropologists, an internal subgroup of EASA, the Applied Anthropology Network (AAN), was established with an annual conference and other events focusing on Why the World Needs Anthropology. This initiative aims to illustrate the role of anthropology over the past 60 years in social movements, social justice initiatives, feminism, ecology, the rights of LGBTQAI+ and communities of people living with disabilities, and transnational migration.

In representing applied anthropology in Europe, the AAN faces a very different situation compared with that of applied anthropology in North America. This difference is partly the result of wide differences in the distribution of applied anthropology jobs outside academia among different countries and the status of applied anthropology within universities. This situation is further complicated by the fact that many researchers do not identify as anthropologists within their companies or organizations. Many experts in communication, photo reporting, marketing, design, user experience (UX) and other digital services, as well as educators and humanitarian workers, apply their anthropological skills daily without identifying themselves as anthropologists and without being employed in that capacity.

The most recent attempt to map applied anthropology in Europe was in Anthropology in Action, the European counterpart to Human Organization (Podjed, Gorup, and Mlakar 2016) and the official journal of the Association of Applied Anthropology in the United Kingdom. In this article, AAN Founder Dan Podjed and colleagues sought to chart the uneven distribution and prospects for anthropology practitioners. In doing so, they noted the strength of regional differences, with anthropologists well positioned in northern Europe and the United Kingdom.

It is arguably less difficult for anthropologists to maintain their identity in a labor market highly protected by state welfare in Northern Europe (i.e., Denmark, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands). In Germany and Austria, anthropologists hold different positions in consultancy firms or in the public sector. In Spain and Italy, Gramscian critiques of hegemonic culture have enabled more social justice-oriented activism and political roles for anthropologists as public intellectuals (Grottanelli et al. 1977). Among these countries, national professional organizations play a central role in promoting anthropology outside the academy, whereas this tendency is less evident among countries in Eastern European.

Yet professional anthropology in public administration and the private market is best integrated in contexts where the discipline has a long history of collaboration—including under colonialism—such as in the United Kingdom, where the presence of professional organizations is also stronger. In France, in contrast, it has proved controversial for scholars to present anthropology as applied (Podjed, Gorup, and Mlakar 2016).

At the time of our writing, formulating a clear description of what anthropology can accomplish in practice remains a challenge. How is the “anthropological imagination” (Dimen-Schein 1977) applied in Europe? How does this application vary across different contexts and professional fields? In the following text, we begin the work of remedying the substantial invisibility of anthropologists outside the academy. We first sketch the field by discussing the work of thematic professional groups within the AAN: the Apply Clubs. These clubs bring together specialists in applied anthropology from throughout Europe and beyond. Their members plan conferences, opportunities for study groups, and forums for professionals to share ideas. The goal is to develop a network to share expert strategies and resources.

Apply Club Art

Apply Club Art focuses on connecting anthropologists working at the intersection of art and anthropology (Skinner 2014). This club is described as a place to discuss the intersections of art and anthropology and to explore subtopics such as experimental ethnography, ethnographic films, and anthropological research on artistic communities and practices. Anthropologists conceptualize and materialize diverse social challenges such as climate change, water insecurity, and gender violence. For example, the Innovation School at the Glasgow School of Art uses an anthropological understanding of the visual and the sensorial as a cultural horizon. Anthropologists work there to curate experimental expositions and codesign participatory performances.

Applied visual anthropology allows further intersection of art and anthropology. Professionals in this field are engaged in photojournalism, documentaries, and reportage for multilateral international organizations and mass media. A pivotal role in training anthropologists working outside the academy is played by the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology in Manchester.

More traditional anthropology engagements with art include curating folklore museums, with their potential to impact people’s education on topics such as colonialism, internal and external migration, and the depopulation of inner countryside areas because of urbanization. The project Montagne in Movimento (moving mountains) in Valle d‘Aosta, Northern Italy, illustrates this focus. It uses the museum as a catalyst to involve local community members in participatory initiatives aimed at rethinking history and envisioning a future for the increasingly deserted but stunning alpine valleys.

Apply Club of Built Environment

A different kind of planning exercise is required by anthropologists working within architecture and urban planning (Buchli 2013; Jasper 2018). The Apply Club of Built Environment fosters the collaborations of anthropologists working at the intersections of architecture and the design of inner and external environments. Professionals undertaking such work engage with urban planners, local communities and stakeholders to shape together an environment fostering a sense of belonging, while supporting functionality and innovative design. In part, the anthropologist’s role here is in relation to social issues such as homelessness, building spaces of care, and alternative ways of relating to the environment (Jasper 2018). Codesign, shared decision-making processes, and a focus on social interactions create a fertile ground for ethnography inspired by anthropological theories on perceptions of the environment (e.g., Miller 2009; Ingold 2011).

One example of community engagement in architecture is the work of The CARE Lab in Barcelona. Through this work, a potentially cold clinical setting, such as a hospital ward, is turned into a space that conveys ideas of protection and care. This result is unlocked by the important involvement and empowerment of local communities of both professionals and patients in the planning and implementation phase of their projects.

Apply Digital Group

An even more “emic” perspective is evident among professionals in the Apply Digital group. Anthropology-trained professionals work in the growing digital international market, including on UX/client experience digital methods and digital data analysis (Goodman, Kuniavsky, and Moed 2012). Ease of use and understanding the trajectories of online users is a priority in the digital marketplace, which is increasingly a concern to capture the attention of users. To ensure that digital design is suitable for the communities that use it, UX is a method that can be based both on classic anthropological approaches of semi-structured interviews and ethnography and on statistical analyses of big data. Instead, what if the user experience were analyzed through concepts such as agency and empowerment? Is it possible to move beyond big data, upon which many apps and digital services are based? New university courses that combine anthropology with statistical data analysis are oriented to this approach. The University of Copenhagen, for example, has recently launched a Master of Science (MSc) in Social Data Science, which combines user experience driven by social science and anthropology with approaches to big data.

Apply Club Finance

Applied and practicing anthropologists are active in Europe in finance (Hart and Ortiz 2014). The Apply Club Finance covers interest in fundraising, investment strategies, and building brands and their design. Navigating a difficult field—given anthropology’s engagement with social justice—professionals working in finance are particularly concerned with storytelling in relation to brands, advertising and consumption trends (Cabrera 2014), with the human experience at the center of the products and campaigns they help design. Technology and innovation are at the forefront of what an anthropologist, as finance strategist, helps develop and fund partnership collaborations that range from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to governments, universities, and private corporations and enterprises.

An example is the work of Inculture in Sweden. Founder Katarina Graffman describes her work as attending to “what people do, not what they say they do” to explore new business possibilities. Through her ethnographic understanding of social reality drenched with contradictions and conflicts between people’s agency and self-representation, Katharina, like others, can inform financial strategies for companies by directing focus to human behavior as patterned and socially driven.

Apply Club Health

The tension between individual and community-based understandings of social living is crucial to applied anthropologists in the field of health. The Apply Club Health, of which we are organizing members, was developed on the initiative of Gaia Campanelli and Henrich Schwarz to reach out to medical anthropologists in Europe within and outside academia. According to a 2016 survey, medical anthropologists constitute the second largest group of nonacademic anthropologists in Europe, immediately following the number working in design (including the built environment, UX and product design).

The Apply Club Health fosters collaborations in the widely diverse fields of applied medical anthropology, including epidemics and disaster preparedness and interventions; to cross-cultural, minority, women’s and migrant’s health; initiatives to support people living with noncommunicable conditions (Manderson and Wahlberg 2020); ways to foster the participation of local communities (Abramowitz et al. 2015); and ways to challenge health policymaking (Henry and Henry 2022). Another field of interest is the training and education of healthcare practitioners, bringing insights from ethnography to classrooms (Martinez and Wiedman 2021).

As an example of our focus, we turn to our work on violence against healthcare workers in emergency services in Northern Italy (Pasquini) and Austria (Jaeger). Our findings from extensive fieldwork and insights from semi-structured interviews demonstrate how violence in the emergency room is influenced by stereotypical assumptions by professionals. Yet violence and mistrust toward health professionals are also sources of improvisation and techniques of de-escalation to avoid harm (Pasquini 2023a, 2023b; Jaeger, Wahl, and Wiesinger 2021a, 2021b). Teaching these techniques is a way to practically describe what can be done to attend to structural forces in clinics—racism, stigmatization, and discrimination of marginalized communities. Like us, an increasing number of anthropologists in Europe teach in medical and nursing faculties, and in professional continuing education on cultural competency, diversity awareness, and structural competency (Metzl and Hansen 2014).

The effort to train health professionals to recognize and act upon social structures requires employment of more anthropologists than are currently available. However, the interest of health faculties and hospitals is increasing, as illustrated by the presence of long-standing education programs. One such example is Healthy Diversity, a collaboration between the University of Vienna, the U.K. National Health Service, and five international NGOs. The project has produced internationally accessible educational material to cover multiple institutional exigencies in terms of diversity and inequality within healthcare.

Another major field of employment in the health sector is quality assurance, with anthropological methods and theory used to assess the effectiveness of health interventions. Rapid ethnographic assessments are needed by both international organizations and local hospital institutions (Vindrola-Padros and Vindrola-Padros 2018), offering insights within a time-limited context. Anthropologists working in this growing industry have acquired specific skills to combine traditional ethnographic approaches with creative tools to speed processes such as transcribing, coding, and interpreting data. The RREAL: Rapid Research, Evaluation and Appraisal Lab at University College London showcases these applications. It offers courses for requisite ethnographic skills to enable the adaption of anthropology for quick insights, to optimize investments, and to evaluate project development and performance.

Apply Club Innovation

The capacity to affect change is at the core of the Applied Club Innovation, which focuses on how daily living is possibly reshaped by futuristic technologies. Robots, artificial intelligence, and technologies reshaping the relationship between the state and its citizenship in smart cities and public offices are at the center of what club members call “human-centered innovation” (Gunn, Otto, and Smith 2013; Squires 2021).

The club gathers consultants and strategists able to use their anthropological expertise to advise both corporate groups and state actors. They suggest actions and infrastructural investments necessary to gain competitive advantage in new business sectors and protect citizens from the negative effects of technological innovation. Foresight is key to their work. In an interview in the web podcast series This Anthro Life, Lora Koycheva, founder of the Apply Club Innovation, defines her work as speculating about embodied forms of robotics: What do robots enable actors to do, as humans and non-humans, or hinder them from doing? By understanding robots, human and non-human bodies as relational infrastructures, Koycheva looks at robotics as revealing the uneven relationships of humans with their environment. The anthropology of innovation helps private and public enterprises unveil what robotics might mean in practice for people, animals, and plants.

Apply Club Organization

Analyzing identity formation, conflicts and fragmentations in complex organizations, anthropologists often work to facilitate production processes for business enterprises and start-ups, including addressing questions of work satisfaction and sense of belonging—for employers and employees alike. Many of the services applied anthropologists provide as consultants lean toward UX design and an overall understanding of the evolution of the financial market. The long-running companies Experientia, based in Torino, Italy, and the healthcare-related Innovatinghealth.care in Hamburg, Germany, illustrate how applied anthropology firms bring together different aspects of UX services, organizational anthropology, and understandings of innovation and the evolution of financial markets.

Applied anthropologists often use a combination of these skills to adapt to market needs. By emphasizing anthropology’s ability to prioritize people in production processes, professionals demonstrate that social reality is more intricate than any depiction from a hierarchical perspective. At the same time, ethnographers can make complexity understandable through vivid and engaging storytelling.

What is still missing?

Multiple fields of application overlap within the AAN clubs—design, healthcare, finance, organization work, and digital and human innovation intertwine as much as the competencies required by applied and practicing anthropologists in these fields. Equally striking, however, are the absences in matters of representation of what applied anthropology can do in Europe and beyond.

No club to date, for example, focuses on mobility—different forms of migration, tourism, resettlement, and refugees—despite multiple applied initiatives on migration that intersect many of the topics that are a focus in these clubs (Park 2021). Anthropologists in Europe are working side by side with multilateral agencies such as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and global and local NGOs to create projects of inclusion with civil society organizations of different kinds (e.g., Médecins Sans Frontières, Méditerranée). Projects include targeting marginalized migrant communities and providing language services, as well as supporting them to access job placement agencies, public welfare, and social inclusion (Larchanche 2020).

To our knowledge, applied anthropological projects in this regard are particularly strong in European states where migration is at the forefront of public attention. Italy, for example, includes applied national initiatives such as Arte Migrante (Art in Migration) in which anthropology and art are at the forefront to create spaces of conviviality and solidarity through music, dance, and poetry. The Centro di Salute Internazionale e Interculturale (Center for International and Intercultural Health) in Bologna has long facilitated community health promotion with diverse national and international collaborations. The ethno-psychiatric Centre Fanon in Torino, and its approach to trauma and migrant mental health, is another example (Giordano 2014).

Climate change and the societal challenges it poses present another critical opportunity. An Apply Club in Sustainability is being established in the AAN to further professional visibility for this important and growing field. Club Leader Pauline Destrée, from University of Durham, explains that the club is rooted in a commitment to environmental justice, an applied anthropology of sustainability that aims to broaden the tools and ambitions of “sustainability” beyond metrics. The Apply Club sees sustainability as a cultural field of practice that requires flexible, participatory, and situated methods.

Anthropologists working closely with multilateral organizations and with activists and social movements are capable of ensuring key insight into the roles of civil society in affecting political change and climate action. This impact is achieved in matters that span from carbon emissions, to the extraction of minerals and fossil fuels, the overexploitation of soil, the workforce, and the overproduction of consumption goods.

The applied anthropology of climate change is also concerned with resilience and recovery after disaster, such as drought and flooding, wildfires, earthquakes, tsunamis, and heat waves (Barrios 2017). For example, the Centre for Natural Hazards and Disasters Science at Uppsala University, Sweden, gathers experts from both natural and social sciences to provide strategic expertise.

A last important domain of applied anthropology, yet to be included as an AAN Apply Club, is pedagogy and education. Although there is an EASA network for teaching anthropology, no applied group represents professionals teaching outside academia. Anthropologists may, for example, teach marketing and public speaking skills and teach UX methods and rapid assessment of digital and health projects in private enterprises. They may work as high school teachers, or help design elective courses on gender and sexuality, multiculturalism and diversity, and conflict resolution. Anthropologists might teach courses about discrimination, disability, and mental health to both students and professionals working in diverse public organizations.

The invisible impact

We have noted the limited attention to applied anthropologists working beyond academic settings in Europe. Although the initiatives we have described herein rely on or involve collaboration with universities, most anthropologists who work outside of academia are redefining the influence that the field can exert on society. Their contributions are often unnoticed, however, because they are assimilated into their organizations rather than maintaining their identity as anthropologists. Professional organizations have the role of fostering anthropological identity and collective imagination in the effort to overcome invisibility.

This task is more urgent than ever because applied anthropology has never been more necessary. Across Europe, neoliberal states are dismantling public welfare, allowing space for growing intolerance, social exclusion, and violence to the advantage of securitarian, far right political parties. Facing neoliberal ideology with keen deconstruction and targeted community action, anthropologists can support building trust within local communities that are overwhelmed by a sense of fear and precarity in the shadows of global warming as well as current wars and the threat of their expansion. Applied anthropology has already proven its worth in fostering hope and social justice. Such key contributions across multiple fields must be now made visible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mirko Pasquini

Mirko Pasquini is an Assistant Professor in Medical Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg. His research interests combine hospital ethnography, structural competency and emergency care in Italy and Sweden. He is a board member of Apply Club Health (AAN/EASA), Health Professions Education Interest Group (SMA/AAA) and coordinates the “Hospital Ethnography peer meetings” within the Medical Anthropology Europe Young Scholars (MAYS) network.

Margret Jaeger

Margret Jaeger is an Austrian medical anthropologist, who lectures in health professional training and conducts research at the Vienna Social Fund Education Centre (NPO). Her research interests are diversity competency, structural competency, violence against health workers, health promotion, and pediatric emergency simulation. She is a founding partner of Apply Club Health (AAN/EASA), Health Professions Education Interest Group (SMA/AAA) and a member of Solar Plexus, Austria.