Sarah Kendzior

The anthropology blog Savage Minds interviewed me last week on my career, the crisis in higher education and the role of anthropology in public life. An excerpt below, on grad students and the job market:

Graduate students live in constant fear. Some of this fear is justified, like the fear of not finding a job. But the fear of unemployment leads to a host of other fears, and you end up with a climate of conformity, timidity, and sycophantic emulation. Intellectual inquiry is suppressed as “unmarketable”, interdisciplinary research is marked as disloyal, public engagement is decried as “unserious”, and critical views are written anonymously lest a search committee find them. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the Academic Jobs Wiki.

The cult mentality of academia not only curtails intellectual freedom, but hurts graduate students in a personal way. They internalize systemic failure as individual failure, in part because they have sacrificed their own beliefs and ideas to placate market values. The irony is that an academic market this corrupt and over-saturated has no values. Do not sacrifice your integrity to a lottery — even if you are among the few who can afford to buy tickets until you win.

Check out the full interview at Savage Minds.

For Al Jazeera English, I have a new article on my adopted city of St. Louis. An excerpt:

In St. Louis, you can buy a mansion for $275,000. It has twelve bedrooms, eight bathrooms, a three-bedroom carriage house, and is surrounded by vacant lots. It was built in the late 1800s, a few decades before the 1904 World’s Fair, when St. Louis was the pride of America. In 1904, everyone wanted to live in St. Louis.  A century later, the people who live here die faster.  A child born in Egypt, Iran, or Iraq will live longer than a child born in north St. Louis. Almost all the children born in north St. Louis are black.

In St. Louis, the museums are free. At the turn of the 20^th century, the city built a pavilion. They drained the wetlands and made a lake and planted thousands of trees and created a park. They built fountains at the base of a hillside and surrounded it with promenades white and gleaming. Atop the hill is an art museum with an inscription cut in stone: “Dedicated to art and free to all.” On Sundays, children do art projects in a gallery of Max Beckmann paintings. Admission is free, materials are free, because in St. Louis art is for everyone.

In St. Louis, you can walk twenty minutes from the mansions to the projects. In one neighborhood, the kids from the mansions and the kids from public housing go to the same public school. On the walls of the school cafeteria are portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama, to remind the children what leaders look like.

In St. Louis the murder rate is high and the mayor is named Slay but few think that is funny. In St. Louis things are cheap but life stays hard. In St. Louis, an African-American man with gold teeth and a hoodie and baggy jeans rushed toward me in a mall, because I was pushing a baby carriage, and he wanted to hold the door open for me.

Read the whole thing, The view from flyover country, on Al Jazeera English.

At Al Jazeera English, I have a new article about the alleged auction of a UN internship for $22,000, and on unpaid internships in general. An excerpt:

UN internships may not be up for auction, but they are, in essence, for sale. The United Nations does not pay its interns, making it very difficult for someone who is not independently wealthy to take an internship. The only thing that distinguishes the alleged auction from the UN’s normal practice is that the unspoken class discrimination is made blatant.

“Given the high cost of living in key UN cities, such as New York and Geneva, undertaking a UN internship is an experience that few can afford, especially those from the very developing countries the organisation strives to serve,” wrote the group UnPaid Is Unfair in a 2012 petition calling on the United Nations to stop using free labour.

Their call went unheeded. The United Nations’ website includes a form for calculating the personal expenses an intern incurs – expenses the UN conservatively estimates at $2500 per month, not counting travel to New York City or health insurance. The intern is forbidden from taking other paid work during their two-month term, and they not allowed to apply for jobs at the UN for six months following the internship. “A possible source of employment would be the United Nations Volunteers Programme,” the UN website suggests. This programme pays no salary.

“For an organisation that prides itself on inclusion, diversity, and equality, the UN’s refusal to compensate its interns has created a system that counters those very ideals,” writes former UN intern Matt Hamilton, noting that only 5% of UN interns come from the least developed countries. Young people who care about international justice – including those who witness firsthand its erosion in poor, repressive states – cannot afford to work jobs structured on noblesse oblige.

The United Nations is far from the only organisation refusing to pay its interns. Most human rights, policy and development organisations pay interns nothing, but will not hire someone for a job if they lack the kind of experience an internship provides. Privilege is recast as perseverance. The end result hurts individuals struggling in the labour market but also restructures the market itself.

Read the whole thing, Meritocracy for Sale, at Al Jazeera English.

For Al Jazeera English, I reflected on what we lost when we lost the Iraq War:

“Without evidence, confidence cannot arise,” Hans Blix declared to the United Nations in the run up to the war. He was wrong: confidence, like evidence, could be created. The warnings of Blix, Anthony Zinni, Mohamed ElBaradei, the liberal columnists called out as fifth columnists and the hundreds of thousands of protesters around the world changed nothing. When revelation hit, it was with a sense of helplessness that defined the decade to come. Confidence, like evidence, could be destroyed.

The Iraq war is notable not only for journalistic weakness, but for journalistic futility: the futility of fact itself. Fact could not match the fabrications of power. Eventually, our reality shifted to become what they conceived. “I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me,” wrote Bush speechwriter David Frum.

That was the message of the Iraq war: There is no point in speaking truth to power when power is the only truth…

Ten years after the Iraq war, we continue to live in an era of hysterical panic about invented catastrophes and false reassurances about real catastrophes. We laugh bitterly at the “Mission Accomplished” sign raised nearly a decade before the war ended, but the Bush administration did accomplish something. They accomplished the mission of persuading everyday Americans that the unthinkable is normal.

Read the full article, Iraq and The Reinvention of Reality, at Al Jazeera English.