Outreach inspo, anthropology style. Review of: Cool anthropology: How to engage the public with academic research. By KristinaBaines, VictoriaCosta (Eds.), Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2022. pp. 270. $32.95/$26.95 (paperback/ebook). ISBN: 9781487524418

Delving into Cool Anthropology was not what I expected. Going into the book knowing it was an edited volume, I anticipated well-referenced chapters with some cross-talk, foregrounded with an introduction explaining the ties that bound them and a self-aware, historically-situated explanation of how the essays fit into the overall zeitgeist of public anthropology and anthropological outreach. But Cool Anthropology defies this typical structure of the edited volume, instead presenting 14 first-person essays grouped into four parts that summarize the outré methods the various authors have successfully used to communicate anthropological ideas to a larger public. The first part, “Imperatives,” includes essays by volume editors Kristina Baines and Victoria Costa, Agustín Fuentes, and Maria Vesperi. Baines and Costa provide a brief history of “cool anthropology”—their mission of bringing interesting and credible anthropological concepts to the general public—and mention some of their installations, which they set up around the country like anthropological troubadours. An essay by Agustín Fuentes follows, in which he discusses the need for anthropologists to weigh in on public discussions and describes the methods he prefers for translating anthropological concepts for the general public, including blog posts, public lectures, and X, the app formerly known as Twitter. While Fuentes focuses his outreach on reacting to myths that make the news, an opportunity is lost here to discuss the idea of prebunking or inoculation, which involves raising awareness about misinformation before it becomes the next viral story. As a former journalist, Vesperi echoes Fuentes' insistence that public writing be relevant and that authors make peace with being vulnerable and sometimes wrong. Her essay is less about the technicalities of writing and more about ways anthropologists can view ethnography and communication. Part Two, “The World Wide Web,” includes three essays on communicating anthropology online. Daniel Lende summarizes his approach to blogging over the years, including the need to think more like a generalist than the specialist most of us were trained as and the importance of curating online writing so that people can find credible sources of information. Next, the PopAnth collective talks about their inspirations for writing for a public audience. In creating readable stories for different audiences on their website, the team worked toward breaking down cultural ideas and building them back up again. But tight schedules, lack of funding, and difficulties getting popular writing to “count” in the academy ultimately led PopAnth to expire and allowed SAPIENS, with its Wenner-Gren-backed funding, to take its place. In their chapter, Chip Colwell and Leslie Aiello discuss the platform as a way to foreground popular pieces written by anthropologists for the general public. Because SAPIENS does not run solely on goodwill and spare time, it has achieved moderate success, with hundreds of articles and millions of hits over the years. Still, as they point out, finding the “winning formula” for engagement or virality every time is something no one has been able to do. The essays in this section are general optimistic about the use of the internet to reach diverse publics, but they may be out of date. Since the publication of this volume in 2022, social media usage has declined across the board, with the sharpest decrease in X/Twitter; online news sites have seen mass layoffs; and blogs and websites (such as PopAnth.com) have gone stale. It would be interesting to know Lende's current thoughts on blogging, Fuentes' on the use of X, and the PopAnth collective's on maintaining a website in the face of a changing online ecosystem. In Part Three, “Reimagining Public Spaces,” Kristin Koptiuch writes about her Visualizing Immigrant Phoenix project, in which she and a bevy of undergraduate ethnographers documented migrants' lives in the city. From 2016 to 2018, a time when immigration was a hot U.S. policy topic, they employed a variety of methods, from photography to interactive exhibits, to try to upend people's assumptions about immigrants and immigration. Moving from the visual to the virtual, R. Scott Wilson lays out requirements for creating VR/360 ethnographic films in his chapter, focusing on both how to make the film's subject empathetic and how to convince university bureaucrats to fund the necessary equipment. In summarizing their findings from the Library Transformations Project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, a set of authors notes the utility of ethnography for user experience research. By training students in qualitative research techniques, a partnership was formed between anthropologists and librarians that ultimately resulted in the creation of spaces for belonging and the reduction of library anxiety. Shifting the discussion to applied anthropology in the realm of business, James Mullooly explains how to sneak some ethnographic methods into the training of your typical entrepreneur wannabe. Since anthropological methods create outside-the-box thinkers, Mullooly devised an assignment that asks business students to pay attention to ways people “hack” products. The power of observation can pay dividends for these students as they learn to better understand their clients or users. “Creatives,” Part Four of the volume, includes methodologies related to film, comics, performance, and sound. An ongoing professional collaboration between artist Gregg Deal and anthropologist Kerry Hawk Lessard offers a lesson in ways of explaining the experience of Indigenous people in an America that too frequently sees them as mascots. Tom Miller then offers up highlights from his career in ethnomusicology or, as he prefers, sonic anthropology, pointing out that sound can be remixed and played in ways that immerse and inform people, shifting their attention from things to experiences. Writing about fiction filmmaking, Carylanna Taylor discusses the power of collaboration as well as the difficulties getting an anthropologically-inspired indie film off the ground. Whereas most attempts at outreach are direct—teaching and writing prime among them—fiction films are an indirect mode of communication, and one where Taylor suggests it is important to lead with the heart, not the head. The final chapter of the volume, by Sally Campbell Galman, is graphical in format, part of her practice of arts- or comics-based research. Galman points out that this sort of work can be hard to frame as “legitimate” scholarship but that, in the end, it is worth it because art allows her to clarify without simplifying anthropological concepts, leaving the reader with a textual and visual image that sticks with them. Cool Anthropology presents a series of 14 stand-alone case studies but lacks both chapter cross-talk and a formal discussant-style response from volume editors Baines and Costa, which could have drawn the examples together into a more cohesive whole. But there are a couple through-lines worth mentioning. Most authors wrote about the need for their “cool” anthropology to address timely issues, often political, in a way that both informs and entertains their audience. This requires professionals interested in outreach to pay attention to world events, lurk on the 21st century information fire hose we call the internet, network and collaborate with others, and be agile in the methods we use to communicate ideas. Another major point most authors made is that anthropologists, thanks to our training, are huge proponents of outside-the-box thinking but that, unfortunately, the structure and bureaucracy of academia mean difficulties in getting this work to “count,” even though the American Anthropological Association distributed guidelines for counting public communication and scholarship in tenure and promotion review in 2017. Finally, many authors talked about honing their practice over years or decades. This kind of deep knowledge is appreciated, but few authors discussed assessment—Did it work? How do you know?—or how someone interested in outreach can best engage the public when they have little time to devote to it. The ethnographic-reader structure of Cool Anthropology should be thought-provoking for professionals in the field who are eager to update their outreach mood board. Anthropologists will surely identify several methodological aspects throughout the book that may work for their own practice. But when envisioned as a kind of primer for anthropology students interested in public outreach or science communication, the lack of contextualization of most essays means that an instructor would need to provide significant background information for the volume to be useful in the classroom. Although the editors suggest the volume could be used as a how-to manual, the extremely sparse bibliographies do not provide enough guidance for this or for understanding the larger ecosystem of science communication and public anthropology. This edited volume and its case studies are also more relevant for practitioners working with contemporary humans, as the ethical dilemmas touched on in this book are different than the ones those of us working with nonhuman primates or past human groups deal with (e.g., showing images of human skeletons). But in the end, Cool Anthropology—and cool anthropology—are a call to action, encouraging anthropologists to jump in to contemporary debates and to find innovative ways to infuse anthropology into the fabric of daily life. Kristina Killgrove: Writing – original draft (lead). Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

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