Alexandra Crampton featured in “Anthropology News”

Dr. Alexandra Crampton, a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Boston University Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future was featured in Anthropology News, discussing her experience in navigating a joint doctoral program in Social Work and Anthropology.

Alexandra Crampton’s research at the Pardee Center focusses on issues related to global trends in aging and her doctoral dissertation looked more specifically at aging issues in Ghana.

In her commentary on doing interdisciplinary research she writes, “My interdisciplinary degree experience at the University of Michigan Joint Program in Social Work and Social Science combined the master’s and doctoral degree requirements of social work and anthropology. Completing these requirements simultaneously involved learning and unlearning multiple and often conflicting concepts of good scholarship and best practices.”

She concludes that “A single set of universal best practices may be elusive, but the tension between competing notions of best practices can itself be productive.”