PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT, POLICY REFORM AND SCALES OF EFFECTIVE INTERVENTION

Abstract

In this paper for the annual four-field symposium organized by the Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges, we make a simple point: Scale matters. Teach “scale.” Whether your students are aiming to change their worlds through business, research, or advocacy work, they must be strategic at multiple scales simultaneously, which means that we, as teachers and practitioners need to be similarly strategic.Today, we will offer for your consideration six propositions about applied anthropology, “holism,” and scales of policy intervention. For illustration purposes, some recent work on policy reform is presented for bridging the so-called “digital divide.” At the end, it is suggested that as teachers and practitioners of applied anthropology, we must attend more carefully to issues of multiple scales in analysis, intervention, and policy impact analysis, and I will mention some specific ways of doing so.