Navigating a career beyond the traditional academic path can be both exciting and daunting for humanities professionals, often leaving them eager to explore new opportunities but unsure where to start. This article addresses five common challenges faced by those venturing outside academia and offers practical strategies for overcoming these obstacles. By tackling key issues such as translating academic expertise into broader contexts, expanding skill perceptions, and building professional networks, it provides actionable advice to help humanities graduates thrive in diverse career environments. Whether you are struggling with imposter syndrome or looking to leverage your unique skills, this guide aims to empower you to unlock new career possibilities and achieve success beyond academia.

The Dutch parliamentary far right has been considered a relatively liberal outlier to the gender politics of the European far right, yet recent years have shown the increasing anti-gender mobilization of the party Forum voor Democratie(FvD). Based on a theoretical framework of anti-gender mobilization, the far right, and politics of knowledge, this article explores anti-gender politics as a form of alternative knowledge production through a qualitative content analysis of the FvD’s online presence. Through applying Verloo’s concept of the episteme, this article’s findings show that the FvD mobilizes against epistemic institutions by claiming they disseminate dangerous knowledge about gender, which they argue presents a fundamental threat to society, captured in conspiratorial terms like “transgender ideology” and “woke.” Simultaneously, the party promotes illiberal gender politics through the establishment of alternative epistemic institutions. This article shows how far-right actors may promote anti-gender politics by presenting themselves as “alternative intellectuals” who seek to carve out an epistemic niche alongside the mainstream.

This essay delves into a pivotal incident where Edward Said’s Palestinian identity collided with entrenched conservative American values, revealing the dichotomy of his dual role as a Columbia University professor and outspoken advocate for Palestinian statehood. The catalyst was a provocative article, “Edward Said Accused of Stoning in South Lebanon,” from the Columbia Daily Spectator. Said, renowned for his incisive critique of Western depictions of the East and the global dissemination of “orientalism,” brazenly condemned American foreign policy, particularly its support for Israel’s colonial expansion. I examine the episode’s portrayal in the New York Times and Columbia Daily Spectator, highlighting Edward Said’s seemingly conflicting intellectual legacy. Drawing from his essays like “On Nelson Mandela, and Others” (1994), “Homage to a Belly Dancer” (1990), and the memoir “Out of Place” (1999), I explore Said’s views on the public intellectual’s role in America. This investigation probes whether Said’s public identity aligns with his academic persona, and how visibility shapes his concept of the “public.” It questions if public intellectuals can maintain autonomy within academia or if they inevitably conform to university norms.

The World Health Organization (WHO) proclaimed September 21 as World Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Day and extended the observance to the entire month. Various awareness campaigns are being conducted around the world, with special emphasis on the importance of education to improve the quality of life for patients, families, and the community at large, and to eliminate stigma and ageism.

It is estimated that there are approximately 44 million people worldwide with some form of dementia, while in the United States it reaches 5.4 million. In Puerto Rico, it is estimated that there are approximately 60,000 people with Alzheimer’s disease. An AARP study (2021) showed that there are over 500,000 caregivers of older adults, making Puerto Rico one of the top three countries with the largest aging population and the 6th country in the world. While in Latin America and the Caribbean there is a prevalence between 6.2 and 6.5 per 100 adults aged 60 years or older (WHO).

This health and social situation require an educated and empowered society to meet the challenges. Muñoz et. al (2023) conducted a qualitative study with caregivers and found that 91% of the participants stated that training would help them provide better care to the elderly. Social work is one of the main disciplines dealing with this social phenomenon and should therefore play a leading role in education and therapeutic intervention.

For the past five years, the Department of Social Work at Inter-American University, Metro Campus, has joined and supported the cause through the celebration of the Alzheimer’s Symposium: A Perspective from the Academy. This event involves the entire university community, as well as the community at large, which includes caregivers, government and non- profit agencies, and professionals from various disciplines. There will be concurrent lectures, Discussions among local and international professionals, a film forum, poster presentations, artistic expressions, and educational tables. The 6th Symposium will be held on September 20, 2024. The Symposium is promoted through various media. This activity has generated alliances, recommendations and new educational projects that contribute to the well-being of older adults.

An animal welfare education community of practice (AWECoP) for those teaching animal welfare science, applied ethology, and/or animal ethics was created to develop a dialogue amongst educators within the field of animal welfare science. The purpose of this paper is to describe the history, objectives, and members’ experiences within this community. AWECoP hosts 6–8 meetings annually for members to discuss topics relevant to our community and exchange teaching resources; within its first two years, the community has grown to 121 members representing approximately 70 institutions across six continents. A 12-question, mixed-method survey was distributed to capture member demographics, engagement with AWECoP, motivations for joining, and self-evaluation of AWECoP’s impacts. Quantitative data from the survey are presented descriptively, while reflexive thematic analysis was applied to the qualitative data. Survey respondents (n = 54) felt that AWECoP is a vital community and safe space for members to share their ideas and receive feedback, inspiration, information, and resources regarding subject-specific and broader pedagogical topics. As a result, a majority experienced professional (e.g. development of new contacts) and personal (e.g. increased feeling of belonging in their field) benefits, as well as impacts realised in their teaching practice. We conclude with an examination of challenges faced in ensuring AWECoP remains accessible to a growing membership and offer recommendations for facilitating similar communities to support fellowship and training in the teaching of animal welfare and related disciplines.

Most people working in the field of linguistics in the US and Canada have an intuitive sense of who the “major players” are among PhD-granting linguistics departments. Our analysis demonstrates that the frequently-perceived hierarchy of linguistics programs is indeed correct. Drawing on publicly available information from Winter/Spring, 2019 on faculty at all PhD-granting linguistics programs across the US and Canada, we use social network and heat map visualizations to demonstrate the existence of an extraordinarily strong and relatively stable hierarchy of programs whose graduates dominate the linguistics academic job market. A secondary finding is that many of the top programs are characterized by gender imbalances. We argue that the top programs’ tremendous influence on the job market as a whole affords these programs the ability – indeed, the responsibility – to take the lead in effecting positive change in the field's hiring patterns more broadly.

Pretendianism is a problem in academia (and of whiteness). Its long-standing existence is well researched and analyzed in the academic record, and it has been brought to wider audiences through news and social media. In response, task forces, committees and advisory councils are being created in universities to determine stronger identity validation policies, with emphasis on engaging relationships with local Indigenous nations, communities, elders, and knowledge holders. Policy making, including processes and procedures of identity validation, will be a powerful apparatus going forward to administer indigeneity in universities. This approach will also lead to the intensification of Indigenous definition and regulation by predominantly non-Indigenous institutions. This article proposes a set of complementary extrapolicy practices addressing pretendianism worth exploring and that emerge from the everyday embodied vantage points of Indigenous academics. We must (continue to) name whiteness, model Indigenous relationality and learn from Indigenous women's leadership.

The COVID-19 pandemic and pandemic-related measures have impacted the lives and work-related activities of Antarctic researchers. To explore these impacts, we designed, piloted and disseminated an online survey in English, Russian, Spanish and Chinese in late 2020 and early 2021. The survey explored how the pandemic affected the productivity of Antarctic researchers, their career prospects and their mental wellbeing. Findings exposed patterns of inequities. For instance, of the 406 unique responses to the survey, women appeared to have been affected more adversely than men, especially in relation to mental health, and early-career researchers were disadvantaged more than their mid- or late-career colleagues. Overall, a third of the research participants reported at least one major negative impact from the pandemic on their mental health. Approximately half of the participants also mentioned that the COVID-19 pandemic had some positive effects, especially in terms of the advantages that working from home brought and opportunities to attend events, network or benefit from training workshops online. We conclude with a series of recommendations for science administrators and policymakers to mitigate the most serious adverse impacts of the pandemic on Antarctic research communities, with implications for other contexts where scientific activities are conducted under extreme circumstances.

This article presents the results of a 2021 international online survey of 419 early career researchers in archaeology. Respondents were passionate about pursuing an academic career, but pessimistic about job and career prospects. Statistics highlight specific obstacles, especially for women, from unstable employment to inequitable practices, and a chronic lack of support. Over 180 open-ended comments reveal worrying levels of workplace bullying and discrimination, particularly targeting women and minorities. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on early career researchers is also examined. The survey's findings are analysed and contextualized within the international higher education sector. A communal effort is necessary to create sustained change, but early career researchers remain hopeful that change can be implemented.

Forced migration as a reaction to National Socialism represents individual as well as simultaneously collective, transnational, and global experiences. Not only identity-forming categories but also forms of knowledge are profoundly reshaped by processes of displacement and resettlement. The paper argues that the biography of the archaeologist Grete Mostny (1914–91) offers an exemplary case study of such processes of adaptation on individual, collective, and academic levels. Due to her escape from Austria to Chile as a persecuted Jew in 1938/39, Mostny's identity as a white European (female) scholar attained a whole new significance and became the door opener for her interdisciplinary career at the interface of archaeology and anthropology in her new homeland. Her research in Chile was a product of a global event—namely mass forced emigration from Europe—as well as of factors on the micro level, such as her European descent and her academic education, which gave her certain privileges in her new environment. When Mostny arrived in Chile in 1939, a new European and U.S. hegemony had already begun to dominate academia in the country, which was trying to modernise itself and move from the academic periphery closer to the centre. Mostny, the once racially persecuted scholar, fit well in this process by making use of her “European” knowledge and her networks. In 1954 she received international attention when she put together a pioneering interdisciplinary research team to study El Niño del Cerro El Plomo, a four-hundred-year-old Inca mummy found in the Andes five thousand metres above sea level. Nationally, Mostny's study contributed, beyond all measure, to the Andean state's identity, as it re-evaluated and enhanced Chile's prehistory. In a time of political and social tensions in Chile, the rediscovery of its Indigenous prehistory—even by a foreign white scholar—helped to overcome the old shadows of colonial historical research, perhaps because in the immediate present the Indigenous movement in Chile offered little potential for consensus. This article uses Mostny's transnational biography as a lens through which to detect these connected histories and entangled hegemonies in the fields of anthropology and archaeology, which have become instrumental in the formation of Chile's national identity. Moreover, the paper shows that the category of race played a central role in the field of knowledge production and career development, not only for Grete Mostny.