Retinal Microvascular Biomarkers Measured by Optical Coherence Tomography Angiography in Neurodegenerative and Neurovascular Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Distinctions have long been made about what it means to be a professional, practicing, public, or applied anthropologist (; ; ; ; ). At a moment when many academically placed anthropologists are reconsidering the fit of the academic enterprise with their career and life goals, and when anthropologists in training may be seeking different types of employment, we explore contemporary anthropological practice through our own experiences within the United States’s largest integrated health care system, the United States Department of Veteran Affairs (VA). We offer a portrait of a career path that is viable and rewarding with broad system-wide impacts embedded within a community of practice that can foster and sustain that career path. Most of what we know about anthropological employment is framed in terms of academic placement. Approximately 79% of United States anthropology doctorates do not obtain tenure-track positions, largely as a result of structural impediments to the idealized path from graduate student to tenure-track faculty (). These impediments include an overproduction of Ph.D.s, changes in the number of jobs, a disproportionate number of tenure-track positions filled by a subset of programs, and persistent discrepancies in employment by subdiscipline. The job market has changed dramatically in the last 20 years. The realities of the anthropology job market impede the abilities of many anthropologists to pursue tenure-track appointments within anthropology departments (; ). Speakman and colleagues describe that 75% of doctoral program graduates fill only 31.6% of positions, with the majority of positions going to a minority of graduates. Kawa and colleagues similarly note that five Ph.D.-granting programs disproportionately fill 30% of faculty positions, leaving graduates from lower-tier programs with significantly less chance of finding a faculty position. There are, however, a few graduate programs designed explicitly to prepare students for a diversity of jobs (; ). Yet these are still not the norm. Given these realities, anthropologists are increasingly rethinking the model instantiated in graduate school, about what it means to be an anthropologist, and how and which work defines who we are (). Given how our profession is oriented and structured, anthropologists outside academia need practical strategies to find employment, maintain an anthropological identity, stay engaged with the discipline, and equip future anthropologists to work in meaningful ways in a variety of settings. One important and useful strategy is the development of a community of practice (CoP). A CoP is an informal social learning system comprising a group of people who share a concern or passion (). Through dynamic, active interactions, they improve their skills around something they do and together learn how to do it better (). Key features of a CoP are self-organization, an emergent structure, complex relationships, dynamic boundaries, and ongoing negotiation of identity and cultural meaning (). A CoP can provide pragmatic and emotional support, mentoring, sharing of best practices, and/or a sense of connection with other anthropologists.