The field practicum is placed at the master’s degree in Anthropology (Second and third term) and is ideally coordinated in the fall the year before the practicum starts in the spring term. The field practicum period runs yearly from the 15’th of April to the 30’th of September, that means 4 to a maximum of 5 months. The field practicum can be fulltime or part time depending on what is agreed upon between the host organisation of practicum and the student.
In a scholarly context, the field practicum must include a fieldwork which is training in applying and attaining knowledge through interviews, participant observation and other anthropological data collection methods. The field practicum student is obliged to collect and process data in an iterative fieldwork process with a particular theme.
Anthropological studies are based on a qualitative and open approach that identify patterns in human behaviour and strategies to understand and explain human interaction, behaviour and social structures. In that sense, anthropology is a shortcut to create documented knowledge and understanding of different organizational cultures as well as different social and cultural aspects of your organization, the action patterns of consumers, social structures, internal challenges in your organization or in relation to business partners.
The field practicum student has a supervisor, a teacher from the Department of Anthropology, and a field practicum contact person (Ideally an academically educated person) is required in the host organisation. These three parties engage in a field practicum agreement. The student prepares the field practicum, processing work in the form of literature studies and a project description in collaboration with the supervisor which is already initiated in the period from February to April before starting the field practicum in the organization.
The field practicum concludes with a field report/exam paper at the department of Anthropology. In addition, the student can, by individual agreement, make a direct report to the host organisation of the field practicum, for example: give a short oral presentation on preliminary findings just after the field practicum.
Feel free to send us a statement of your organization’s interest (as well as contact details of a practicum manager). Your organization will then be added to our list of field practicum places that interested students can find out about via MANTRA.
Or even better, please send us a call for a field practicum student. A call that can be circulated among our graduate students. Practicum calls are preferably a short kind of “job posting” inviting for a dialogue. There must be a theme, a heading, a bit about the problem that the field practicum student will work with, some information about your organization, including a link to your website, plus a contact person. Generally, our students are very pleased with open themes that invite the student to a dialogue around how it can be examined anthropologically and about possible foci.
Field practicum agreements with the department of Anthropology are entered into on an ongoing basis, preferably during autumn of the year before the field practicum is requested in the spring, so we can advertise your notice early, and you can hopefully have more applicants to choose from.
For inquiries regarding field practicum: MantraAssistance@cas.au.dk
