Where This Leads Me
The question I get asked most often is some version of "so what are you going to do?" I understand why people ask it. I still don't have the clean answer. What I have instead is a clearer sense of what the work has to feel like, and that turns out to be more useful than a job title.
The clearest standard I own comes from the food access project in Denver. I know what it felt like to make a real system work differently, and I know I want to feel that again. Not the grant, not the line on the resume. The feeling that something works differently because I was there. Whatever I do next, in whatever field, I want it to pass that test.
I've also learned how I want to do the work. I want to be physically present. I want to participate rather than observe from a distance, because working alongside someone is almost like an interview, but better. Sometimes that means entering a situation where the problem is already named and helping solve it. Sometimes it means entering more openly, working alongside people, and letting them name the problem before I decide what would help. I want both, and I don't think they conflict. The common denominator is that my involvement can't end at understanding. I don't want the work to stop at "I now see how this works." I want it to end with something changed, communicated, or set in motion.
I've thought a lot about who the work is for. Some of it has to reach people with the power and resources to act: institutional leaders, organizations, funders, decision makers. But I care just as much that the work stays recognizable to the people it came from. I want information to travel upward without becoming unrecognizable on the way. I want a community to be able to look at what I produced and feel I did justice to what they wanted to communicate. That principle will shape every choice I make about audience, format, and venue.
I've thought about the shape of the life around the work, too. I don't want permanent transit. I can imagine periods of intense fieldwork, weeks at a time, and I can imagine stretches of institutional work, meetings, writing, presenting. I want a home base and a life that isn't constantly packed into a carry-on. The version of this future I want has room for both immersion and return, and I don't think that makes the work less serious. I think it makes it sustainable.
As for the specific direction: photography is definite. It has been for years, and it isn't going anywhere. Documentary and field reporting genuinely draw me, especially work that makes policy human by showing how decisions made in capitals land on actual communities. But I haven't tested that life enough to claim it, and this site isn't going to pretend I have. Humanitarian field work and community-engaged research sit close to the same instincts and remain live possibilities. What these paths share is the real foundation: presence, participation, careful listening, some fluency in how systems and policy work, ethical representation, and communication that respects the people it describes. I trust that foundation more than any job title.
Anthropology is what built it. Not by teaching me to care about people, because I arrived already caring. It did something harder: it made my instinct to help more thoughtful. Better according to whom? What do people want? What's already working? I'm no longer the person who thinks my first idea is the solution, and that shift will show up in everything I do, whether or not my job title ever says "anthropologist."
There's a version of success I keep coming back to. Somewhere down the line, I'd like someone to hand me a problem that matters and say, "we want you to lead this." Not because I have all the answers, but because I've shown I can go find out: work with the people experiencing something, figure out what's actually happening, bring that knowledge back, and help do something about it. Presenting still scares me. Leading is a skill I'm still building. But I can see the person who does those things, and the distance between her and me is mostly reps.
So, where does this lead? I'm going where the wind blows, which is a phrase I use privately and mean honestly. It scares me a little, and it's also the truest thing I can say. But going where the wind blows isn't the same as drifting. I know what I want to carry with me: show up in person, work alongside people, understand before assuming, communicate without flattening, and leave things working a little better than I found them. The destination is unresolved. The direction isn't.