embedded scholarship

"A two-year-old Pentagon program that assigns social scientists to work with military units in Iraq and Afghanistan has come under sharp criticism from a panel of anthropologists who argue that the undertaking is dangerous, unethical and unscholarly. The committee, which released the report on Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, the discipline’s largest professional group, has been studying the program since its inception in 2007. The panel concluded that the Pentagon program, called the Human Terrain System, has two conflicting goals: counterinsurgency and research. Collecting data in the context of war, where coercion and offensive tactics are always potentially present, “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology,” the report says." (thanks Laleh)