Dr. Jennifer Loughmiller-Cardinal

I started out as a linguistic anthropologist, very much in academia. I finished up my PhD doing archaeological research in Central America. Then, my work required chemistry, so I went back to school for another PhD in chemistry for residue analysis - looking at what people say and what they write down versus what they're actually doing. I was about to finish up a PhD when COVID hit, which put a pause to everything, but it was the first time in about 20 years I had a chance to just stop and evaluate what I wanted out of life. The work that we were doing on social norms, the papers that my husband and I were publishing, and then all of this other research - archaeology, linguistics, and chemistry - when we put it all together, we realized that academia is no longer what it used to be, and research is no longer what it used to be, but there's a lot of problems in this world that anthropologists are not contributing their knowledge to. So, it was a reprioritization of what we were doing, so we both decided to leave academia and to contribute our knowledge to the social problems and social needs and environmental needs in a more practical way, to bring all this research that people seem to be completely unaware of to the forefront. We're both anthropologists, and the research that this is based on was something that my husband and I started about a decade ago on social norms. As we were working on the social norms research, it became 3 articles, and now it's going to be 4 articles.