University-based academic advising at a large, Great Lakes state institution was designed to support first-year students' transition to college. We conducted individual interviews and facilitated story circles with 162 students to determine their perceived effectiveness of advising. Analyses revealed four overarching themes: student difficulty making the distinction between roles of high school guidance counselors and postsecondary academic advisors, advisor communication, student desire for a relationship, and advisor accessibility. On the basis of data gathered, we developed a model for understanding the formation and maintenance of student advising perceptions.

In recent years, many anthropologists in the United States have become involved with organizations that serve newly resettled refugees, especially as budgets for the agencies have been severely cut since 2017. Here, we reflect on some of our experiences working with Refugees from the Congo Wars (RFCWs) and address some of the challenges we have faced as applied/practicing anthropologists and resettlement support personnel. Juxtaposing a larger southern city—Tampa—with a smaller rustbelt city—Akron—we see many commonalities but also a few differences that likely relate to host city size and existing diversity profiles. Drawing on almost 3 years of research, we offer some shared observations and comparative divergences among populations of RFCWs that shed light on issues of: timing of arrival in the United States, community and class, schooling, gender and family, and food and diet, for people working with this population.

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Community‐based research and service‐learning (CBRSL) represents an important and expanding approach to academic inquiry and pedagogy employed by several fields, including cultural anthropology. Much of the theoretical work on this approach, while providing an essential foundation for research, fails to account fully for the complexities encountered in the actual practice of community‐based collaborative work. Drawing on nearly a decade of my own field experience, both teaching about and participating in community‐based research, I examine the concepts of “community” and “neighborhood” as they are constructed by collaborating partners to frame a discussion of the overall objectives of community‐based projects. In particular, I outline and explore the lifecycle of an ongoing CBRSL project, its role in the systematic generation of local transformative knowledge, and I examine how, at each stage in its evolution, the process is shaped by the interaction of individual agents within the constraints of the cultural structure in which such research takes place. This approach is valuable because it allows us to both better understand the degree to which theoretical constructs are shared by coalition members and to explicate the ramifications that variation in understanding between members holds for project success. Success, in the case of CBRSL, is multidimensional and fluid, as expectations and goals vary between partners and shift across the lifecycle of the project. I conclude that what is of lasting value to all participants is the shared appreciation of the challenges and long‐term benefits of coalition building between academic and nonacademic communities to address real world problems.