Erica Lehrer is a sociocultural anthropologist and curator. She is currently an associate professor and the Canada Research Chair in Museum and Heritage Studies in the departments

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Public and feminist anthropologists use multiple modalities to remap the traditional distinctions between university and community through rigorous scholarship and a commitment to social justice.As anthropologists, we recognize that knowledge production and circulation are intimately linked to myriad political projects. Anthropology has been and remains committed to interrogating social relations: Analyzing relations of power is an integral part of anthropological inquiry. Questioning the construction of naturalized categories and the social processes that circulate them as "natural" is what we do. And yet, while we engage with these questions as researchers, it's possible that our understanding of our own scholarly projects as saturated with certain political projects remain less explored. How do we then respond to social injustices on our campuses and in our communities, particularly when our work speaks to these concerns directly? For graduate students, this might be expressed as an expectation that their social justice work is tangential to their identities as scholars.Once they become faculty, the separation of scholarship from service as part of the criteria used for promotion and tenure evaluations can compound this distinction. When this distinction is structurally maintained across generations, public scholarship, which is both scholarship and a kind of "service," becomes understood as categorically ambiguous and is often clumped with "service" rather than being seen as scholarship. Although there are many examples of overlap between one's public scholarship and more traditional forms, the dominant norm presents them as markedly di erent. In this moment, our discipline is ideally poised to respond to the challenges of studying how all social relations are political and thus recognizing how our scholarship is political.In this column, I draw on Sara Ahmed's work on the "feminist killjoy" gure-one who questions power structures across forms and genres to consider what a feminist killjoy (in/of) anthropology might look like-and take the feminist maxim of "the personal is political" as method to reconcile academic work with political investments. In anthropology, academic work is oftentimes a choice, 