Many of our graduate students come to the department with work experience outside of academe, and some wish to pursue graduate work in order to gain the skills to continue doing so after their M.A. or Ph.D. degrees. The public anthropology collective consists of students, alumni, and affiliated anthropologists who have worked in fields that range from medical research, disaster relief, and environmental NGO work, to design firms and consultancy. The goal is to bring anthropologists from within and outside the academic world together to create a series of sustained conversations about theory, methods, and ethics. How is ethnography – in the ways it is conducted, its results communicated, and perceived – changing as it circulates across academic and non-academic terrain? What methods, forms of knowledge and insights are valued in academic / non-academic settings and how can such intersections lead to methodological innovation? How do anthropologists best convey their skill sets? And in what ways in ethnography refunctioned through collaboration?