Description of Research Expertise

Areas of Expertise
Cultural Anthropology
Educational Bureaucracy /Culture
Meritocracy and Social Reproduction
Credentialism in Higher Education
Ethnographic and Other Qualitative Methods

Professional Biography
Dr. Posecznick joined Penn GSE in Fall 2011 in a hybridized role as Program Manager and Lecturer in Education, Culture and Society. He received a Wenner-Gren grant to fund his dissertation research on college admissions, which he successfully defended at Columbia University in Fall 2010. Prior to joining GSE he held adjunct appointments in the City University of New York and Metropolitan College of New York, as well as holding administrative appointments in a variety of institutions up to and including Assistant Dean of Students. His research and professional expertise in post-secondary settings provide him with a unique perspective on academic programming and higher education administration. Dr. Posecznick is also an affiliated faculty member in Penn’s International Educational Development Program and a member of the American Anthropological Association, the Council on Anthropology and Education, the American Educational Research Association.

Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Posecznick’s expertise is in cultural anthropology, qualitative methods and post-secondary educational settings. He examines institutional culture, policy, and practice ethnographically, with particular emphasis on the social construction of legitimacy, privilege, merit, gatekeeping, access, equity and opportunity. Dr. Posecznick’s interest in educational bureaucracies highlights the ways that peripheral institutions and systems both shape and are shaped by the individuals who move through them. This has also led him to explore the production of the neoliberal subject in post-secondary settings, as well as entré into professional (and other) identities through post-secondary education.

His most recent research, an ethnography of college admissions funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation, demonstrates the challenges faced by a small urban college as it struggles to both compete in a tight educational marketplace and to change students’ lives. In short, he describes the delicate balance that many educational institutions must walk in the current economic climate: the line between empowering marginalized students and exploiting them. He has reviewed manuscripts for American Anthropologist, Ethos, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting and is coediting a special issue of Learning and Teaching that examines the relationship between the university, academics and state. He is co-chair of the Council on Anthropology and Education’s committee on Post-Secondary Education. Dr. Posecznick has presented numerous papers at such venues as the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting, Penn’s Ethnography in Education Research Forum, and Oxford’s Ethnography and Education Conference.