Ethnography and Translational Capital in
Relational Engagement
Words: Courtney Boag
Images: Dr. Gillian Tan speaking at Nostos gathering
Preprint publication of forthcoming paper
1 October, 2025
“The stakes are high, but I believe that in bridging differences, fostering ethical dialogue, and preserving the capacity to think with rather than over others, anthropology can serve as a bulwark against the flattening logics of speed, scale, and superficial knowledge.”
Courtney Boag
In a world accelerating at a pace where artificial intelligence processes data at scales and speeds far beyond human cognition (Sauerbrei and Pruszynski 2025; Galatzer-Levy et al. 2024) and where social media infrastructures amplify insight, opinion, and extremism (Whittaker, Looney, Reed and Votta 2021; Van Bavel, Rathje, Harris, Robertson and Sternisko 2021; Shaw 2023), the question of how we preserve human capacities for reflection, relationality, and ethical engagement has never been more urgent. Contemporary societies, driven by efficiency, productivity, and quantifiable outcomes, can often marginalise the slower, ambiguous, and often contradictory practices of observation, dialogue, and reflection through which we apprehend complexity, cultivate nuance, and resist polarising dichotomies (Tyler, Boldi and Cherubini 2022; Vasist., Chatterjee and Krishnan 2024; Turner and Smaldino 2018). It is in this present day complexity that anthropology, and the practice of ethnography in particular, must be recognised, not merely as an academic or methodological undertaking, but as a vital training ground for metacognitive awareness and for developing what I propose as “translational capital”.
I would like to propose from the outset of this paper that ethnographic practice can function as a dual cultivation; firstly, as a form of metacognitive training in which practitioners can learn, not only how to observe and interpret others, but also how to attend to reflexively in their own witnessing, assumptions, and interpretive frameworks (Trigger 2025; Erkonan 2020; Stodulka, Dinkelaker and Thajib 2019; Davies 2008). Secondly, I argue that it can operate as a means to develop “translational capital”, a theoretical concept I introduce here, which aims to capture the capacity to convert deeply contextual, often messy cultural insights into intelligible, ethically grounded, and actionable forms for diverse audiences, from policymakers, organisational leaders, and civic stakeholders to the broader public.
To make this argument I weave three strands of thought. Firstly, I very briefly situate ethnographic practice within the literature on metacognition aiming to theoretically illustrate how it can potentially embody metacognitive dispositions (although I provide no empirical evidence for this and simply aim to spark theoretical discussion on this here). Secondly, I offer a concise (given the scope of this paper) history of translation work across disciplines and propose how my notion of “translational capital” seeks to build on existing literature around Bourdieu’s (1986) foundational work on the "forms of capital”, Star and Griesemer’s (1989) work on ‘boundary objects’ (see also: Caccamo, Pittino and Tell 2023). Boundary objects, knowledge integration, and innovation management; A systematic review of the literature. Technovation, 122, Article 102645., literature on knowledge brokering (Vallance, MacKillop, Downe and Notman 2025; Karcher et al. 2025; MacKillop, Connell, Downe and Durrant 2023; Bandola-Gill 2023; Krystallis and Jasim 2023) and work on the the sociology of translation (Dadich and Boydell 2023; Bielsa 2010, 2011, 2022; 2024). Lastly, I draw from the case of the monthly Nostos gathering hosted by Anthroprospective to illustrate how metacognitive insight and translational capital might be realised and potentially developed further in public and relational settings with both academic and non-academic audiences. I conclude by making a case that in an age of technological mediation, anthropology’s metacognitive capacities and translational potential become essential tools for bridging differences, mediating dialogue, and sustaining our shared humanity in the face of rapid digital, technological, social, ecological and political shifts.
Ethnographic practice is, at its most rigorous, not merely a set of tools for data collection, but a sustained engagement with the social world in which curiosity, ethical commitment, relational sensitivity, and reflexivity intertwine (Ingold 2021). Inhabiting liminal spaces of cultural, political, social, and epistemic difference, ethnographers are trained to dwell with ambiguity (Alimardanian and Heffernan 2024; Horvath, Thomassen and Wydra 2022; Deener 2017; Turner 1969), attend to cultural nuance (Geertz 1993; Clifford and Marcus 1986), be cognisant of power and structural inequalities (Abu-Lughod 1990; Foucault and Sheridan 1979; Graeber 2014; Giles 2021) and surface unspoken assumptions about the “mundane” (Ortner 2006; Das 2007; Brown 2006; High, Kelly and Mair 2012). Subsequently, the skills cultivated through ethnography can therefore be understood, not only as methods of intellectual inquiry, but as exercises in relational cognition, ethical engagement, and translation as they equip practitioners with the capacity to thoughtfully mediate complexity in a world that is increasingly defined by speed, scale, efficiency, epistemological and ontological binaries and technological mediation (Ingold 2018).
Critically, I propose that ethnography is a powerful form of metacognitive training. Metacognition, that is the thinking about one’s own thinking, is foundational in educational, cognitive, and developmental literature (e.g. Flavell 1979; Nelson and Narens 1990; Veenman, Van Hout-Wolters and Afflerbach 2006; Paris and Winograd 1990; Schraw and Dennison 1994). Recent advances have also emphasised that metacognitive capacities vary culturally, are socially mediated, and are amenable to training and reflection (Proust 2013; Proust and Fortier 2018). For instance, research on the cultural origins of metacognition shows that different cultural practices shape the ways people monitor and evaluate their own thought processes (Heyes, Bang, Shea, Frith and Fleming 2020).
Likewise, when ethnographers enter the “field” (the place where they will conduct their ethnographic work), they are not only observing others; they are absorbing, contesting, and revising their own categories, interpretive frames, and positionalities in real time (Erkonan 2020; Stodulka, Dinkelaker and Thajib 2019; Davies 2008). They learn to attend to the recursive feedback loop, that is, how their presence and questions shape what they see, and how what they see reshapes their thinking. In this sense, ethnographic fieldwork can be conceptualised as an embodied metacognitive lab; a space in which thinking and rethinking, noticing and adjusting, become habitual and others, albeit very few and with more of an opaque empirical link to metacognitive outcomes, have begun empirically and theoretically exploring this synergy in the literature (Zhang and Fathi 2025; Bruun 2019; Southcott and Crawford 2018)
In addition, pedagogy in ethnographic methods itself increasingly foregrounds practices that promote the ethnographers own personal reflection, collaborative inquiry, and decentring researcher privilege (Negrón et al. 2024; Trigger 2025; Davis 2008). Models such as vertically integrated projects, team-based learning, and explicit reflection modules are also helping students not just to do ethnography, but to develop awareness of how their own interpretive lenses mediate meaning (Zhang et al. 2023). These pedagogical trends echo calls across anthropology to realign disciplinary practices with ethical, relational, and socially responsive aims (Negrón et al. 2024; Ingold 2018). Therefore, I argue, albeit in a preliminary and theoretical way given I lack currently empirical evidence for this direct causal link, but draw from the rich pool of literature already conducted on ethnography (Erkonan 2020; Stodulka, Dinkelaker and Thajib 2019; Zhang and Fathi 2025; Davies 2008; Ingold 2021; Geertz 1993; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Negrón et al. 2024; Alimardanian and Heffernan 2024; Giles 2021), that ethnographic practice holds potential for training metacognitive sensitivity, that is, the reflexive capacity to hold one’s own interpretive stance lightly, to monitor when one’s assumptions are strained, and to adjust those assumptions in dialogue when in the field.
Before elaborating on translational capital, it is necessary to situate the concept of translation within its broader theoretical genealogy from knowledge translation, linguistics and sociological theory, and then to show how my concept aims to build upon and extend these understandings. In the health and implementation sciences, knowledge translation models (see: Woolf 2008; Greenhalgh and Wieringa 2011; Smith, Molldrem, Farroni and Tumilty 2023; Fort, Herr, Shaw, Gutzmen and Starren 2017) emphasise the movement of research findings into policy and practice in a linear trajectory to denote that the impact of this dissemination (often made manifest in medical or scientific innovations) will travel from “bench to bedside” (Greenhalgh and Wieringa 2011). However, this use of “translation” often neglects the relational dynamics, positionality, identity work, and the affective labour inherent in translation work (Taxt 2024; Püttmann, Ruhose, and Thomsen 2023; Ho, Looi, and Goh’s 2020; Dadich and Boydell 2023). Evidently, here the concept of translation holds its own specific technical meaning, which doesn’t always map cohesively into the social sciences.
In critical sociology and science and technology studies, translation came to be conceptualised in more relational terms during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century as a critical departure from the use of positivist epistemologies and linear models of causality that were being used to formulate research enquiries (Fassin and Steinmetz 2023). This epistemological rupture, or “concept-quake” as Steinmetz (2023) describes it sought to foreground the more symbolic, discursive, and interpretive dimensions of social life by recognising that knowledge is not only socially mediated and historically relative but also embedded in systems of power, representation, and struggle (Dadich and Boydell 2023; Bielsa 2010, 2011, 2022; 2024; Fassin and Steinmetz 2023; Foucault 1972; Geertz 1973, 1993; Latour 2005). This shift brought disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and science and technology studies to the fore, where the entanglement of knowledge and society is considered constitutive of research itself, not peripheral to it. Some major contributions that emerged from this period were Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory which emphasised enrolment, alignment, and negotiation in networks of humans and nonhumans. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of the “habitus”, the “field” and forms of capital which aimed to draw attention to how social, cultural, and symbolic forms of capital are deployed, negotiated, and converted across fields. Clifford Geertz (1973) developed the concept of “thick description” within anthropology to describe the process of ethnographic translation which is particularly influential here as I seek to flesh out the significance of ethnography, not only as a training in metacognition, but also, for its ability to help us develop “translation capital”.
Likewise, linguistic studies developed new insights into the process of translation in the 1980s and 90s (Even-Zohar 1978, 1990; Toury 1995; Bassnett and Lefevere 1990), where attention shifted from linguistic equivalence to rather acknowledge the political, ideological, and cultural work of translation and to trace how power, identity, and language shape meaning (Bielsa 2010, 2012, 2022, 2024; Doorslaer and McMartin 2022; Barbin 2014). This movement towards a “sociological turn” of translation has helped redefine scholarly communication not as a technical act of dissemination, but as a culturally embedded, institutionally mediated, and performatively enacted practice. Bielsa (2021) frames translation not as a tool of neutral intercomprehension but as a social relation forged in “spaces of incommensurability”. Translation, in this view, is a political act of provisional meaning-making across sites of epistemic and cultural tension.
A particularly important contribution here is Star and Griesemer’s (1989) concept of boundary objects, which explains how artefacts, formats, and practices enable knowledge to travel across different social worlds without requiring consensus. Recent reviews (Caccamo, Pittino, and Tell 2023) demonstrate how boundary objects function in knowledge integration and innovation by providing shared reference points across communities with divergent epistemic commitments. This literature helps explain how knowledge can move between groups. However, it leaves under-examined the question of who is able to mobilise these objects effectively and what capacities enable this movement.
Similarly, the contemporary literature on knowledge brokering (Bandola-Gill 2023; Krystallis and Jasim 2023; Vallance et al. 2025; Karcher et al. 2025) examines the roles, repertoires, organisational forms, and attributes that support the mediation of knowledge between research, policy, and practice. This scholarship moves beyond linear models and emphasises relationality, trust, negotiation, and contextual sensitivity. Yet here too, the focus remains on roles, organisations, and practices rather than on the embodied, cultivated capacities that allow individuals to perform this work across domains.
Building on this theoretical lineage and in particular the work of Bourdieu (1986), Bielsa (2011, 2012, 2022, 2024), and Geertz (1973), I introduce the concept of “translational capital”. Translational capital shifts the analytical focus from translation as a process, role, or object to translation as a cultivated human capability. It refers to the accumulated dispositions, skills, and sensibilities that enable individuals to render complex, contextually embedded social knowledge intelligible, actionable, and ethically grounded across divergent social worlds. Where boundary objects explain the mechanisms through which knowledge can travel, and knowledge brokering explains the roles and organisational practices that support this movement, translational capital explains the capacity that makes such movement possible. It is a form of capital developed through sustained ethnographic training, reflexivity, and cross-context engagement that allows actors to navigate epistemic, cultural, and institutional difference without collapsing nuance.
Here, I argue that anthropologists carry a unique ability to broker cross-cultural insights and therefore are embedded within fertile ground to develop forms of translational capital that are integral skills for the next economy and indeed, for fostering bridges and dialogue across diverse contexts.
I would like to propose that translational capital can be conceptualised in three interrelated dimensions. Firstly, “cognitive translational capital” can be understood as the capacity to extract patterns, frameworks, and interpretive insight from rich, messy social phenomena and communicate them coherently to different audiences while preserving critical nuance. Secondly, “affective translational capital” can be understood as the ability to attend to, interpret, and translate emotions, values, ethical stakes and relational contexts across audiences by generating empathy, resonance, and shared understanding. Lastly, “structural translational capital” enables the capacity to navigate institutional, disciplinary, professional, and organisational terrains, connecting domains (academia, policy, media, civic life) with ethical acumen and strategic sensitivity. I argue that, by emphasising relational, interpretive, and ethical dimensions, translational capital highlights the distinctively human skills, such as reflexive judgement, metacognition, empathy, and context-sensitive reasoning, that algorithms or artificial intelligence cannot replicate. Here, anthropology is well placed as it cultivates these capacities by enabling practitioners to observe, interpret, and mediate difference, sustain dialogue, and generate actionable insight that resonates across social, cultural, and institutional boundaries. In this sense, translational capital represents a critical and uniquely anthropological skill set which I believe is essential for navigating the complex terrains of contemporary society.
Translational capital is both distinct from, and connected to, Bourdieu’s (1986) foundational work on the forms of capital. While Bourdieu (1986) conceptualises economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital as resources accumulated and deployed within specific social “fields”[1], translational capital differs in that it is less about accumulation within a single field and more about movement across fields, epistemic contexts, and institutional or social boundaries. Where “social capital” indexes networked resources and “cultural capital” reflects mastery of domain-specific knowledge and dispositions, “translational capital” rather emphasises the ability to mediate, reinterpret, and convey knowledge across heterogeneous fields by translating complex and field-specific knowledge into forms that are intelligible, actionable, and ethically attuned for audiences with differing assumptions, needs, and epistemic frameworks. Likewise, while “symbolic capital” signals legitimacy within a field, translational capital seeks to generate authority across fields by leveraging relational, cognitive, and affective work to render knowledge socially and institutionally salient beyond its disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. In this way, translational capital seeks to extend Bourdieu’s (1986) framework by arguing that forms of capital can be derived, not necessarily from what one knows, or who one knows, but how one translates cultural difference, epistemological schisms and brokers knowledge and understanding in dynamic and socially diverse contexts.
By framing ethnography as metacognitive training and translational capital as its pedagogical product, I propose a conceptual bridge between internal reflexivity and external translation. I argue that the disciplined cultivation of cultural awareness, interpretive sensitivity, and ethical attentiveness within ethnographic practice enables practitioners to move beyond the constraints of a single field by converting relational and cognitive insight into actionable forms of understanding that resonate across professional, social, and civic domains. Translational capital, therefore, positions anthropology not only as a knowledge‑producing discipline but as a practical, relational, and ethically attuned mode of engagement that is capable of informing dialogue and greater understanding across diverse forms of social, institutional, and public life.
Building on this early theoretical grounding for translational capital, I wish to briefly draw on nearly a decade of my work with Anthroprospective and the more recent Nostos series that we’ve held, which together foster the creation of relational “third spaces” (Lefebvre 1991). The monthly Nostos events that we hosted seek to bridge the worlds of academic research and everyday social life by creating conditions for anthropological insight to be actively translated and made meaningful to broader publics. During these gathering, we invite participants into more generative and reflective dialogue with guest anthropologists on topics ranging from relational ethnography and multispecies engagement to cultural ritual and the intersection of technology and society. Within these “contact zones” (Pratt 1992) or “counterpublics” (Fraser 1990), academics are invited to translate highly complex research into accessible formats through storytelling to cultivate greater understanding of various issues through an anthropological lens to a broad audience, many of whom come from non-academic or minimally anthropologically literate backgrounds. What has been particularly rewarding in hosting these events, however, is the frequent feedback from our community indicating that these monthly gatherings, and the knowledge shared within them have enable participants to articulate and make sense of aspects of their lived experiences that had previously been difficult to conceptualise, by providing new language, conceptual frameworks, and relational perspectives through which they can interpret social phenomena.
At the same time, these gatherings provide fertile ground for the cultivation of, and deeper understandings of translational capital as they provide the environment for which academics can develop and cultivate skills in translating their research, and indeed foundational anthropological concepts and frameworks, in more accessible ways to help foster greater sense-making around social, cultural, political or ecological issues thereby gaining greater translational capital which then can be applied to other aspects of their personal and professional lives. Likewise, it is interesting to witness the unfolding of affective translational capital as the audience members garner insights provided to them from the guest anthropologist and then apply those insights in group discussions to negotiate shared understanding and empathy on issues for which they may have vastly different viewpoints on. While Nostos and Anthroprospective do not yet constitute formal empirical demonstrations of the operation of “translational capital” or the various impacts of this form of capital in the “public sphere” (Habermas 1962), they offer compelling provisional illustrations of how anthropology, when rendered publicly accessible and relationally structured, might be able to scaffold metacognitive reflection, foster relational engagement, and generate translational skill by providing both a rich site for observing these processes in action and an invitation to further research into the social, ethical, and cognitive capacities anthropology can cultivate in contemporary society.
In the rapidly evolving contexts of the twenty-first century, I concur with (Eustorgio Rivera, Rivera-González, Escamilla-García and Carrillo Gamboa 2025; Yin, Zhang, Zhao and Tang 2024; Matos, Tonial, Monteiro, Selig and Edvinsson 2022) that relational forms of capital (such as trust, relatability, collaboration, empathy and reciprocity) will be vital to maintaining resilience in the digital era rather than purely financial or technological. Indeed, the ability to bridge perspectives across social, cultural, and professional divides and to navigate differences with ethical attentiveness, curiosity, and strategic insight is increasingly essential. It is here that I would like to land on two fundamental points. Firstly, I would like to make the case for ethnography as a vital practice in developing greater metacognitive skills that will be fundamental to the future of work and society, and secondly, that anthropologists hold unique capacities in brokering complex social phenomenon across diverse audiences whether in design spaces, innovation, climate change, legal proceedings, in media etc. and therefore this work presents itself as unique example of “translational capital” which I argue is deeply needed as we move forward.
Subsequently, in this short paper I have laid the preliminary foundations for two interlinked suggestions. Firstly, I argue that ethnography is not merely a method of social research but a vital training in metacognitive reflexivity, that is, a practice that cultivates awareness of how our frames, assumptions, and positionalities mediate what we see, shape what we ask, and filter what we say and I argue that this is increasingly important in a world where self-awareness and critical reflection are paramount. Secondly, I argue that anthropologists hold a unique ability to broker insight across social, cultural, and institutional divides, and this capacity, as I have theorised it here, can be thought of as translational capital, that is, a form of capital grounded in relational, narrative, and ethical sensibility, and essential for translating complexity into actionable understanding. Finally, in very briefly drawing together the theoretical work and the example of Anthroprospective and its monthly Nostos series, I have attempted to theoretically illustrate how metacognitive cultivation, and translational capital can co-emerge. For example, the inward scrutiny of one’s interpretive lens can feed the outward capacity to broker meaning, engage publics, and influence practice. In an age in which algorithms claim to automate “insight”, I argue that anthropology’s core human-scale skills around reflection, relationality, ethical disposition and cross-cultural translation, will continue to be distinctively vital.
As we move forward, I see the challenge we face as being both institutional and pedagogical, as how to empirically evidence and embed ethnographic metacognitive training more broadly in academic curricula, how to support public-facing translation infrastructures, and how to recognise translational capital as a legitimate scholarly output will be no small task, especially in today’s climate where we see the humanities and social sciences consistently and naively defunded and devalued (Leonard 2025; Cassidy 2025a,b,c; Townsend 2024). However, the stakes are high, but I believe that in bridging differences, fostering ethical dialogue, and preserving the capacity to think with rather than over others, anthropology can serve as a bulwark against the flattening logics of speed, scale, and superficial knowledge. In cultivating metacognitive awareness and translational capital, anthropologists, and practitioners trained in ethnographic sensibilities, are uniquely equipped to sustain the relational, reflective, and generative modes of human engagement that I argue are most urgently needed in our time.
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I would like to propose from the outset of this paper that ethnographic practice can function as a dual cultivation; firstly, as a form of metacognitive training in which practitioners can learn, not only how to observe and interpret others, but also how to attend to reflexively in their own witnessing, assumptions, and interpretive frameworks (Trigger 2025; Erkonan 2020; Stodulka, Dinkelaker and Thajib 2019; Davies 2008). Secondly, I argue that it can operate as a means to develop “translational capital”, a theoretical concept I introduce here, which aims to capture the capacity to convert deeply contextual, often messy cultural insights into intelligible, ethically grounded, and actionable forms for diverse audiences, from policymakers, organisational leaders, and civic stakeholders to the broader public.
To make this argument I weave three strands of thought. Firstly, I very briefly situate ethnographic practice within the literature on metacognition aiming to theoretically illustrate how it can potentially embody metacognitive dispositions (although I provide no empirical evidence for this and simply aim to spark theoretical discussion on this here). Secondly, I offer a concise (given the scope of this paper) history of translation work across disciplines and propose how my notion of “translational capital” seeks to build on existing literature around Bourdieu’s (1986) foundational work on the "forms of capital”, Star and Griesemer’s (1989) work on ‘boundary objects’ (see also: Caccamo, Pittino and Tell 2023). Boundary objects, knowledge integration, and innovation management; A systematic review of the literature. Technovation, 122, Article 102645., literature on knowledge brokering (Vallance, MacKillop, Downe and Notman 2025; Karcher et al. 2025; MacKillop, Connell, Downe and Durrant 2023; Bandola-Gill 2023; Krystallis and Jasim 2023) and work on the the sociology of translation (Dadich and Boydell 2023; Bielsa 2010, 2011, 2022; 2024). Lastly, I draw from the case of the monthly Nostos gathering hosted by Anthroprospective to illustrate how metacognitive insight and translational capital might be realised and potentially developed further in public and relational settings with both academic and non-academic audiences. I conclude by making a case that in an age of technological mediation, anthropology’s metacognitive capacities and translational potential become essential tools for bridging differences, mediating dialogue, and sustaining our shared humanity in the face of rapid digital, technological, social, ecological and political shifts.
Ethnographic practice is, at its most rigorous, not merely a set of tools for data collection, but a sustained engagement with the social world in which curiosity, ethical commitment, relational sensitivity, and reflexivity intertwine (Ingold 2021). Inhabiting liminal spaces of cultural, political, social, and epistemic difference, ethnographers are trained to dwell with ambiguity (Alimardanian and Heffernan 2024; Horvath, Thomassen and Wydra 2022; Deener 2017; Turner 1969), attend to cultural nuance (Geertz 1993; Clifford and Marcus 1986), be cognisant of power and structural inequalities (Abu-Lughod 1990; Foucault and Sheridan 1979; Graeber 2014; Giles 2021) and surface unspoken assumptions about the “mundane” (Ortner 2006; Das 2007; Brown 2006; High, Kelly and Mair 2012). Subsequently, the skills cultivated through ethnography can therefore be understood, not only as methods of intellectual inquiry, but as exercises in relational cognition, ethical engagement, and translation as they equip practitioners with the capacity to thoughtfully mediate complexity in a world that is increasingly defined by speed, scale, efficiency, epistemological and ontological binaries and technological mediation (Ingold 2018).
Critically, I propose that ethnography is a powerful form of metacognitive training. Metacognition, that is the thinking about one’s own thinking, is foundational in educational, cognitive, and developmental literature (e.g. Flavell 1979; Nelson and Narens 1990; Veenman, Van Hout-Wolters and Afflerbach 2006; Paris and Winograd 1990; Schraw and Dennison 1994). Recent advances have also emphasised that metacognitive capacities vary culturally, are socially mediated, and are amenable to training and reflection (Proust 2013; Proust and Fortier 2018). For instance, research on the cultural origins of metacognition shows that different cultural practices shape the ways people monitor and evaluate their own thought processes (Heyes, Bang, Shea, Frith and Fleming 2020).
Likewise, when ethnographers enter the “field” (the place where they will conduct their ethnographic work), they are not only observing others; they are absorbing, contesting, and revising their own categories, interpretive frames, and positionalities in real time (Erkonan 2020; Stodulka, Dinkelaker and Thajib 2019; Davies 2008). They learn to attend to the recursive feedback loop, that is, how their presence and questions shape what they see, and how what they see reshapes their thinking. In this sense, ethnographic fieldwork can be conceptualised as an embodied metacognitive lab; a space in which thinking and rethinking, noticing and adjusting, become habitual and others, albeit very few and with more of an opaque empirical link to metacognitive outcomes, have begun empirically and theoretically exploring this synergy in the literature (Zhang and Fathi 2025; Bruun 2019; Southcott and Crawford 2018)
In addition, pedagogy in ethnographic methods itself increasingly foregrounds practices that promote the ethnographers own personal reflection, collaborative inquiry, and decentring researcher privilege (Negrón et al. 2024; Trigger 2025; Davis 2008). Models such as vertically integrated projects, team-based learning, and explicit reflection modules are also helping students not just to do ethnography, but to develop awareness of how their own interpretive lenses mediate meaning (Zhang et al. 2023). These pedagogical trends echo calls across anthropology to realign disciplinary practices with ethical, relational, and socially responsive aims (Negrón et al. 2024; Ingold 2018). Therefore, I argue, albeit in a preliminary and theoretical way given I lack currently empirical evidence for this direct causal link, but draw from the rich pool of literature already conducted on ethnography (Erkonan 2020; Stodulka, Dinkelaker and Thajib 2019; Zhang and Fathi 2025; Davies 2008; Ingold 2021; Geertz 1993; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Negrón et al. 2024; Alimardanian and Heffernan 2024; Giles 2021), that ethnographic practice holds potential for training metacognitive sensitivity, that is, the reflexive capacity to hold one’s own interpretive stance lightly, to monitor when one’s assumptions are strained, and to adjust those assumptions in dialogue when in the field.
Before elaborating on translational capital, it is necessary to situate the concept of translation within its broader theoretical genealogy from knowledge translation, linguistics and sociological theory, and then to show how my concept aims to build upon and extend these understandings. In the health and implementation sciences, knowledge translation models (see: Woolf 2008; Greenhalgh and Wieringa 2011; Smith, Molldrem, Farroni and Tumilty 2023; Fort, Herr, Shaw, Gutzmen and Starren 2017) emphasise the movement of research findings into policy and practice in a linear trajectory to denote that the impact of this dissemination (often made manifest in medical or scientific innovations) will travel from “bench to bedside” (Greenhalgh and Wieringa 2011). However, this use of “translation” often neglects the relational dynamics, positionality, identity work, and the affective labour inherent in translation work (Taxt 2024; Püttmann, Ruhose, and Thomsen 2023; Ho, Looi, and Goh’s 2020; Dadich and Boydell 2023). Evidently, here the concept of translation holds its own specific technical meaning, which doesn’t always map cohesively into the social sciences.
In critical sociology and science and technology studies, translation came to be conceptualised in more relational terms during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century as a critical departure from the use of positivist epistemologies and linear models of causality that were being used to formulate research enquiries (Fassin and Steinmetz 2023). This epistemological rupture, or “concept-quake” as Steinmetz (2023) describes it sought to foreground the more symbolic, discursive, and interpretive dimensions of social life by recognising that knowledge is not only socially mediated and historically relative but also embedded in systems of power, representation, and struggle (Dadich and Boydell 2023; Bielsa 2010, 2011, 2022; 2024; Fassin and Steinmetz 2023; Foucault 1972; Geertz 1973, 1993; Latour 2005). This shift brought disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and science and technology studies to the fore, where the entanglement of knowledge and society is considered constitutive of research itself, not peripheral to it. Some major contributions that emerged from this period were Bruno Latour’s (2005) actor-network theory which emphasised enrolment, alignment, and negotiation in networks of humans and nonhumans. Pierre Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of the “habitus”, the “field” and forms of capital which aimed to draw attention to how social, cultural, and symbolic forms of capital are deployed, negotiated, and converted across fields. Clifford Geertz (1973) developed the concept of “thick description” within anthropology to describe the process of ethnographic translation which is particularly influential here as I seek to flesh out the significance of ethnography, not only as a training in metacognition, but also, for its ability to help us develop “translation capital”.
Likewise, linguistic studies developed new insights into the process of translation in the 1980s and 90s (Even-Zohar 1978, 1990; Toury 1995; Bassnett and Lefevere 1990), where attention shifted from linguistic equivalence to rather acknowledge the political, ideological, and cultural work of translation and to trace how power, identity, and language shape meaning (Bielsa 2010, 2012, 2022, 2024; Doorslaer and McMartin 2022; Barbin 2014). This movement towards a “sociological turn” of translation has helped redefine scholarly communication not as a technical act of dissemination, but as a culturally embedded, institutionally mediated, and performatively enacted practice. Bielsa (2021) frames translation not as a tool of neutral intercomprehension but as a social relation forged in “spaces of incommensurability”. Translation, in this view, is a political act of provisional meaning-making across sites of epistemic and cultural tension.
A particularly important contribution here is Star and Griesemer’s (1989) concept of boundary objects, which explains how artefacts, formats, and practices enable knowledge to travel across different social worlds without requiring consensus. Recent reviews (Caccamo, Pittino, and Tell 2023) demonstrate how boundary objects function in knowledge integration and innovation by providing shared reference points across communities with divergent epistemic commitments. This literature helps explain how knowledge can move between groups. However, it leaves under-examined the question of who is able to mobilise these objects effectively and what capacities enable this movement.
Similarly, the contemporary literature on knowledge brokering (Bandola-Gill 2023; Krystallis and Jasim 2023; Vallance et al. 2025; Karcher et al. 2025) examines the roles, repertoires, organisational forms, and attributes that support the mediation of knowledge between research, policy, and practice. This scholarship moves beyond linear models and emphasises relationality, trust, negotiation, and contextual sensitivity. Yet here too, the focus remains on roles, organisations, and practices rather than on the embodied, cultivated capacities that allow individuals to perform this work across domains.
Building on this theoretical lineage and in particular the work of Bourdieu (1986), Bielsa (2011, 2012, 2022, 2024), and Geertz (1973), I introduce the concept of “translational capital”. Translational capital shifts the analytical focus from translation as a process, role, or object to translation as a cultivated human capability. It refers to the accumulated dispositions, skills, and sensibilities that enable individuals to render complex, contextually embedded social knowledge intelligible, actionable, and ethically grounded across divergent social worlds. Where boundary objects explain the mechanisms through which knowledge can travel, and knowledge brokering explains the roles and organisational practices that support this movement, translational capital explains the capacity that makes such movement possible. It is a form of capital developed through sustained ethnographic training, reflexivity, and cross-context engagement that allows actors to navigate epistemic, cultural, and institutional difference without collapsing nuance.
Here, I argue that anthropologists carry a unique ability to broker cross-cultural insights and therefore are embedded within fertile ground to develop forms of translational capital that are integral skills for the next economy and indeed, for fostering bridges and dialogue across diverse contexts.
I would like to propose that translational capital can be conceptualised in three interrelated dimensions. Firstly, “cognitive translational capital” can be understood as the capacity to extract patterns, frameworks, and interpretive insight from rich, messy social phenomena and communicate them coherently to different audiences while preserving critical nuance. Secondly, “affective translational capital” can be understood as the ability to attend to, interpret, and translate emotions, values, ethical stakes and relational contexts across audiences by generating empathy, resonance, and shared understanding. Lastly, “structural translational capital” enables the capacity to navigate institutional, disciplinary, professional, and organisational terrains, connecting domains (academia, policy, media, civic life) with ethical acumen and strategic sensitivity. I argue that, by emphasising relational, interpretive, and ethical dimensions, translational capital highlights the distinctively human skills, such as reflexive judgement, metacognition, empathy, and context-sensitive reasoning, that algorithms or artificial intelligence cannot replicate. Here, anthropology is well placed as it cultivates these capacities by enabling practitioners to observe, interpret, and mediate difference, sustain dialogue, and generate actionable insight that resonates across social, cultural, and institutional boundaries. In this sense, translational capital represents a critical and uniquely anthropological skill set which I believe is essential for navigating the complex terrains of contemporary society.
Translational capital is both distinct from, and connected to, Bourdieu’s (1986) foundational work on the forms of capital. While Bourdieu (1986) conceptualises economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital as resources accumulated and deployed within specific social “fields”[1], translational capital differs in that it is less about accumulation within a single field and more about movement across fields, epistemic contexts, and institutional or social boundaries. Where “social capital” indexes networked resources and “cultural capital” reflects mastery of domain-specific knowledge and dispositions, “translational capital” rather emphasises the ability to mediate, reinterpret, and convey knowledge across heterogeneous fields by translating complex and field-specific knowledge into forms that are intelligible, actionable, and ethically attuned for audiences with differing assumptions, needs, and epistemic frameworks. Likewise, while “symbolic capital” signals legitimacy within a field, translational capital seeks to generate authority across fields by leveraging relational, cognitive, and affective work to render knowledge socially and institutionally salient beyond its disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. In this way, translational capital seeks to extend Bourdieu’s (1986) framework by arguing that forms of capital can be derived, not necessarily from what one knows, or who one knows, but how one translates cultural difference, epistemological schisms and brokers knowledge and understanding in dynamic and socially diverse contexts.
By framing ethnography as metacognitive training and translational capital as its pedagogical product, I propose a conceptual bridge between internal reflexivity and external translation. I argue that the disciplined cultivation of cultural awareness, interpretive sensitivity, and ethical attentiveness within ethnographic practice enables practitioners to move beyond the constraints of a single field by converting relational and cognitive insight into actionable forms of understanding that resonate across professional, social, and civic domains. Translational capital, therefore, positions anthropology not only as a knowledge‑producing discipline but as a practical, relational, and ethically attuned mode of engagement that is capable of informing dialogue and greater understanding across diverse forms of social, institutional, and public life.
Building on this early theoretical grounding for translational capital, I wish to briefly draw on nearly a decade of my work with Anthroprospective and the more recent Nostos series that we’ve held, which together foster the creation of relational “third spaces” (Lefebvre 1991). The monthly Nostos events that we hosted seek to bridge the worlds of academic research and everyday social life by creating conditions for anthropological insight to be actively translated and made meaningful to broader publics. During these gathering, we invite participants into more generative and reflective dialogue with guest anthropologists on topics ranging from relational ethnography and multispecies engagement to cultural ritual and the intersection of technology and society. Within these “contact zones” (Pratt 1992) or “counterpublics” (Fraser 1990), academics are invited to translate highly complex research into accessible formats through storytelling to cultivate greater understanding of various issues through an anthropological lens to a broad audience, many of whom come from non-academic or minimally anthropologically literate backgrounds. What has been particularly rewarding in hosting these events, however, is the frequent feedback from our community indicating that these monthly gatherings, and the knowledge shared within them have enable participants to articulate and make sense of aspects of their lived experiences that had previously been difficult to conceptualise, by providing new language, conceptual frameworks, and relational perspectives through which they can interpret social phenomena.
At the same time, these gatherings provide fertile ground for the cultivation of, and deeper understandings of translational capital as they provide the environment for which academics can develop and cultivate skills in translating their research, and indeed foundational anthropological concepts and frameworks, in more accessible ways to help foster greater sense-making around social, cultural, political or ecological issues thereby gaining greater translational capital which then can be applied to other aspects of their personal and professional lives. Likewise, it is interesting to witness the unfolding of affective translational capital as the audience members garner insights provided to them from the guest anthropologist and then apply those insights in group discussions to negotiate shared understanding and empathy on issues for which they may have vastly different viewpoints on. While Nostos and Anthroprospective do not yet constitute formal empirical demonstrations of the operation of “translational capital” or the various impacts of this form of capital in the “public sphere” (Habermas 1962), they offer compelling provisional illustrations of how anthropology, when rendered publicly accessible and relationally structured, might be able to scaffold metacognitive reflection, foster relational engagement, and generate translational skill by providing both a rich site for observing these processes in action and an invitation to further research into the social, ethical, and cognitive capacities anthropology can cultivate in contemporary society.
In the rapidly evolving contexts of the twenty-first century, I concur with (Eustorgio Rivera, Rivera-González, Escamilla-García and Carrillo Gamboa 2025; Yin, Zhang, Zhao and Tang 2024; Matos, Tonial, Monteiro, Selig and Edvinsson 2022) that relational forms of capital (such as trust, relatability, collaboration, empathy and reciprocity) will be vital to maintaining resilience in the digital era rather than purely financial or technological. Indeed, the ability to bridge perspectives across social, cultural, and professional divides and to navigate differences with ethical attentiveness, curiosity, and strategic insight is increasingly essential. It is here that I would like to land on two fundamental points. Firstly, I would like to make the case for ethnography as a vital practice in developing greater metacognitive skills that will be fundamental to the future of work and society, and secondly, that anthropologists hold unique capacities in brokering complex social phenomenon across diverse audiences whether in design spaces, innovation, climate change, legal proceedings, in media etc. and therefore this work presents itself as unique example of “translational capital” which I argue is deeply needed as we move forward.
Subsequently, in this short paper I have laid the preliminary foundations for two interlinked suggestions. Firstly, I argue that ethnography is not merely a method of social research but a vital training in metacognitive reflexivity, that is, a practice that cultivates awareness of how our frames, assumptions, and positionalities mediate what we see, shape what we ask, and filter what we say and I argue that this is increasingly important in a world where self-awareness and critical reflection are paramount. Secondly, I argue that anthropologists hold a unique ability to broker insight across social, cultural, and institutional divides, and this capacity, as I have theorised it here, can be thought of as translational capital, that is, a form of capital grounded in relational, narrative, and ethical sensibility, and essential for translating complexity into actionable understanding. Finally, in very briefly drawing together the theoretical work and the example of Anthroprospective and its monthly Nostos series, I have attempted to theoretically illustrate how metacognitive cultivation, and translational capital can co-emerge. For example, the inward scrutiny of one’s interpretive lens can feed the outward capacity to broker meaning, engage publics, and influence practice. In an age in which algorithms claim to automate “insight”, I argue that anthropology’s core human-scale skills around reflection, relationality, ethical disposition and cross-cultural translation, will continue to be distinctively vital.
As we move forward, I see the challenge we face as being both institutional and pedagogical, as how to empirically evidence and embed ethnographic metacognitive training more broadly in academic curricula, how to support public-facing translation infrastructures, and how to recognise translational capital as a legitimate scholarly output will be no small task, especially in today’s climate where we see the humanities and social sciences consistently and naively defunded and devalued (Leonard 2025; Cassidy 2025a,b,c; Townsend 2024). However, the stakes are high, but I believe that in bridging differences, fostering ethical dialogue, and preserving the capacity to think with rather than over others, anthropology can serve as a bulwark against the flattening logics of speed, scale, and superficial knowledge. In cultivating metacognitive awareness and translational capital, anthropologists, and practitioners trained in ethnographic sensibilities, are uniquely equipped to sustain the relational, reflective, and generative modes of human engagement that I argue are most urgently needed in our time.
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