As part of my undergraduate course, I have written a dissertation in Social Anthropology on “’Being an EA': How Effective Altruism is understood and lived out by members of its transnational community.”
A few points about it:
- I am not proposing conclusions about the entirety of the EA due to its sheer diversity, but merely work with a few specific ethnographic examples.
- Two questions I tackled:
i) What does it mean to “be an EA” for individual members of the transnational EA community?
ii) What are the characteristics and motives of the EAs’ “altruism”? - Key takeaways:
i) I argue that EA can be productively analysed as a lifestyle movement
ii) I also argue that the kind of altruism among EAs resembles a spatio-temporally extended form of sharing - I worked on it between August 2022 and May 2023, so it captures briefly some reflections on the SBF crisis and its impact on EAs’ self-identification with the movement.
- It was my first article-length piece of work, so it is far from perfect, but I hope it can prompt productive discussion on the future of the movement and its community.
- I initially aimed to write it for: community organisers, academics interested in social movements, people intrigued by EA; but I hope that the personal stories described in it might be quite inspiring to other EAs, too.
Because of the marking boycott, I cannot post the full version here yet, but if you would like to get access to the document, please fill out this Google Form.
If you’d like to chat about it, feel free to contact me on [email protected] or Calendly: https://calendly.com/joanna-wiaterek/30min.
I would like to say a big thank you again to those of you who contributed to this dissertation!
