Recently, Tampa Bay has stoked controversy among U.S. anthropologists. Facing statewide rising fascism and oppressive laws targeting historically marginalized minorities, it's also the site of the 2024 American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting. In this episode of AnthroPod, we visit three Tampa-based anthropologists doing community-…

The second episode of our two-part mini-series, showcases a roundtable discussion held at the 2023 American Anthropological Association’s Annual meeting in Toronto. In this episode, anthropology scholars gather to celebrate the work of Harsha Walia and share reflections on how her scholarship has influenced their own research, writing and activism.…

A discussion featuring Harsha Walia, alongside community organizers and migrant workers representing Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), took place at the American Anthropological Association's 2023 Annual Meeting in Toronto. This episode is the first part of a two-part mini-series highlighting the impact and contributions of Harsha Walia’s…

In this episode, Professor Nick Seaver, Professor Veronica Barassi, and Alex Moltzau discuss the intersection of anthropology and algorithms. What exactly can anthropology bring to the table in understanding them? How can we use anthropological concepts and methods to make sense of algorithms? And how does this research translate into practice?For …

In this episode, fellow podcasters, Frankie Younger and Dr. Anthony Jerry share how they combined podcasting with community engagement to create podcasts as archival spaces for the voices of historically marginalized communities.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

In our latest episode in this series What Concepts Do we welcome guest producer Nazlı Özkan, who leads us through a discussion of New Media. How has newness been produced as a feature of media in different political and historical contexts, and how can anthropological approaches help us understand how technological novelty becomes a part of statecr…

In this episode, Dr. Willi Lempert discusses anthropology of outer space, focusing on historical and ongoing forms of colonialism on and off of Earth, as well as indigenous futurisms and alternative imaginations of outer space. Our interview with Dr. Lempert was conducted in May 2023.For more, visit https://culanth.org/fieldsights/astro-colonialism…

AnthroBites: Disability with Dr. Arseli Dokumaci.AnthroBites is a series from the AnthroPod team, designed to make anthropology more digestible. Each episode tackles a key concept, text, or theme, and breaks it down into manageable, bite-sized chunks. In this episode, Dr. Arseli Dokumaci discusses disability, ethnography, and her recent book Activi…

Anthropology can be presented in various forms - what does it mean to share anthropology through podcasts? In the latest episode in the What Does Anthropology Sound Like series, we explore anthropological podcasts as method and as output. This episode features Dr. María Eugenia Ulfe Young (from the Nuestras Historias desde Cuninico podcast), PhD Ca…

In this AnthroPod episode, we provide a retrospective on the Virtual Otherwise conference from the perspective of the local node in Agria, Greece. Touching on matters of accessibility, engagement, and multimodality, we ask: Whither anthropology conferencing?Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

This episode is devoted to thinking through the specificity of the United States as a place in which to conduct fieldwork.For show notes, please visit : https://culanth.org/fieldsights/contributed-content/anthropodPar Society for Cultural Anthropology

In this episode, Professors Sophie Bjork-James, Carolyn Sufrin, and Elise Andaya share what the anthropology of abortion looks like in their fieldsites and how those sites will change in a post-Roe world, and we break down this topic with the help of other scholars of reproduction.For show notes, please visit https://culanth.org/fieldsights/anthrop…

In part 2 of our series on sound and borders, cultural geographer Tom Western talks with Nick Smith about the work of the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum (SGYF) in Athens, Greece. Featuring sound clips created by the SGYF team, the discussion unpacks the concept of active citizenship and the ways that sound can challenge the static character of border…

This is the second episode in the series "What Concepts Do." In this episode, Contributing Editor Sharon Jacobs unpacks the concept of solidarity, alongside anthropologists Darryl Li, Amahl Bishara, Lesley Gill, and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos. What is solidarity, and who can practice it? Is solidarity something we do within communities, or beside al…

In this episode, anthropologist and artist Alex Chavez talks about performance, migration and nationalism in the United States. For show-notes, please visit https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-sound-of-borders-a-conversation-with-alex-chavezPar Society for Cultural Anthropology

Cassandra Hartblay, Cristiana Giordano, and Greg Pierotti discuss performance as ethnographic medium in the third installment of What Does Anthropology Sound Like, an Anthropod Series. For transcriptions, visual content, and other resources related to this episode of Anthropod, please visit: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/what-does-anthropology-so…

In this episode, Contributing Editors Joyce Rivera-González and Michelle Hak Hepburn unpack the concept of resilience, alongside anthropologists Roberto Barrios, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, Andrew Wooyoung Kim, and Jason Cons. Where did the concept of resilience originate from, and how is it so widespread? What are the benefit…

Professor Kamari Clarke reflects on her ethnographic work in Africa, her thinking on the legacies of colonialism in the discipline of Anthropology, and her recent work with the Radical Humanism Initiative.For the transcription and show-notes of this episode, please visit: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/radical-humanism-and-decolonization-an-interv…

The Ottoman archives contain just over a hundred photographs that look like old family portraits, but they were created for an entirely different purpose. They document the renunciation of Ottoman nationality, "terk-i tabiiyet," by Armenian emigrants bound for the US and elsewhere. As our guest Zeynep Devrim Gürsel explains, the photographs were "a…

Katherine Verdery reflects on working through her Securitate file and ethnographers' positionalities, her research in Eastern Europe prior to the fall of communism, and what anthropology offers at moments when the episteme shifts.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Writing ethnographic poetry with Darcy Alexandra and Ather Zia. This is the second installment in the What Does Anthropology Sound Like series, in which we ask anthropologists to share their work and insights with us on the different forms their anthropological practice takes. In this episode, the theme is poetry.…

The "Anthropology and/of Mental Health" series is a two-part exploration of anthropologists' experiences with mental health. In this episode, Anar expands the conversation about mental health in anthropology through conversations and contributions about attention, grief, and unexpected changes to our plans for fieldwork and research. For more infor…

Hunleth and Yount-André discuss Hunleth's research on children's caregiving amid Zambia's tuberculosis (TB) outbreak and trace parallels with today's COVID19 pandemic. They look at the role of proximity, recognizing the different ways children offer care, how to discuss disease with children and problematize the idea of disclosure, and the moral va…

Jonathan Rosa discusses raciolinguistic ideologies, a framework developed by Rosa and Professor Nelson Flores (University of Pennsylvania) to critique the racialization of various speaking subjects and their linguistic practices. The interview begins with a focus on this concept and related themes in Rosa’s book, then turns to a consideration of br…

Sophie Chao and Bianca Williams discuss activism, organizing, and anthropology in the first installment of a new Anthropod series: What Does Anthropology Sound Like.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

In this episode, AnthroPod Contributing Editor Anar Parikh talks to Prof. Beatriz-Reyes Foster and Prof. Rebecca Lester about their blog series "Trauma and Resilience in Ethnographic Fieldwork" on Anthrodendum. For more, visit https://culanth.org/fieldsights/contributed-content/anthropodPar Society for Cultural Anthropology

Ruth Behar speaks with Kristen Ghodsee about how anthropologists can be public intellectuals: They discuss how can anthropologists maintain credibility as scholars within the academy while also speaking to broader audiences; the necessity of patience and thinking of a career over the long duree; the productive spaces and possibilities within the di…

Guests Camilla Ida Ravnbøl and Marie Kolling explore the impact that digitalizing economies have on communities that are poor and highly cash dependent. The episode features Ravnbøl's research with Roma migrants at the Roskilde Festival, a music festival in Denmark that went cashless in 2017 but has developed accommodations for cash-dependent Roma …

Mark Schuller on anthropological work in, with, and on NGOs.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Guests Namita Dharia and Tulasi Srinivas discuss the possibilities for an anthropology of wonder. Their conversation builds out from Srinivas’s latest book, "The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder," and explores questions of positionality in the field, canonical inheritances, and experiments with ethnographic writing. Sonic landscapes f…

In "When Fieldwork Breaks Your Heart," guest producer Aisha Sultan considers the question: what do you do when fieldwork threatens to break your heart? While graduate seminars and methodological reflections within anthropology often focus on the possibilities ethnography affords as the cornerstone of the discipline, Sultan here contends with its bl…

“(W)Rap on: Gender/Sexuality” is the third episode of the (W)Rap On series at AnthroPod, which brings anthropologists into conversation with artists, activists, and scholars from other disciplines and perspectives. The series is loosely inspired by James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s 1970 conversation Rap on Race, and was conceived by Hilary Leathem …

Anthropologist Jason De León and journalist Maria Hinojosa discuss migration, U.S. border militarization, and teaching and writing in political times. Journalist Julio Ricardo Varela moderates the conversation. This episode is part of the (W)rap On: Series, inspired by the original 1970 conversation between writer James Baldwin and anthropologist M…

This roundtable discussion explores the recently published Reading List for a Progressive Environmental Anthropology. The crowdsourced reading list is a project organized by Bridget Guarasci (Franklin and Marshall College), Amelia Moore (University of Rhode Island), and Sarah Vaughn (University of California, Berkeley). Crafting this reading list a…

Margot Weiss explores the origins, presents and futures of queer anthropology.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

“(W)Rap On: Race” features anthropologist Shalini Shankar discussing race, social activism, and pedagogy with Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson. Christien Tompkins moderates the conversation.(W)Rap on Race is the inaugural episode of the new (W)Rap On series at AnthroPod, which brings anthropologists into conversation with artists, activis…

Maria Frederika Malmstrom on the Sound of Economic Collapse in EgyptPar Society for Cultural Anthropology

Vijayendra Rao, an economist with the World Bank, talks with anthropologist Ian Pollock about the theory and practice of development, anthropology’s relationship to development, and how ethnography might help the disenfranchised engage with powerful institutions and effect social change.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Graeme Warren explains what we can learn about histories and cultures through Hunter & Gatherer research.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Damien Sojoyner on race, education, imprisonment, and their intersection in the United States.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Teresa Caldeira discusses her recent research on urban practices and forms of cultural production from the peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil that are reshaping public space, including rap music, graffiti, ostentation funk, and pixaçãoProducer: Liliana GilMusic: Excerpts from “Soldado Sem Bandeira” by Emicida (00:00, 08:20), “Fim de Semana no Parque”…

Christa Craven discusses feminist anthropology in this episode of AnthroBites, the podcast that makes key concepts in anthropology more digestible.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Lara Deeb and Jessica Winegar discuss their recent book, Anthropology's Politics: Disciplining the Middle East (2015). They touch on how political and economic pressures shape how U.S.-based scholars research and teach about the Middle East, how certain topics and regions are embraced or pushed back on, and how those pressures and incentives impact…

Angela Jenks shares her approach to anthropological pedagogy and offers thoughtful insights into how anthropologists might begin thinking about how to incorporate podcasts into their syllabi.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Anthropologists of media and journalism reflect on the current post-truth era in the United States means for research and teaching. This episode features a panel from the the 2017 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association with Naomi Schiller, Robert Samet, Natalia Roudakova, Alexandra Juhasz, Amahl Bishara, and Faye Ginsburg.Music:…

Guest producers Stine Krøijer and Astrid Oberborbeck Andersen take up a debate that is central to current environmental and political anthropology: namely, how ethnographers can identify and describe the political when earth beings, spirits, or nonhuman others become part of the ethnographic equation? Marisol de la Cadena’s 2015 book _Earth Beings:…

Yarimar Bonilla discusses the concept of sovereignty and its anthropological applications in this episode of AnthroBites, the podcast that makes key concepts in anthropology more digestible.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Hugh Gusterson, Kim Garcia, and a U.S. military drone operator on active duty discuss the representation of drone warfare. Their conversation engages the ways we think about communities of expertise and war, as well as how we represent the experiences of others.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Rachel Watkins discusses the origins and legacies of scientific racism for AnthroBites, the podcast that makes key concepts in anthropology more digestible.Par Society for Cultural Anthropology

Lilly Irani discusses the human labor behind artificial intelligence technology. Irani helped create a platform called Turkopticon to support workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a website that outsources micro data processing work. Irani also talks about her current book project on entrepreneurialism and national development in India.…