AnthroPod

This episode of AnthroPod is the third in a miniseries sharing highlights from talks organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the 2025 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. The presentations we’ll share with you today deal with the disastrous world we live in, a world where capitalist interests and geopolitical conflict threaten traditional forms of agriculture and land...

We’ve all been there—dashed hopes, longing, feeling the distance between the life we’re living and the life we want. Disappointment emerges in today’s world in a variety of spaces and social registers. But what does it feel like, how do we know it… what does it do? In 2022, anthropologists Sarah Muir and Jessica Greenberg published a review article on the anthropology of disappointment. This episo...

In this episode of AnthroPod, Contributing Editor Daillen Culver sits down with Jerika Loren Heinze to discuss the concept of auto-reflexivity and the systemic risks, traumas, and safety challenges faced by researchers conducting fieldwork.

This is the second of a three-part miniseries covering the 2025 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. Throughout this miniseries, you’ll hear segments from some of the panels and roundtables organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the conference. This second part engages with the central theme of race across borders. This involves questioning how...

Iran has dominated the US news cycle throughout 2026 so far. The U.S. and Israeli war of aggression in Iran just passed its 100th day, having come on the heels of the Islamic Republic regime’s brutal repression of protests around the country in January. Among other things, these events have thrust a spotlight on the complex relationship between Iran and its diaspora, and the varied and contradicto...

Content warning: This episode contains discussion of sexual violence, sexual assault, imprisonment, and intimate partner violence. This episode is the second installment of our mini-series on love and anthropology. What happens when love and violence are not experienced as opposites but as deeply entangled? In dialogue with Dr. Luisa Schneider, whose work examines love, violence, and legal interve...

This is the first of a three-part miniseries covering the 2025 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. The conference presentations we’ll share with you today revolve around the stories people tell themselves about themselves; the ways people come to connect with and understand history; how people carry and transmit cultural traditions; and the emotional performa...

This is the second episode of the two-part miniseries on linguistic anthropologists working with indigenous communities in Mexico. In this episode, Emiliana Cruz, a native Chatino speaker and scholar based at CIESAS, reflects on her research, her career, and the realities of Indigenous education in contemporary Mexico.

This episode is the first part of a two-part miniseries on linguistic anthropologists working with Indigenous communities in Mexico. In conversation with Mario Chávez Peón (CIESAS) and Carolyn O’Meara (UNAM), the episode introduces their research on Indigenous languages, their community-engaged fieldwork, and the activism that grows out of it, from developing writing systems alongside speakers to...

Rethinking anthropological research through tension, comparison, transparency, and shared knowledge-making around notion of collaboration.

Explores fieldwork through digital ethnography today through gaming, social media and digital life.

A Black feminist anthropology of college football, race, labor, and care.

In this episode, we dive into the series of debates that have emerged around assisted suicide, both within and outside the boundaries of medico-legal institutions. Through a conversation with anthropologists Dr. Dwai Banerjee, Dr. Miki Chase, Dr. Sophia Jaworski, and Dr. Miranda Tuckett, we explore the ethical obligations that are raised around end of life care by the legalization of aid-in-dying...

This episode is about love. What does it mean to study love ethnographically and analytically? How might we speak of love, especially in today’s social and political climate? In dialogue with Dr Omar Kasmani, whose work explores migrant loves and intimacies in Berlin, we trace the hopes, heartbreaks, and potentialities that love can hold for field research and ethnographic writing. Bridging the su...

In this episode, we dive into gender and sexual diversity, sexual dissidence, and their intersections with anthropology and education. Through a conversation with Dr. Joshua Liashenko, Director of LGBTQ+ Studies at Chapman University, we explore how queer anthropologists are engaging with these concepts in their approaches to research, training and teaching, particularly in relation to gay, lesbia...

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-centered fieldwork among marginalized local commun...

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 scholarship.

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 show notes, please visit: culanth.org/fieldsights...

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.

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 statecraft, activism, and everyday life?

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-conversation-with-willi-lempert

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 Activist Affordances. Our interview with Dr. Dokumaci w...

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 Candidate Anuli Akanegbu (creator of BLK IRL®), and...

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?