AnthroPod

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/anthropod

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/anthropod-talks-abortion

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 regimes in Greece and throughout the Mediterranea...

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 allies? What are some of the shortcomings and challe...

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-chavez

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-sound-like-performance

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 benefits and shortcomings of the concept? And how do anth...

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-interview-with-kamari-maxine-clarke

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 "anticipatory arrest warrants for a crime yet to be...

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.

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 information, as well as a transcript of the episode,...

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 valences that become attached to disease and the peo...

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 broader implications of this work for academia, anth...

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

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/anthropod

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 discipline to reach out; and tips and suggestions fo...

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 migrants who collect bottles for refunds. Rich sou...

Mark Schuller on anthropological work in, with, and on NGOs.

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 from Srinivas’s fieldsite weave in and out of their...

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 bleaker and more difficult dimensions: the toll it t...

“(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 in collaboration with AnthroPod. Our format attemp...

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 Margaret Mead.

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 around themes such as toxicity, globalization, wate...

Margot Weiss explores the origins, presents and futures of queer anthropology.