New Books in Anthropology
2,049 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 2 months ago - ★★★★ - 38 ratingsInterviews with Anthropologists about their New Books
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Episodes
Ke Li, "Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
March 13, 2023 08:00 - 59 minutesIn recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end-of-history approach to legal inquiry, Ke Li advocates for an approach that attends to the circumstances in which state actors select legal methodologies for the purposes of statecraft, and those in which they prefer nonlegal, extralegal and illegal ones. She demonstrates this approach in Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Con...
Charles L. Briggs, "Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge" (Utah State UP, 2021)
March 12, 2023 08:00 - 1 hourA provocative theoretical synthesis by renowned folklorist and anthropologist Charles L. Briggs, Unlearning: Rethinking Poetics, Pandemics, and the Politics of Knowledge (Utah State UP, 2021) questions intellectual foundations and charts new paths forward. Briggs argues, through an expansive look back at his own influential works as well as critical readings of the field, that scholars can disrupt existing social and discourse theories across disciplines when they collaborate with theorists w...
Arve Hansen, "Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life" (Springer, 2022)
March 10, 2023 09:00 - 28 minutesIn this episode, we discuss Arve Hansen’s new book Consumption and Vietnam’s New Middle Classes: Societal Transformations and Everyday Life (Springer, 2022). In this book, Hansen studies the dramatic changes in consumption patterns in Vietnam over the past decades, focusing on how everyday life changes in the context of rapid economic development and capitalist transformations. How does a consumer society emerge and take shape in Vietnam’s socialist market economy? What is consumer socialism?...
Book Chat: "Puppets, Gods and Brands. Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
March 10, 2023 09:00 - 56 minutesFor this instalment, we had the pleasure of hosting Teri Silvio, who works as Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica Institute of Ethnology. We chatted about Teri’s recently published book, Puppets, Gods and Brands. Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan (2019), her previous work and current projects. To find out more about performance and animation, a Taiwan-centered mode of animation (ang-a), cute gods and designer toys, please listen to this episode! Learn more about your ad choices. ...
Chris Walley on Deindustrialization (EF, JP)
March 09, 2023 09:00 - 40 minutesOn a blustery fall morning back in 2019, RTB welcomed Christine Walley, anthropologist and author of Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago. In the early 1980s Chris’s father, along with thousands of other steel workers, lost his job when the mills in Southeastern Chicago closed. The book is part of a multimodal project, including the documentary film, “Exit Zero: An Industrial Family Story,” (with director Chris Boebel) and an NEH-funded digitization project of the Southeaster...
Miguel Sicart, "Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture" (MIT Press, 2023)
March 08, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe play element at the heart of our interactions with computers—and how it drives the best and the worst manifestations of the information age. Whether we interact with video games or spreadsheets or social media, playing with software shapes every facet of our lives. In Playing Software: Homo Ludens in Computational Culture (MIT Press, 2023), Miguel Sicart delves into why we play with computers, how that play shapes culture and society, and the threat posed by malefactors using play to weap...
Timothy O. Benedict, "Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan" (U California Press, 2022)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourTimothy Benedict’s Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan (U California Press, 2023) is an exploration of spiritual care in the context of the Japanese hospice. The book is rooted in Benedict’s experience as a hospice chaplain in Japan and his extensive fieldwork and interviews with patients, medical personnel, and other chaplains. The author thoughtfully problematizes the application of ideas about spiritual care in end-of-life care that are not necessarily well rooted in t...
Book Chat: "Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan" (Routledge, 2021)
March 07, 2023 09:00 - 46 minutesIn this podcast, the host, Lara Momesso, interviews Dr Beatrice Zani, author of the book Women Migrants in Southern China and Taiwan. Mobilities, Digital Economies and Emotions, published by Routledge in 2021. The two scholars chat about novel ethnographic methods, such as itinerant ethnography and digital ethnography, solidarity between migrant women, the role of emotions in research. This episode can’t be missed by those interested in understanding globalisation from the perspective of cont...
Claudio E. Benzecry, "The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (The University of Chicago Press, 2022) shows us how globalization works through the many people and places involved in making women’s shoes. We know a lot about how clothing and shoes are made cheaply, but very little about the process when they are made beautifully. In The Perfect Fit, Claudio E. Benzecry looks at the craft that goes into designing shoes for women in the US market, revealing that this creative process takes place on...
Ulrike Krause, "Difficult Life in a Refugee Camp: Gender, Violence, and Coping in Uganda" (Cambridge UP, 2021)
March 06, 2023 09:00 - 52 minutesAlthough refugee camps are established to accommodate, protect, and assist those fleeing from violent conflict and persecution, life often remains difficult there. Building on empirical research with refugees in a Ugandan camp, Ulrike Krause offers nuanced insights into violence, humanitarian protection, gender relations, and coping of refugees who mainly escaped the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Difficult Life in a Refugee Camp: Gender, Violence, and Coping in Uganda explor...
Nicola Rollock, "The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival" (Penguin, 2022)
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 44 minutesWhy do racial inequalities persist? In The Racial Code: Tales of Resistance and Survival (Penguin, 2023), Nicola Rollock, a Professor of Social Policy & Race at King’s College London, examines the often hidden and subtle rules that underpin the long-term existence of racism. The book draws on a huge range of qualitative and quantitative data to craft individual narratives that illustrate the operation of the racial code. In doing so, the book offers an clear overview of the lived experience o...
Lisa M. Johnson and Rosemary A. Joyce, "Materializing Ritual Practices" (U Colorado Press, 2022)
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourMaterializing Ritual Practices (U Colorado Press, 2022) explores the deep history of ritual practice in Mexico and Central America and the ways interdisciplinary research can be coordinated to illuminate how rituals create, destroy, and transform social relations. Ritual action produces sequences of creation, destruction, and transformation, which involve a variety of materials that are active and agential. The materialities of ritual may persist at temporal scales long beyond the lives of hu...
Kyama M. Mugambi, "A Spirit of Revitalization: Urban Pentecostalism in Kenya" (Baylor UP, 2020)
March 05, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourPerhaps more than anywhere else in the world, Africa has generated unique expressions of Christianity that have, in their rapid development, overtaken older forms of Christianity represented by historic missionary efforts. Similarly, African Christianity has largely displayed its rootedness in its social and cultural context. The story of Pentecostal movements in urban Kenya captures both remarkable trends. Individual accounts of churches and their leaders shed light on rich and diverse commo...
Ben Davies et al., "Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic" (Oxford UP, 2022)
March 04, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDrawing on an ethnographic study of novel readers in Denmark and the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic, Reading Novels During the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford UP, 2022) provides a snapshot of a phenomenal moment in modern history. The ethnographic approach shows what no historical account of books published during the pandemic will be able to capture, namely the movement of readers between new purchases and books long kept in their collections. The book follows readers who have tuned into novels a...
Jennie E. Burnet, "To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue in the Rwandan Genocide" (Cornell UP, 2023)
March 04, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn To Save Heaven and Earth: Rescue in the Rwandan Genocide (Cornell UP, 2023), Jennie E. Burnet considers people who risked their lives in the 1994 Rwandan genocide of Tutsi to try and save those targeted for killing. Many genocide perpetrators were not motivated by political ideology, ethnic hatred, or prejudice. By shifting away from these classic typologies of genocide studies and focusing instead on hundreds of thousands of discrete acts that unfold over time, Burnet highlights the ways ...
Seema Golestaneh, "Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran" (Duke UP, 2022)
March 03, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn her new ethnographic study Unknowing and the Everyday: Sufism and Knowledge in Iran (Duke University Press, 2023), Seema Golestaneh guides her readers through processes and praxes of mystical experience and knowledge acquisition amongst Sufi communities in contemporary Iran. The book focuses on the central conceptual paradigm of “ma‘rifat”, which Golestaneh has incisively translated as “unknowing.” From a Sufi perspective, this complicated concept renders any knowledge of the divine as ult...
Greta Lynn Uehling, "Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine" (Cornell UP, 2023)
March 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourEveryday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine (Cornell UP, 2023) provides an accessible lens through which to understand what noncombatant civilians go through in a country at war. What goes through the mind of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? In Ukraine, such questions have been part of the daily calculus of life. Greta Uehling engages with the lives of ordinary people living in and around the armed...
Arthur Kleinman, "Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine" (U California Press, 1997)
March 01, 2023 09:00 - 32 minutesOne of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and ...
Damien M. Sojoyner, "Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums" (U California Press, 2022)
March 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThis highly original story reflects on how the carceral state shapes daily life for young Black people--and how Black Americans resist, find joy, and cultivate new visions for the future. Joy and Pain: A Story of Black Life and Liberation in Five Albums (University of California Press, 2022) is about a young man, Marley, and a particular place, the Southern California Library--an archive of radical and progressive movements and a community organization where the author meets Marley. Taking m...
Celeste Vaughan Curington et al., "The Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance" (U California Press, 2021)
March 01, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesThe Dating Divide: Race and Desire in the Era of Online Romance (U California Press, 2021) is the first comprehensive look at "digital-sexual racism," a distinct form of racism that is mediated and amplified through the impersonal and anonymous context of online dating. Drawing on large-scale behavioral data from a mainstream dating website, extensive archival research, and more than seventy-five in-depth interviews with daters of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual identities, Curington, L...
Dan DiPiero, "Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life" (U Michigan Press, 2022)
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourContingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life (U Michigan Press, 2022) offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free ...
Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt: A Conversation with Andrew Simon
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourAndrew Simon, a historian of media, popular culture, and the Middle East at Dartmouth College, discusses his new book Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2022) , with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Media of the Masses is an engaging book that examines the impact of cassettes, cassette players, and their users during a particular period in Egypt's recent past. It provides a brilliant example of how disparate and surprising sources can be used t...
Affective Masculinities
February 27, 2023 09:00 - 19 minutesAmrita De talks about affective masculinities, aspirational linkages with dominant scripts of masculinities, socially organized. As she expands her work beyond her study of South Asian masculinities, she talks about how understanding and loosening these linkages entails crucial feminist work. She also talks about Shah Rukh Khan. Amrita De is a Postdoctoral fellow in the Center of Humanities and Information at Penn State University. Her research focuses on global south masculinity studies and ...
Stephen Bullivant, "Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America" (Oxford UP, 2022)
February 26, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe United States is in the midst of a religious revolution. Or, perhaps it is better to say a non-religious revolution. Around a quarter of US adults now say they have no religion. The great majority of these religious “nones” also say that they used to belong to a religion but no longer do. These are the nonverts: think “converts,” but from having religion to having none. Even on the most conservative of estimates, there are currently about 59 million of them in the United States. Nonverts...
Gary Alan Fine, "Fair Share: Senior Activism, Tiny Publics, and the Culture of Resistance" (U Chicago Press, 2023)
February 26, 2023 09:00 - 38 minutesIf you’ve ever been to a protest or been involved in a movement for social change, you have likely experienced a local culture, one with slogans, jargon, and shared commitments. Though one might think of a cohort of youthful organizers when imagining protest culture, this powerful ethnography from esteemed sociologist Gary Alan Fine explores the world of senior citizens on the front lines of progressive protests. While seniors are a notoriously important—and historically conservative—politica...
Bernard D. Geoghegan, "Code: From Information Theory to French Theory" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 25, 2023 09:00 - 53 minutesBernard Dionysius Geoghegan traces the shared intellectual and political history of computer scientists, cyberneticists, anthropologists, linguists, and theorists across the humanities as they developed a communication and computational-based theory that grasped culture and society in terms of codes. In Code: From Information Theory to French Theory (Duke UP, 2023), Geoghegan reconstructs how Progressive Era technocracy as well as crises of industrial democracy and colonialism shaped early ac...
David H. Price, "The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent" (Pluto Press, 2022)
February 23, 2023 09:00 - 54 minutesWhen the possibility of wiretapping first became known to Americans they were outraged. Now, in our post-9/11 world, it's accepted that corporations are vested with human rights, and government agencies and corporations use computers to monitor our private lives. In The American Surveillance State: How the US Spies on Dissent (Pluto Press, 2022), David H. Price pulls back the curtain to reveal how the FBI and other government agencies have always functioned as the secret police of American ca...
Jane Lasonder, "Red Alert: The Inside Story of Prostitution and Human Trafficking" (Scholten Uitgeverij BV, 2016)
February 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWe love the tradition of the Amsterdam red light district, where many women stand in the windows in their underwear. Busloads of tourists and school children come by every day to look at them. In the Netherlands, where it has been taken out of the dark and made legal, we can even be proud of this age old profession. It is legal, so it must be okay, right? In England, Israel and other countries, we see the street prostitutes standing alongside the road in skimpy clothes, waiting for customers....
Shannon Philip, "Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
February 22, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesShannon Philip's book Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities, Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony (Cambridge UP, 2022) tells the gendered story of a changing India through the lives of its young middle class men. Through time spent ethnographically 'hanging-out' with young men in gyms, bars, clubs, trains and gay cruising grounds in India, this book critically reveals Indian men's violence towards women in various city spaces and also shows the many classed and masculine...
Helena Hof, "The EU Migrant Generation in Asia: Middle-Class Aspirations in Asian Global Cities" (Policy Press, 2022)
February 22, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDrawing on an extensive study with young individuals who migrated to Singapore and Tokyo in the 2010s, The EU Migrant Generation in Asia: Middle-Class Aspirations in Asian Global Cities (Policy Press, 2022) by Helena Hof sheds light on the friendships, emotions, hopes, and fears involved in establishing life as Europeans in Asia. It demonstrates how migration to Asian business centres has become a way of distinction and an alternative route of middle-class reproduction for young Europeans dur...
Joseph Plaster, "Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin" (Duke UP, 2023)
February 20, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (Duke UP, 2023), Joseph Plaster explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States. Tracing the history of the downtown lodging house districts where marginally housed youth regularly lived beginning in the late 1800s, Plaster focuses on San Francisco’s Tenderloin from the 1950s to the present. He draws on archival, ethn...
Nicholas Mirzoeff, "White Sight: Visual Politics and Practices of Whiteness" (MIT Press, 2023)
February 19, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourFrom the author of How to See the World comes a new history of white supremacist ways of seeing—and a strategy for dismantling them. White supremacy is not only perpetuated by laws and police but also by visual culture and distinctive ways of seeing. Nicholas Mirzoeff argues that this form of “white sight” has a history. By understanding that it was not always a common practice, we can devise better ways to dismantle it. Spanning centuries across this wide-ranging text, Mirzoeff connects Ren...
Fabio Duarte and Ricardo Alvarez, "Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space" (MIT Press, 2021)
February 18, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWhy technology is most transformative when it is playful, and innovative spatial design happens only when designers are both tinkerers and dreamers. In Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space (MIT Press, 2021), Fábio Duarte and Ricardo Álvarez argue that the merely functional aspects of technology may undermine its transformative power. Technology is powerful not when it becomes optimally functional, but while it is still playful and open to experimentation. It is through play—in the ...
Marnia Lazreg, "Foucault's Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan" (Berghahn Books, 2020)
February 17, 2023 05:00 - 54 minutesFoucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, Marnia Lazreg's Foucault's Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan (Berghahn Books, 2020) examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as ...
Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, "When Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier’s Story" (Duke UP, 2015)
February 16, 2023 09:00 - 37 minutesWhen Rains Became Floods: A Child Soldier’s Story (Duke UP, 2015) is the gripping autobiography of Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez, who as a child soldier fought for both the Peruvian guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and the Peruvian military. After escaping the conflict, he became a Franciscan priest and is now an anthropologist. Gavilán Sánchez's words mark otherwise forgotten acts of brutality and kindness, moments of misery and despair as well as solidarity and love. Learn more about your ad choi...
Emily Hund, "The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media" (Princeton UP, 2023)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 49 minutesBefore there were Instagram likes, Twitter hashtags, or TikTok trends, there were bloggers who seemed to have the passion and authenticity that traditional media lacked. The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton UP, 2023) tells the story of how early digital creators scrambling for work amid the Great Recession gave rise to the multibillion-dollar industry that has fundamentally reshaped culture, the flow of information, and the way we relate to ourselves ...
Sarah Kunz, "Expatriate: Following a Migration Category" (Manchester UP, 2023)
February 15, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourWho are expatriates? How do they differ from other migrants? And why should we care about such distinctions? Expatriate: Following a Migration Category (Manchester University Press, 2023) by Dr. Sarah Kunz interrogates the contested category of 'the expatriate' to explore its history and politics, its making and lived experience. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, the book offers a critical reading of International Human Resource Management literature, explores the work and histor...
Lee D. Baker, "From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954" (U California Press, 1998)
February 13, 2023 09:00 - 54 minutesOn today’s podcast we are celebrating the 25th anniversary of the publication of Dr. Lee D. Baker’s book From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (University of California Press, 1998). From Savage to Negro examines the relationship between the discipline of anthropology and the construction of racial categories used for African Americans in the United States. He analyzes how “ideas about racial inferiority were supplanted by notions of racial equality in law...
Piro Rexhepi, "White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality Along the Balkan Route" (Duke UP, 2022)
February 12, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIn White Enclosures: Racial Capitalism and Coloniality Along the Balkan Route (Duke UP, 2022), Piro Rexhepi explores the overlapping postsocialist and postcolonial border regimes in the Balkans that are designed to protect whiteness and exclude Muslim, Roma, and migrant communities. Rather than focusing on present crises to the exclusion of the histories that have gotten us to this point, Rexhepi takes a wide lens to understand how different mechanisms and regimes of exclusion are historicall...
Shailaja Paik, "The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India" (Stanford UP, 2022)
February 12, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesShailaja Paik's book The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India (Stanford UP, 2022) is an important reflection on the question of Dalit women and their sexuality question. Through the performance of Tamasha, Paik has relooked into the lifeworld of Dalit women and has argued about what the performance of Tamasha means in Dalit women’s everydayness rather than conventionally understanding it through a moral lens of good vs bad. The framework of ‘manuski’ and ‘assli’...
Jessica Barnes, "Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt" (Duke UP, 2022)
February 10, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutesEgyptians often say that bread is life; most eat this staple multiple times a day, many relying on the cheap bread subsidized by the government. In Staple Security: Bread and Wheat in Egypt (Duke UP, 2022), Jessica Barnes explores the process of sourcing domestic and foreign wheat for the production of bread and its consumption across urban and rural settings. She traces the anxiety that pervades Egyptian society surrounding the possibility that the nation could run out of wheat or that peopl...
Mary Ann Hinsdale and Stephen Okey, "T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology" (T&T Clark, 2020)
February 09, 2023 09:00 - 25 minutesThe T&T Clark Handbook of Theological Anthropology (T&T Clark, 2020) is a ground-breaking volume that gathers together the voices of veteran theologians and some of the most promising emerging scholars publishing in the field of theological anthropology today. The contributing essays outline the various approaches (classical, modern, postmodern) that Christian theologians have taken to present and interpret the doctrines of creation, the human person as imago dei, sin, grace, and the final de...
A New Hope? Japanese Retirement Migration to Malaysia
February 09, 2023 09:00 - 23 minutesIn post-growth Japan, some people are looking to Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, as a source of new hope. A notable change in the recent pattern of global migration is the movement of people within Asia. Previous studies on Asian migration have mostly considered the movement of people from Asia to Europe and North America. Yet in recent years, countries in Asia have emerged as major receiving sites of intra-regional migration. Joining Dr Natali Pearson on SSEAC Stories, Dr Shiori Shakuto...
Leslie Bow, "Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy" (Duke UP, 2022)
February 08, 2023 09:00 - 50 minutesIn Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Duke UP, 2022), Leslie Bow traces the ways in which Asian Americans become objects of anxiety and desire. Conceptualizing these feelings as “racist love,” she explores how race is abstracted and then projected onto Asianized objects. Bow shows how anthropomorphic objects and images such as cartoon animals in children’s books, home décor and cute tchotchkes, contemporary visual art, and artificially intelligent robots function as ...
Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Technology in 20th Century Mali
February 06, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourLaura Ann Twagira, an associate professor of history, head of African Studies, and an affiliate with science in society program and feminist gender sexuality studies program at Wesleyan University, talks about her book, Embodied Engineering: Gendered Labor, Food Security, and Taste in Twentieth-Century Mali with Peoples & Things host, Lee Vinsel. Embodied Engineering examines how women in rural Mali have used technology to ensure food security through the colonial period, environmental crises...
Gabrielle Kruks-Wisner, "Claiming the State: Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
February 03, 2023 09:00 - 48 minutesCitizens around the world look to the state for social welfare provision, but often struggle to access essential services in health, education, and social security. Claiming the State: Active Citizenship and Social Welfare in Rural India (Cambridge UP, 2018) investigates the everyday practices through which citizens of the world's largest democracy make claims on the state, asking whether, how, and why they engage public officials in the pursuit of social welfare. Drawing on extensive fieldwo...
Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh, "Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix" (UP of Mississippi, 2021)
February 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourIdentity is often fraught for multiracial Douglas, people of both South Asian and African descent in the Caribbean. In this groundbreaking volume titled Dougla in the Twenty-First Century: Adding to the Mix (University Press of Mississippi, 2021), Sue Ann Barratt and Aleah N. Ranjitsingh explore the particular meanings of a Dougla identity and examine Dougla maneuverability both at home and in the diaspora. The authors scrutinize the perception of Douglaness over time, contemporary Dougla neg...
Nick Seaver, "Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation" (U Chicago Press, 2022)
February 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourThe people who make music recommender systems have lofty goals: they want to broaden listeners’ horizons and help obscure musicians find audiences, taking advantage of the enormous catalogs offered by companies like Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora. But for their critics, recommender systems seem to embody all the potential harms of algorithms: they flatten culture into numbers, they normalize ever-broadening data collection, and they profile their users for commercial ends. Drawing on years...
Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic, "Monumental Names: Archival Aesthetics and the Conjuration of History in Moscow" (Routledge, 2022)
February 02, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourMonumental Names: Archival Aesthetics and the Conjuration of History in Moscow (Routledge, 2022) asks us to consider: what stands behind the propensity to remember victims of mass atrocities by their personal names? Grounded in ethnographic and archival research with Last Address and Memorial, one of the oldest independent archives of Soviet political repressions in Moscow and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic examines a version of archival activism that is centr...
Clare Forstie, "Queering the Midwest: Forging LGBTQ Community" (NYU Press, 2022)
February 01, 2023 09:00 - 1 hourDrag shows that test the capacity of bars persist alongside wishes for stronger community among River City's LGBTQ population. In this examination of LGBTQ community in a small, Midwestern city, Clare Forstie highlights the ambivalence of LGBTQ lives in the rural Midwest. Drawing on in-depth interviews, ethnographic research, and friendship mapping, Forstie reveals the ways that community spaces are disappearing and emerging, LGBTQ people feel safe and unrecognized, and friendships do and don...