Tracing women’s experiences of miscarriage and termination for foetal anomaly in the second trimester, before legal viability, shows how such events are positioned as less ‘real’ or significant…
Do newborns think-do they know that ‘three’ is greater than ‘two’? Do they prefer ‘right’ to ‘wrong’? What about emotions–do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do,…
What Work Means: Beyond the Puritan Work Ethic (ILR Press, 2024) goes beyond the stereotypes and captures the diverse ways Americans view work as a part of a good…
Losing a pet has always been a unique kind of pain. No set rituals exist to help provide closure when pets die, there are no readily shared passages…
Is a green future possible? In Petrochemical Planet: Multiscalar Battles of Industrial Transformation (Duke UP, 2023), Alice Mah, a Professor in Urban and Environmental Studies at the University of Glasgow examines the practices…
If ideology has never before been so much in evidence as a fact and so little understood as it appears to be today then, Jason Blakely argues in his new…
Mainstream portrayals of ultra-Orthodox religious women often frame their faith as oppressive: they are empowered only when they leave their community. For Women and Girls Only: Reshaping Jewish Orthodoxy…
This episode is the first of two episodes this season on Muslims in China. Here Claudia Radiven and Chella Ward talk to Darren Blyer about his book Terror Capitalism:…
Paradoxes of Migration in Tajikistan: Locating the Good Life (UCL Press, 2024) by Dr. Elena Borisova is the first ethnographic monograph on migration in Tajikistan, one of the most remittance-dependent…
Roots of Power: The Political Ecology of Boundary Plants (Routledge, 2023) tells five stories of plants, people, property, politics, peace, and protection in tropical societies. In Cameroon, French Polynesia, Papua…
Liberal democracy is in crisis around the world, unable to address pressing problems such as climate change. There is, however, another path—cooperation democracy. From consumer co-ops to credit…
How did ordinary Iraqis survive the occupation of their communities by the Islamic State? How did they decide whether to stay or flee, to cooperate or resist? Based…
Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology graduate student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning the end of lives from an academic pursuit…
Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress – whether political or economic – has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries,…
Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia (UCL Press, 2022) by Alexander Sasha Kondakov uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence against…
Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of A Semiotics of Muslimness in China (Cambridge UP, 2023). About…
What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for…
For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora. Hindu…
The ‘baby boom’ generation, born between the 1940s and the 1960s, is often credited with pioneering new and creative ways of relating, doing intimacy and making families. With…
Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with Paula Bialski, an Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, about her…
Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must…
Israeli universities have long enjoyed a reputation as liberal bastions of freedom and democracy. Drawing on extensive research and making Hebrew sources accessible to the international community, Maya…
In Dance Music Spaces: Clubs, Clubbers, and DJs Navigating Authenticity, Branding, and Commercialism (Lexington Books, 2022), Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo examines the production of physical and digital spaces in dance music, and how the…
Each year, hundreds of thousands of migrants are moved through immigration court. With a national backlog surpassing one million cases, court hearings take years and most migrants will…