Greg Marchildon interviews historian and ethnographer Jennifer Brown on her two most recent books. The first, Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River: A Irving Hallowell and Adam Bigmouth…
Latinx Studies has long been overdue for a revamp – a different orientation to the questions with which we concern ourselves. Critical Dialogues in Latinx Studies: A Reader (New York…
How do metrics and quantification shape social science? In The Quantified Scholar: How Research Evaluations Transformed the British Social Sciences (Columbia UP, 2022), Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, an Associate Professor in sociology at the University…
Throughout his career, the internationally renowned Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot unsettled key concepts in anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and beyond. From his early critique…
Stories, Senses and the Charismatic Relation: A Reflexive Ethnography of Christian Experience (Routledge, 2020) offers a uniquely intimate and auto-ethnographic exploration of Christian experience, rendering a deep, phenomenological account…
A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Modern Mediterranean (Indiana UP, 2022) tells the story of Jews from the southern shore of the Mediterranean who, between the late 1940s…
Based on fieldwork among state officials, NGOs, politicians, and activists in Costa Rica and Brazil, A Future History of Water (Duke UP, 2019) traces the unspectacular work necessary to make…
Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or…
A medical doctor with an inquisitive mind and a traveling spirit, John Richens thought he had hit upon an exemplary public health case study – the story of…
In The Concrete Plateau: Urban Tibetans and the Chinese Civilizing Machine (Cornell UP, 2022), Grant examines how China’s urban development policies of frontier cities like Xining (Tib. zi ling) accompanied civilizational…
Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate (U California Press, 2021) examines the failure of recent efforts to improve Americans’ diets by increasing access to healthy food. Based on…
Having a “good” sense of humor generally means being able to take a joke without getting offended—laughing even at a taboo thought or at another’s expense. The insinuation…
Manuela Ciotti’s Retro-modern India: Forging the Low Caste Self (Routledge, 2020) is interesting engagement with Chamar identity and understanding it through the lens of modernity. Through a rich ethnographic engagement…
Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest (Lexington Books, 2022) explores an annual interstate tug-of-war between two small towns along the Mississippi River. In this book, Johnston…
In Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke UP, 2022) Eldritch Priest questions the nature of the imagination in contemporary culture through the phenomenon of the earworm:…
Victor Frankl was a leader in 20th century psychiatry. In 1942, Frankl was sent to a concentration camp in the Czech Republic. Frankl was already influential in the…
Edited by Ellie D. Hernandez, Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr., and Magda García, Transmovimientos: Latinx Queer Migrations, Bodies, and Space (University of Nebraska Press, 2021) focuses on queer, trans, and gender nonconforming communities of…
The contributors to Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form (Duke UP, 2022) assert the importance of queer kinship to queer and trans theory and to kinship theory. In a contemporary…
In recent decades, the North American public has pursued an inspirational vision of successful aging—striving through medical technique and individual effort to eradicate the declines, vulnerabilities, and dependencies…
In High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women’s Mobilization in Violent Contexts (Rutgers University Press, 2022), Dr. Julia Zulver documents the experiences of grassroots women’s organizations that united to demand gender justice…
L. L. Wynn and Angel M. Foster,’s edited volume Sex in the Middle East and North Africa (Vanderbilt UP, 2022) examines the sexual practices, politics, and complexities of the modern…
Straight from the beaches of Hawaii comes an exciting new ethnography of a community of big-wave surfers. Oahu’s Waimea Bay attracts the world’s best big wave surfers—men and…
Today Julia Keblinska and I had the pleasure of talking to Assistant Professor Jerry Zee about his book, Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System, published by University of California…
From social media posts and text messages to digital government documents and archives, researchers are bombarded with a deluge of text reflecting the social world. This textual data…