This episode features a conversation with Murali Shanmugavelan and Sareeta Amrute about how caste structures IT workspaces and communication infrastructures. We began with their reflections on how they…
The Ryukyu Islands between Japan and Taiwan consist of around 160 islands and are home to about 1.5 million inhabitants. Across the islands’ history, sea-lanes and trade patterns…
In Tension: Mental Distress and Embodied Inequality in the Western Himalayas (Duke UP, 2026), Dr. Nikita Kaur Simpson examines the effects of rapid development in the Himalayas on the minds…
In Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou (Duke UP, 2026), the cultural anthropologist Nellie Chu tells the story of the migrant entrepreneurs at the heart of Guangzhou’s fast…
In The Goddess in the Mirror: An Anthropology of Beauty (Duke UP, 2025), Tulasi Srinivas offers a pathbreaking ethnography of contemporary Indian beauty parlors in Bangalore. Exploring the gendered world of…
Most employers in the United States routinely conduct criminal background checks on job applicants, weeding out those with criminal convictions—and thus denying opportunities to those who need them…
The Cultural Competence Collective welcomes Marika Duczynski onto the podcast to discuss cultural competence, decolonial practices, and community-led curation. Marika is a Gamilaraay and Mandandanji writer and curator and…
Who gets to live a life with dignity? Each day, families around the world make the difficult decision to leave their homes in search of safety, stability, and…
Over the last thirty years, Latin America has undergone an unprecedented wave of reparations targeting victims of political violence during military regimes, Indigenous and Afro-Latin groups affected by…
In this timely and bold book, Against Innocence: Undoing and Remaking the World (U Chicago Press, 2025), Miriam Ticktin explores how a concept that consistently appears as a moral good actually…
In this intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911–2007), Kalpana Karunakaran achieves the remarkable: capturing the singularity of an exceptional woman,…
Since the early 2000s, the Canadian government has attempted reconciliation with Indigenous Nations through varied efforts: treaty processes, government commissions, rebranding campaigns for settler-owned businesses, workshops for state…
This episode features a conversation with Ravikant Kisana, Dean of the School of Liberal Education and Languages at Galgotias University in India, about his book Meet the Savarnas: Indian…
Options for Success: A PhD’s Guide to Navigating Career Transitions and Thriving in Your Next Professional Chapter (Oxford UP, 2025) is a transformative, step-by-step guide designed for early to mid-career academics…
Worker Centered: Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement (Oxford UP, 2024) is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low…
Rapa Nui, known to Western cultures as Easter Island for centuries, has long been a source of mystery. While the massive stone statues that populate the island’s landscape…
Respectability on the Line: Gender, Race, and Labor along British and Colonial Indian Railways (U California Press, 2026) by Dr. Mattie Armstrong-Price offers a social and cultural history of…
How do the inhabitants of the Indian city of Mumbai navigate political signs and representations? What is the significance of crowds and mass mobilization to popular politics, and…
Since 2008, there has been tremendous public interest in the social and ecological ramifications of the global land rush, a rapid increase of capital investment into land, especially…
This episode features Yashica Dutt, journalist and author of Coming Out as Dalit. We began with a discussion of her choice to write a memoir, the significance of the…
Making War Safe for Capitalism: The World Bank, IMF, and the Conflict in Ukraine (Bristol UP, 2025) by Dr. Elliot Dolan-Evans examines the impact of World Bank and International…
A provocative book arguing that the workplace is where we learn to live democratically. In The Pandemic Workplace: How We Learned to Be Citizens in the Office (U Chicago Press,…
The open access Bloomsbury Handbook of Religion and Heritage in Contemporary Europe (Bloomsbury, 2025) offers readers a state-of-the-art guide to the public debates and scholarship on religious heritage in contemporary…
A free e-book version of Delta Futures is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier (U…