Minoritarian Liberalism: A Travesti Life in a Brazilian Favela (University of Chicago Press, 2022) is a mesmerizing ethnography of the largest favela in Rio, where residents articulate their own politics…
China has one of the largest queer populations in the world, but what does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties,…
Edward Anthony Avery-Natale’s book Ethics, Politics, and Anarcho-Punk Identifications: Punk and Anarchy in Philadelphia (Lexington, 2016) explores the ways in which those who identify as punks and anarchists living in the…
In today’s episode of How To Be Wrong we welcome Dr. Khytie Brown, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.…
A detailed exploration of parents’ fight for a safe environment for their kids, interrogating how race, class, and gender shape health advocacy The success of food allergy activism…
Argentina lies at the heart of the American hemisphere’s history of global migration booms of the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century: by 1910, one of every three Argentine…
Trina Nileena Banerjee’s book Performing Silence: Women in the Group Theatre Movement in Bengal (Oxford UP, 2021) addresses the absence of a sustained and critical engagement with the gender politics…
Peer Schouten, of the Danish Institute for International Studies, has written a breathtaking book. Roadblock Politics: The Origins of Violence in Central Africa (Cambridge, 2022). Schouten mapped more than 1000…
Jazz in Socialist Hà Nội: Improvisations between Worlds (Routledge, 2022) examines the germination and growth of jazz under communist rule—perceived as the “music of the enemy” and “ideologically decadent”—in the…
In Militarized Global Apartheid, Catherine Besteman offers a sweeping theorization of the ways in which countries from the global north are reproducing South Africa’s apartheid system on a worldwide scale…
In Media Culture in Nomadic Communities (Amsterdam University Press, 2021), author Allison Hahn examines the ways that new communications technologies have changed how nomadic and mobile communities engage in political advocacy,…
A new generation of Afro-Brazilian media producers have emerged to challenge a mainstream that frequently excludes them. Reighan Gillam delves into the dynamic alternative media landscape developed by…
The Boston Harbor Islands have been called Boston’s “hidden shores.” While some are ragged rocks teeming with coastal wildlife, such as oystercatchers and harbor seals, others resemble manicured…
In Chemical Heroes: Pharmacological Supersoldiers in the US Military (Duke UP, 2021), Andrew Bickford analyzes the US military’s attempts to design performance enhancement technologies and create pharmacological “supersoldiers” capable of withstanding…
What happens when the written words of biblical scripture are transformed into experiential, choreographed environments? To answer this question, anthropologist James Bielo explores a diverse range of practices…
Normative liberalism has promoted the freedom of privileged subjects, those entitled to rights—usually white, adult, heteronormative, and bourgeois—at the expense of marginalized groups, such as Black people, children,…
Andrew Leon Hanna’s book 25 Million Sparks: The Untold Story of Refugee Entrepreneurs (Cambridge UP, 2022) takes readers inside the Za’atari refugee camp to follow the stories of three courageous…
How can development programs deliver benefits to marginalized citizens in ways that expand their rights and freedoms? Political will and good policy design are critical but often insufficient…
In Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine (Duke UP, 2020), Christopher Harker demonstrates that financial debt is as much a spatial phenomenon as it is a temporal and…
What drives and sustains participation in unemployed workers’ movements in Argentina? Today’s guest, Marcos Perez, is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Washington and…
How the debate over genetically modified crops in India is transforming science and politics Genetically modified or transgenic crops are controversial across the world. Advocates see such crops…
Randa Khair Abbas and Deborah Court’s book The Israeli Druze Community in Transition: Between Tradition and Modernity (Cambridge Scholars, 2021) gives voice to the Israeli Druze through in-depth interviews with…
In There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life (Duke UP, 2022), Jafari S. Allen offers a sweeping and lively ethnographic and intellectual history of what…
In Academic Apartheid: Race and the Criminalization of Failure in an American Suburb (U California Press, 2022), sociologist Sean J. Drake addresses long-standing problems of educational inequality from a nuanced…