Modern environmentalism often frames conservation as moral, humans damage nature, and conservation protects it. But Mardi Reardon-Smith’s Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia, published by Stanford University Press in 2025, dismantles that comforting narrative and replaces it with something far more complex and candid. Set on the Cape York Peninsula, the book explores how Aboriginal traditional owners, pastoralists, conservation workers, and government institutions nav...
Jun 10, 2026•1 hr
In this episode of the New Books Network , I spoke with Dr Olga Burlyuk and Dr Ladan Rahbari about their new edited volume, From the Margins: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity (Open Book Publishers, 2026). The book is open access. As universities promote internationalisation while maintaining labour systems that leave many migrant scholars vulnerable, this volume builds on the editors’ 2023 collection (also featured on New Books Network) by incorporating global perspectives. Through per...
Jun 08, 2026•1 hr
Walmart: Made in China (Stanford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Eileen Otis tells the story of Walmart's expansion in China, making the case that it is the story of a major shift in the structure of global capitalism. Walmart, argues Dr. Otis, is a leading actor in the rise of merchant capitalism, wherein the role of the merchant has changed from operating at the whim of industrialists, to leveraging control over large consumer markets. As Walmart's retail business grew at unprecedented rates ac...
Jun 06, 2026•1 hr 24 min
In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Dr Santiago Betancor Falcón (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) about his 2025 paper, Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain . The conversation focuses on minoritised languages, autonomous language learning, and language activism. Reference: Betancor-Falcon, S. (2025). Autonomous language learning a...
Jun 03, 2026•30 min
From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O’Reilly’s Empires of the Southern Ocean : Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of...
Jun 01, 2026•46 min
In this episode, we are delighted to be joined by educator and researcher Associate Professor Remy Low to explore what cultural competence and culturally responsive teaching looks like in the classroom. He is committed to furthering culturally responsive education across schools, higher education, arts and cultural institutions, as well as community organisations. As a previous high school teacher, now published academic and lecturer, Remy chats to us about what “good teaching” is, and that cult...
May 31, 20260
Welcome to the first episode of The Cultural Competence Collective podcast! For our first episode, we are joined by the multi-talented actress, musician and director, Zindzi Okenyo! You may recognise her from your TV screen on shows like Fisk, Wakefield and Play School, on stage from her multiple shows with Sydney Theatre Company or maybe you’ve heard her hits like ‘A Woman’s World’ as a solo artist Okenyo, or ‘Love + Kindness’ from her fun, family-friendly kids project Zindzi & the Zilliona...
May 30, 20260
Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an est...
May 30, 2026•49 min
In this episode, Claudia Radiven and Saeed Khan were in conversation with Rhea Rahman to discuss her new book ‘Racializing the Ummah - Muslim Humanitarians: Beyond Black, Brown and White’. Through this, the discussion drew on issues of ‘doing good’, racial capitalism and the struggles faced by Islamic NGOs in a time when Islamophobia is on the rise. Rhea Rahman is an assistant professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College CUNY, working primarily on global racial formations in relation to histori...
May 29, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Sh. An-ski (Shloyme-Zanvl Rappoport, 1863-1920) was a writer in Russian and Yiddish, a revolutionary, a wartime relief worker, and an ethnographer who studied the Jews of the Russian Empire. During his 1911-1914 expeditions to shtetls in Ukraine—he would report—he and his co-workers took 1000 photographs, recorded 1000 Yiddish songs and 1500 stories, and purchased 400 objects for a Jewish museum. The expedition also inspired An-ski to write his signature play, The Dybbuk . Although East European...
May 29, 20260
Sanskrit-Speaking' Villages, Linguistic Utopias and the Metaphysics of Development (Routledge, 2026) is a recollection of the McCartney's journey across 'Sanskritland, ' which is the term coined to refer to the utopian landscape within which the 'Language of the Gods' is thought to be spoken. There are three destinations on the author's journey. This study sheds light on how, why, and where Sanskrit is spoken in the twenty-first century, the complex and dynamic historical and contemporary that h...
May 28, 2026•36 min
Lithium Extraction in Chile: Ontological, Ecological and Economic Dimensions (Routledge, 2025) is a new book from Dr Daniela Soto-Hernández, a Social Anthropologist currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sussex. In this book, published with Routledge, Dr Soto-Hernández uses ethnographic methods during her intensive fieldwork in Chile, specifically in and around the Atacama Desert, to take a relational view on lithium mining in the region. Chile is the largest and old...
May 24, 2026•55 min
In this episode Chella Ward and Amina Easat-Daas spoke with Dr Martijn de Koning about the nature of Islamophobia in the Netherlands and how this sits in relation to common perceptions about Dutch society as a liberal and tolerant society and the Islamophobic realities of the Netherlands. De Koning also spoke at length of the recent NTA affair in the Netherlands, the exceptionalising of surveilling Muslim communities and how Muslims in the Dutch context have begun to challenge this. Dr de Koning...
May 22, 2026•55 min
Erica Bornstein, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon (and Divisional Associate Dean), has a new book that delves into the regulatory reforms within the nonprofit sector in India. These reforms transpired over more than a decade, and Bornstein spent extended time developing this ethnographic study of not only the changes, but the institutional structures that manage nonprofit organizations and how the various regulatory decisions are made. The research explores the ways in which...
May 21, 2026•42 min
In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image—one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "terrorism," political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "faile...
May 20, 2026•46 min
In Rainforest Radio: Language Reclamation and Community Media in the Ecuadorian Amazon (U Arizona Press, 2025), Dr. Georgia C. Ennis provides a comprehensive ethnographic exploration of Amazonian Kichwa community media, offering a unique look at how Indigenous broadcast and performance media facilitate linguistic and cultural reclamation in the Ecuadorian Amazon. This work offers a critical analysis of how standardized language revitalization efforts, like the imposition of Unified Kichwa, can i...
May 19, 2026•36 min
Anxious Homes: Inflexible Demand and China's Housing Market (Cornell UP, 2026) is a study of the power that shapes the forms of the homes Chinese citizens strive for and the possible paths they may take to realize their home ownership dreams. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Mengqi Wang discusses how the Chinese real estate industry functions in the everyday, welding aspirational middle-class families, especially migrant families, to the property-owning class and the urban growth machi...
May 19, 2026•1 hr 5 min
Temptations in Ruin: S overeign Accumulation and the Making of Post-Genocide Turkey (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) examines the political-economic afterlife of the Armenian genocide in present-day Turkey, focusing on the region of Muş (Moush). Anthropologist Alice von Bieberstein explores how the 1915 genocide and dispossession of Armenians shaped property regimes, citizenship, and economic logics that continue to reverberate today. By combining ethnography with historical context and diverse pers...
May 17, 2026•37 min
In this episode hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Amani Hassani, to discuss her most recent work around Islamophobia and Muslimness in Denmark. Hassani discussed Danish colonial histories and the surveilling nature of the Danish welfare state, and how these are employed to construct a narrative of Danish benevolence while simultaneously marking Muslims in Denmark as ‘other’ and deserving of intolerance in an otherwise tolerant nation. Amani Hassani is a lecturer at Brunel...
May 15, 2026•56 min
This episode features a conversation with urban geographer, Malini Ranganathan, and historian, Juned Shaikh, on the centrality of caste to urbanization in India. Through a focus on 20th century Bombay (now Mumbai) and 21st century Bangalore (now Bengaluru), we explored the symbiotic relationship between caste and capitalism manifest in the political economy of urbanization from the heyday of industrial capitalism to contemporary neoliberalism. We also delved into the continuities between rural a...
May 11, 2026•1 hr 12 min
Edith Szanto’s Twelver Shi'i Self-Flagellation Rites in Contemporary Syria: Mourning Sayyida Zaynab (Edinburgh UP, 2025) is a striking and deeply immersive ethnographic study that takes the reader into the shrine town of Sayyida Zaynab in Syria. This town was a vibrant center of Shi‘i life, pilgrimage, and healing, especially for Iraqi refugees until the 2011 Syrian uprising. By combining meticulous fieldwork conducted between 2004 and 2010 with rich historical and social context, Szanto shows h...
May 07, 2026•6 min
Contentious Citizenship : Salvadoran Activism and Belonging Across Borders (U Arizona Press, 2026) reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism from the 1980s solidarity movement to the post–civil war era, Arely M. Zimmerman offers a powerful ethnographic account of how migrants challenge exclusionary state practices and redefine citizenship on their own terms using transnational networks and re...
May 03, 2026•23 min
In the mid-1930s the amateur French ethnographer and filmmaker Bernard de Colmont ventured into the mountainous state of Chiapas to study the Lacandón people and broadcast their way of life to a curious European public. Considered a “lost tribe,” the Lacandón were thought to be the closest living relatives of the ancient Maya. De Colmont became a celebrity explorer whose adventures generated considerable attention. The Lacandón themselves, however, were silenced in his tale. Nearly a century lat...
May 02, 2026•49 min
A Volatile Picture: War and the Political Work of Photography in Sri Lanka (U Washington Press, 2026) by Dr. Vindhya Buthpitiya is a groundbreaking ethnography that explores how, in the context of Sri Lanka’s protracted civil war and its turbulent aftermath, photography has become bound to the Tamil political imagination. From state-commissioned images meant to surveil and rebel documentation of armed resistance, to the fragile memorials created from identity photographs of the disappeared, A Vo...
Apr 29, 2026•43 min
In Embodied Encuentros: Oral History Archives of Latina/o/e Experiences (Ohio State UP, 2026), Elena Foulis offers a practical guide for completing ethical fieldwork in Latina/o/e communities, emphasizing equitable and culturally sustaining practices for gathering oral histories. In her critical decolonial model, Foulis centers the agency of the people within these communities while considering the diversity and complexity of their experiences. In doing so, she advocates for the importance of bu...
Apr 29, 2026•58 min
How can lives and things that are rendered invisible be crucial to identity, politics, and the future? Drawing on experimental ethnographic research in northeastern Estonia, this book offers vivid answers. The Future of Hiding: Secrecy, Infrastructure, and Ecological Memory in Estonia's Siberia (Cornell UP, 2025) analyzes the territorial dimensions of secrecy and how concealment occurs in relation to energy infrastructure and identity politics in eastern Estonia. It shows that secrets and hiding...
Apr 28, 2026•55 min
Susanna Elm and Kristina Sessa, War and Community in Late Antiquity (Cambridge UP, 2026) Late Antiquity (ca. 250–600 CE) was a world at war: barbarian migrations, civil wars, raids, and increasingly porous frontiers affected millions of its inhabitants. While military and political historians have long grappled with this history, scholars of late antique society and culture rarely interrogate the consequences of near constant warfare on civilian populations, fighting forces, and the built enviro...
Apr 27, 2026•1 hr 52 min
This episode features S. Karthikeyan and S. Subbulakshmi, the Convenor and Secretary of the Ambedkar King Study Circle, an anti-caste organization based in Silicon Valley. Our conversation began with a discussion of the choice of B. R. Ambedkar and Martin Luther King Jr. as the titular heads of the organization, then moved on to a conversation about its membership-based structure, the anti-caste struggles in which the AKSC has participated, and the significance of California in general, and the ...
Apr 27, 2026•57 min
In a culture saturated by speed, safety protocols, and mediated fear, what might we rediscover by walking or hiking slowly into the unknown? In this episode of the New Books Network, I speak with Justin S. Bailey, author of An Anthropology of Wandering: How Adventure Can Alleviate a Fearful Culture, published by Those Who Wonder Press in 2026. Drawing on his Appalachian Trail journey, Bailey offers a wide‑ranging reflection on wandering as an ancient human practice, one tied to resilience, trust...
Apr 25, 2026•54 min
Written under the shadow of growing authoritarianism in the United States and Europe, this book is an effort to understand resistance movements of the twenty-first century. It foregrounds the Yellow Vests to present an accurate and timely picture of a protest movement that baffled analysts and blurred the boundaries of left and right. Comprehensively exploring the meaning of “les Gilets Jaunes triompheront” (the yellow vests will win), written on the Arc de Triomphe in 2018, The Yellow Vests and...
Apr 25, 2026•1 hr 28 min•Ep. 414
