Using a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach, Liberating Fat Bodies: Social Media Censorship and Body Size Activism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) by Dr. Wesley Bishop & Dr. Bessie Rigakos explores the social factors that influence the ways in which societal norms police fat bodies. Chapters examine the racist and colonial constructions of Western beauty norms as well as the evolution of anti-fat bias and fat liberation, before delving into the relationship between social media and body siz...
Aug 23, 2024•50 min•Ep 378•Transcript available on Metacast Joseph Heathcott discusses his latest book, Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic (Fordham University Press, 2023), an engaging hybrid of text and visual that features a trove of his personal photography of urban spaces throughout NYC's most diverse borough. Including: airports, overgrown yards, possibly the last living speakers of indigenous languages, the Queens Public Library, racial covenants and civil resistance in early real estate development, and much more that, like the borough itself, is cent...
Aug 21, 2024•41 min•Ep 31•Transcript available on Metacast 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 book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a repres...
Aug 21, 2024•1 hr•Ep 115•Transcript available on Metacast An in-depth examination of the regulatory, entrepreneurial, and organizational factors contributing to the expansion and transformation of China’s supplemental education industry. Like many parents in the United States, parents in China, increasingly concerned with their children’s academic performance, are turning to for-profit tutoring businesses to help their children get ahead in school. China’s supplemental education industry is now the world’s largest and most vibrant for-profit education ...
Aug 21, 2024•2 hr 42 min•Ep 377•Transcript available on Metacast Who is in charge? In The Political Class: Why It Matters Who Our Politicians Are (Oxford University Press, 2018), Peter Allen, a Reader in Comparative Politics in the Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies at the University of Bath, explores the rise of a specific type of political leader and what this means for our politics. The book works through debates over the existence of a political class, arguing this ‘class’ is homogenised along lines of characteristics, attitudes, ...
Aug 20, 2024•41 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast Women, Agency, and the State in Guinea: Silent Politics (Routledge, 2020) examines how women in Guinea articulate themselves politically within and outside institutional politics. It documents the everyday practices that local female actors adopt to deal with the continuous economic, political, and social insecurities that emerge in times of political transformations. Carole Ammann argues that women's political articulations in Muslim Guinea do not primarily take place within women's association...
Aug 18, 2024•2 hr 32 min•Ep 196•Transcript available on Metacast Each year, thousands of youth endure harrowing unaccompanied and undocumented migrations across Central America and Mexico to the United States in pursuit of a better future. Drawing on the firsthand narratives of migrant youth in Los Angeles, California to produce Sin Padres, Ni Papeles: Unaccompanied Migrant Youth Coming of Age in the United States (University of California Press, 2024), Dr. Stephanie L. Canizales shows that while a lucky few do find reprieve, many are met by resource-impoveri...
Aug 18, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 376•Transcript available on Metacast In Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us (NYU Press, 2023), Karen Tongson presents an irreverent look at the love-hate relationship between queer viewers and mainstream family TV shows like Gilmore Girls and This Is Us. After personal loss, political upheaval, and the devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us craved a return to business as usual, the mundane, the middlebrow. We turned to TV to find these things. For nearly forty years, network television has produced a consta...
Aug 18, 2024•59 min•Ep 192•Transcript available on Metacast How do micro-interactions of resistance, fighting and dialogue shape larger patterns of peace and conflict? How can nonviolent resistance, conflict transformation and diplomacy be analysed in micro-detail? Exploring these questions in The Micro-Sociology of Peace and Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Dr. Isabel Bramsen introduces micro-sociology to Peace Research and International Relations. Breaking new methodological, empirical and theoretical ground, Bramsen develops a novel theore...
Aug 17, 2024•43 min•Ep 730•Transcript available on Metacast What is the right way to live? This is an old question in Western moral philosophy, but in recent years anthropologists have turned their attention to this question in what has been called, a “moral turn”. In this original ethnographic study, Pursuing Morality: Buddhism and Everyday Ethics in Southeastern Myanmar (NUS Press, 2024), Justine Chambers examines the Plong (Pwo) Karen people’s conception of themselves as a moral people. In the decade between Myanmar’s opening up in 2011 and the milita...
Aug 15, 2024•48 min•Ep 147•Transcript available on Metacast Elite colleges are boasting unprecedented numbers with respect to diversity, with some schools admitting their first majority-minority classes. But when the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and racial unrest gripped the world, schools scrambled to figure out what to do with the diversity they so fervently recruited. And disadvantaged students suffered. Class Dismissed: When Colleges Ignore Inequality and Students Pay the Price (Princeton UP, 2024) exposes how woefully unprepared colleges were to suppo...
Aug 15, 2024•33 min•Ep 103•Transcript available on Metacast Over the past fifteen years in Mexico, more than 450,000 people have been murdered and 110,000 more have been disappeared. In Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico (Duke UP, 2024), Claudio Lomnitz examines the Mexican state in relation to this extreme violence, uncovering a reality that challenges the familiar narratives of “a war on drugs” or a “failed state.” Tracing how neoliberal reforms, free trade agreements, and a burgeoning drug economy have shaped Mexico’s sociopolitical...
Aug 15, 2024•2 hr 53 min•Ep 5•Transcript available on Metacast White Supremacy and Racism in Progressive America: Race, Place, and Space (Policy Press, 2024) examines the connections between race, place, and space, and sheds light on how they contribute and maintain racial hierarchies. Dr. Miguel Montalva Barba focuses on the White residents of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, which, according to the Cooks Political Report Partisan Voting Index, is the most liberal district in the state and 15th in the United States of America. The book uses settler colonialis...
Aug 14, 2024•53 min•Ep 476•Transcript available on Metacast 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 when the foetal being does not, or will not, survive. Invisible Labour: The Reproductive Politics of Second Trimester Pregnancy Loss in England (Berghahn, 2024) by Dr. Aimee Louise Middlemiss describes the reproductive politics of this category of pregnancy loss in England. It shows how second trimester p...
Aug 12, 2024•45 min•Ep 130•Transcript available on Metacast It has long been a truism that Americans’ disdain for poor people–our collective sense that if they only worked harder or behaved more responsibly they would do well in this land of opportunity–explains, at least in part, why it is we have such a weak and limited public welfare state. But what if that very premise is false? What if, to the contrary, a majority of Americans have sympathy for poor people and disdain for the wealthy? And what if those feelings have demonstrable policy effects? Join...
Aug 11, 2024•34 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast Today I interview Casey Plett. Plett is the author of multiple works of fiction, including the story collection A Dream of a Woman, the novel Little Fish, which was a winner of a Lambda Literary Award and the Amazon First Novel Award in Canada, and and the story-collection A Safe Girl to Love, also a winner of a Lambda Literary Award. Today, we talk about her new book, On Community (Biblioasis, 2023), which explores the idea of community as a word, a symbol, and a very messy, very human experien...
Aug 11, 2024•54 min•Ep 417•Transcript available on Metacast Throughout the 20th century, especially during and immediately after WWII, New York Jews changed their names at rates considerably higher than any other ethnic group. Representative of the insidious nature of American anti-Semitism, recognizably Jewish names were often barriers for entry into college, employment, and professional advancement. College and job application forms were intentionally used as a means to “control” the Jewish population in a given college or institution. As such, many Je...
Aug 11, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 127•Transcript available on Metacast An exploration of the much-derided English suburbs through rap music. There are many different Englands. From the much-romanticized rolling countryside, to the cosmopolitanism of the inner cities (embraced by some as progressive, multicultural enlightenment and derided by others as the playground of a self-righteous metropolitan elite), or the disparagingly named "left behind" communities which, post-Brexit, have so interested political parties and pundits, demographers and statisticians. But th...
Aug 10, 2024•2 hr 30 min•Ep 249•Transcript available on Metacast Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design (Cambridge University Press, 2024) by Dr. Catherine Boone integrates African countries into broader comparative theories of how spatial inequality shapes political competition over the construction of markets, states, and nations. Existing literature on African countries has found economic cleavages, institutions, and policy choices to be of low salience in national politics. This book inverts these arguments. Dr. Boone trains ou...
Aug 10, 2024•1 hr 12 min•Ep 195•Transcript available on Metacast Ella Houston's book Advertising Disability (Routledge, 2024) invites Cultural Disability Studies to consider how advertising, as one of the most ubiquitous forms of popular culture, shapes attitudes towards disability. The research presented in the book provides a much-needed examination of the ways in which disability and mental health issues are depicted in different types of advertising, including charity 'sadvertisements', direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements and 'pro-diversity' ...
Aug 10, 2024•43 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast Two academics, one Jewish and one Muslim, come together to show how much their faiths have in common—particularly in America. This book provides a braided portrait of two American groups whose strong religious attachments and powerful commitments to ritual observance are not always easy to adapt to American culture. Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims share many similarities in their efforts to be at home in America while holding on to their practices and beliefs. As Samuel Heilman and Mucahit B...
Aug 09, 2024•35 min•Ep 124•Transcript available on Metacast An early wave of research helped make visible the complex dynamics of sexuality and gender norms in Latino life, but a new generation of scholars is bringing renewed energy and curiosity to this field of inquiry. In this episode we sit down with Frederick Luis Aldama, Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University and co-editor of Decolonizing Latinx Masculinities (University of Arizona Press), to discuss some of the cutting-edge research in this new edited volume. This rich col...
Aug 09, 2024•37 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast 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 life. Dispelling the notion of Americans as mere workaholics, Claudia Strauss presents a more nuanced perspective. While some live to work, others prefer a diligent 9-to-5 work ethic that is conscientious but preserves time for other interests. Her participants often enjoyed their jobs without making work the focus of their life. These...
Aug 09, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 375•Transcript available on Metacast 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 of the petrochemical industry, along with the communities living with, and resisting, its impact. Offering ethnographic and theoretical reflections on this often overlooked and hidden part of the oil and plastics production chain, the book offers a new perspective on our...
Aug 08, 2024•48 min•Ep 474•Transcript available on Metacast Using one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s major ideas as a springboard for their discussion, “The truth will set you free,” the host and co-host discussed psychoanalytic mechanism of defense starting with denial which can emerge when a topic is too painful or difficult to face. A productive dialogue followed that focused on Dr. Filipe Copeland’s description of two different types of denial, Strategic Denial and Psychological Denial as described in “The American Psychoanalyst” (TAP) in an intervi...
Aug 07, 2024•42 min•Ep 237•Transcript available on Metacast 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 Through the Arts in the Digital Age (NYU Press, 2024), by Jessica Roda, flips this notion on its head. Drawing on six years of fieldwork between New York and Montreal, Roda examines modern performances on the stage and screen directed by and for ultra-Orthodox women. Their incredibly vibrant Je...
Aug 06, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 541•Transcript available on Metacast 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 book Lost in Ideology: Interpreting Modern Political Life (Agenda Publishing, 2023), this may not be because we are like travellers guided by old maps of the political world but because we make the mistake of thinking that our maps are the worlds in which we live and act politically. When we read them as if they are reality, rather than a repres...
Aug 06, 2024•40 min•Ep 20•Transcript available on Metacast 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 countries in the world. Moving beyond economistic push-pull narratives about post-Soviet migration, it foregrounds the experiences of those who ‘stay put’ in the sending society and struggle to reproduce their moral communities. Dr. Borisova examines the role of mobility in historical and cultural...
Aug 02, 2024•57 min•Ep 37•Transcript available on Metacast Politics is a site of performance, and contemporary politicians often perform the role of a regular person--perhaps someone we would like to have a beer with. They win elections not because of the elevated rhetorical performances we often associate with charisma ("ask not what your country can do for you"), but because of something more ordinary and relatable. The everyday magic spell that politicians cast using mass and social media is what sociologist Julia Sonnevend calls "charm." In Charm: H...
Aug 01, 2024•32 min•Ep 102•Transcript available on Metacast Will Africa’s increasingly youthful population lead to new democratic and development breakthroughs? Or will it generate fresh instability as frustrated young people demand economic opportunities their governments cannot provide? In this episode, Nic Cheeseman talks to Professors Amy Patterson and Megan Hershey about their recent book Africa’s Urban Youth. They explain how young people across Africa are contesting marginalization and claiming citizenship, and set out the broader context that led...
Jul 31, 2024•39 min•Ep 18•Transcript available on Metacast 
