Best Deepa Narayan Podcasts (2025)

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John Mathias, "Uncommon Cause: Living for Environmental Justice in Kerala" (U California Press, 2024) 54:27

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9m ago54:27

54:27

How can activists strike a balance between fighting for a cause and sustaining relationships with family, friends, and neighbors? In this episode John Mathias joins host Elena Sobrino to talk about Uncommon Cause: Living for Environmental Justice in Kerala (2024, University of California Press). Uncommon Cause follows environmental justice activist…

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Jürgen Schaflechner, "Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan" (Oxford UP, 2018) 1:26:58

2d ago1:26:58

1:26:58

About two hundred kilometers west of the city of Karachi, in the desert of Baluchistan, Pakistan, sits the shrine of the Hindu Goddess Hinglaj. Despite the temple's ancient Hindu and Muslim history, an annual festival at Hinglaj has only been established within the last three decades, in part because of the construction of the Makran Coastal Highwa…

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Deepa Das Acevedo, "The War on Tenure" (Cambridge UP, 2025) 1:02:47

8m ago1:02:47

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As academia increasingly comes under attack in the United States, The War on Tenure (Cambridge UP, 2025) steps in to demystify what professors do and to explain the importance of tenure for their work. Deepa Das Acevedo takes readers on a backstage tour of tenure-stream academia to reveal hidden dynamics and obstacles. She challenges the common bel…

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Money, Meaning & India’s Growth Story | Venkat Chalasani on Financial Resilience & Well-Being 44:31

18h ago44:31

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What does financial security really mean and how does it connect to the way we live, work, and dream? In this episode of Eudaimonia with Rhitu, I sit down with Venkat Chalasani, CEO of the Association of Mutual Funds in India (AMFI) and former senior banker at SBI, to explore the intersection of money, well-being, and meaningful living. We unpack I…

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Michael Rowe, "Researching Street-Level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions" (Routledge, 2024) 40:09

2d ago40:09

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Researching Street-level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions (Routledge, 2024) is the first among a number of new titles in the Routledge Series on Interpretive Methods that we’ll be featuring on New Books in Interpretive Political and Social Science. In it, Mike Rowe discusses the continued relevance of the idea of street level b…

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Georgios Tsourous, "Orthodox Choreographies: Boundaries, Borders and Materiality in Jerusalem's Old City" (Gorgias Press, 2024) 1:04:05

2h ago1:04:05

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Orthodox Choreographies: Boundaries, Borders and Materiality in Jerusalem's Old City (Gorgias Press, 2024) offers a comprehensive anthropological study of lived Christianity in Jerusalem’s Old City, with a special focus on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Anastasis. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork, the study explores t…

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Gina Vale, "The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State" (Oxford UP, 2024) 56:55

1d ago56:55

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The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Dr. Gina Vale explores the governance of the Islamic State (IS) terrorist organization through the lives and words of local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women. While the roles and activities of foreign (predominantly Western), pro-IS women have garnered significant attentio…

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Kolby Hanson, "Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace" (Oxford UP, 2025) 42:26

7d ago42:26

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In Ordinary Rebels: Rank-And-File Militants Between War and Peace (Oxford University Press, 2025), Kolby Hanson argues that these periods of state toleration do not simply change armed groups' behavior, but fundamentally transform the organizations themselves by shaping who takes up arms and which leaders they follow. This book draws on a set of in…

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Gut, Mind & Sleep: Deepa Kannan on Ayurveda, Anxiety, and Real Healing Beyond Quick Fixes 55:24

8d ago55:24

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Discover the powerful connection between your gut, mind, and sleep in this transformative conversation with functional medicine and Ayurveda expert, Deepa Kannan. In this episode of Eudaimonia with Rhitu, host Rhituparna Bhattacharya explores why anxiety, gut issues, and sleepless nights are on the rise and why quick fixes or social media health ha…

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Laurian R. Bowles, "Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) 1:03:02

10d ago1:03:02

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Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025) explores the experiences of women porters, called kayayei, in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork, anthropologist Laurian R. Bowles shows how kayayei navigate precarity, bringing into sharp relief how racialization, rooted in histories of colonialis…

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Xiang Biao and Wu Qi, "Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) 1:39:40

13d ago1:39:40

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Today I had the pleasure of talking to Professor Xiang Biao on his new book, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World, which was originally written and published in Chinese. The English translation has just come out with Palgrave Macmillan. Self as Method provides a manifesto of intellectual activism that counsels China’s young people t…

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From Peace March to PhD: Dr. Elise Temple's Unconventional “Success” 57:39

11d ago57:39

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What happens when a straight-A student drops out of college and gets arrested at 19, as part of a peace march? Meet Dr. Elise Temple, whose unconventional path from college dropout to corporate neuroscientist proves there's no single blueprint for a meaningful life. At 19, Elise was a lost soul on a nine-month peace march across America when she me…

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Nidhi Mahajan, "Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean" (U of California Press, 2025) 1:04:03

17d ago1:04:03

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Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean (U of California Press, 2025) follows sailors from the Gulf of Kachchh in India as they voyage across the Indian Ocean on mechanized wooden sailing vessels known as vahans, or dhows. These voyages produce capital through moorings that are spatial, moral, material, and conceptual. With a view from…

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Susan M. Rigdon, "Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final" (Berghahn Books, 2024) 1:07:48

18d ago1:07:48

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American anthropologist Oscar Lewis secured permission from Fidel Castro to undertake three years of field research on cultural and economic change in Cuba in the decade after the victory of Castro's M-26 Movement. Oscar Lewis in Cuba: La Partida Final (Berghahn Books, 2024) delves into Lewis' research goals, methods, the training and composition o…

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Chelsi West Ohueri, "Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife" (Cornell UP, 2025) 51:10

23d ago51:10

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Encountering Race in Albania: An Ethnography of the Communist Afterlife (Cornell University Press, 2025) is the first book to interrogate race and racial logics in Albania. Chelsi West Ohueri examines how race is made, remade, produced, and reproduced through constructions of whiteness, blackness, and otherness. She argues that while race is often …

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Rooted in Raga: Sandeep Narayan on Music, Marriage & Meaning 46:47

19d ago46:47

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What does it really take to pursue your passion, stay grounded, and build meaningful relationships in a fast-paced world? In this candid episode, Carnatic vocalist Sandeep Narayan joins Rhitu for a conversation that goes far beyond music. From his journey moving from Los Angeles to Chennai, to the discipline and patience behind artistic mastery, Sa…

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The Truth About Fulfilment, Agency & Inner Clarity with Vijayraj Kamat 1:12:35

20d ago1:12:35

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What holds us back from leading more fulfilling lives? In this deeply reflective conversation, Rhitu sits down with Vijayraj Kamat - a leadership development professional, coach and TEDx speaker to unpack the emotional and psychological patterns that shape our choices, suffering, and growth. We explore: • Why we often chase goals that aren’t truly …

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Darcie Deangelo et al., "Demilitarizing the Future" (Anthem Press, 2025) 50:25

20d ago50:25

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Demilitarizing the Future (Anthem Press, 2025) draws from art, anthropology, and activism to investigate the entrenchment of militarism in everyday lives and consider novel imaginaries of its dissolution--of peacemaking, community, and shared equitable futures. This book will be published in October of 2025. In this episode, Rebecca Kastleman, Darc…

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Jovana Diković, "The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia" (UCL Press, 2025) 55:05

20d ago55:05

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What if rural progress isn’t about government intervention but about the self-reliance and ingenuity of peasants themselves? The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia (UCL Press, 2025) subverts conventional wisdom on rural development by shifting the focus from state-led planning to the agency of peasants themselves. Rej…

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Reinventing Life with Meenakshi Menon 1:00:36

22d ago1:00:36

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What does it mean to truly flourish — at any age? In this episode, Rhitu sits down with Meenakshi Menon: media trailblazer, organic farmer, deep-sea diver, and passionate advocate for women’s health and the environment. With over four decades of experience across advertising, marketing, and social impact, Meenakshi is now challenging the narrative …

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Cold Rush 27:45

25d ago27:45

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Sari Pietikainen about her new book Cold Rush (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). This book is an original study of “Cold Rush,” an accelerated race for the extraction and protection of Arctic natural resources. The Northernmost reach of the planet is caught up in the double dev…

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Ruth E. Toulson, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore" (U Washington Press, 2024) 58:30

28d ago58:30

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Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic growth, the government has ordered the destruction of all but one burial ground, forcing people to exhume their family members. In Necropolitics of the O…

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Tiffany Earley-Spadoni, "Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East" (UP of Colorado, 2025) 58:49

26d ago58:49

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Landscapes of Warfare: Urartu and Assyria in the Ancient Middle East (University Press of Colorado, 2025) by Dr. Tiffany Earley-Spadoni offers an in-depth exploration of the Urartian empire, which occupied the highlands of present-day Turkey, Armenia, and Iran in the early first millennium BCE. Lesser known than its rival, the Neo-Assyrian empire, …

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Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football 58:04

1M ago58:04

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Big-time college football promises prestige, drama, media attention, and money. Yet most athletes in this unpaid, amateur system encounter a different reality, facing dangerous injuries, few pro-career opportunities, a free but devalued college education, and future financial instability. In one of the first ethnographies about Black college footba…

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Maan Barua, "Plantation Worlds" (Duke UP, 2024) 58:49

1M ago58:49

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In Plantation Worlds (Duke UP, 2024), Maan Barua interrogates debates on planetary transformations through the histories and ecologies of plantations. Drawing on long-term research spanning fifteen years, Barua presents a unique ethnography attentive to the lives of both people and elephants amid tea plantations in the Indian state of Assam. In the…

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Vanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood" (Duke UP, 2020) 50:01

1M ago50:01

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While Hollywood’s images present a veneer of fantasy for some, the work to create such images is far from escapism. In Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood (Duke University Press, 2020), anthropologist Vanessa Díaz examines the raced and gendered hierarchies and inequalities that are imbricated within the work …

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Bettina Ng′weno, "No Place Like Home in a New City: Anti-Urbanism and Life in Nairobi" (U of California Press, 2025) 53:28

2M ago53:28

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Bettina Ng’weno is Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis Nairobi, known as the Green City in the Sun, has taken shape through anti-urban ideologies that insist that the city cannot be home for most residents. Based on decades of experience in rapidly changing Nairobi, No Place Like Home in a New Ci…

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Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage 41:01

1M ago41:01

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In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Dr Alexandra Grey speaks with Dr Zozan Balci about Zozan’s new book, Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage: Language, Identity and Belonging in the Lives of Cultural In-betweeners, published in 2025 by Routledge.. The conversation focuses on a study of adults with three languages ‘at play’ in their…

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Kate Herrity, "Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown" (Bristol UP, 2024) 1:07:54

2M ago1:07:54

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The soundscape of prison life is that of constant clangs, bangs and jangles. What is the significance of this cacophonous din to those who live and work with it? Sound, Order and Survival in Prison: The Rhythms and Routines of HMP Midtown (Bristol UP, 2024) tells the story of a year spent with a UK prison community, bringing its social world vividl…

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Kevin P. Donovan, "Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 1:02:03

2M ago1:02:03

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In his book, Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Kevin Donovan argues that East African decolonization was not coterminous with political sovereignty but rather consisted of a longer process of reorganizing how value was legitimately defined, produced, and distributed. It is an…

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Kirin Narayan, "Cave of My Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora" (U Chicago Press, 2024) 1:17:25

2M ago1:17:25

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On the podcast today I am joined by Kirin Narayan, emerita professor at the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. Kirin is joining me to talk about her new book, Cave of my Ancestors: Vishwakarma and the Artisans of Ellora published by Chicago University Press in 2024, and in 2025 as an Indian edition by HarperColli…

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Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) 1:12:16

2M ago1:12:16

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From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one t…

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"Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsideration of how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation" 1:08:59

2M ago1:08:59

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“Age, Creativity and Culture: Reconsidering how the Phases of Life Influence Knowledge, Experience, and Creation” by Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera appeared in Nuevos Horizontes in 2024. The article examines age as a dimension of identity, creativity and cognition, and in this episode, Heidi Landecker, Samuel Jay Keyser, and Jenny Wilson consider the importa…

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Lizzie Wade, "Apocalypse: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures" (Harper, 2025) 1:29:26

2M ago1:29:26

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A richly imagined new view on the great human tradition of apocalypse, from the rise of Homo sapiens to the climate instability of our present, that defies conventional wisdom and long-held stories about our deep past to reveal how cataclysmic events are not irrevocable endings, but transformations. A drought lasts for decades, a disease rips throu…

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Anand Pandian, "Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down" (Stanford UP, 2025) 52:22

2M ago52:22

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In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump's harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the country—from Fargo, North Dakota to Denton, Texas, from southern California to upstate New York—seeking out fellow Americans with markedly different soc…

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Klaus Bachmann, "The Genocide in Rwanda in Comparative Perspective: Death and Survival on the Lake Kivu Shore" (Routledge, 2025) 1:22:35

2M ago1:22:35

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The Genocide in Rwanda in Comparative Perspective: Death and Survival on the Lake Kivu Shore (Routledge, 2025) combines social science concepts, history and transitional justice studies to examine the social dynamics, specific actors and ideologies involved in the genocide in Rwanda and examines what makes this genocide a unique case of mass violen…

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Yuki Kato, "Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City" (NYU Press, 2025) 1:07:12

2M ago1:07:12

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Gardens are often spaces of hope, expected to solve many problems in a city including food insecurity and climate resilience. In fact, there has been a historical trend of urban gardening gaining popularity during times of crisis. Gardens of Hope is the story of urban gardening in New Orleans in the decade after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita…

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Shani Adia Evans, "We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place" (U Chicago Press, 2025) 32:37

2M ago32:37

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Although Portland, Oregon, is sometimes called “America’s Whitest city,” Black residents who grew up there made it their own. The neighborhoods of Northeast Portland, also called “Albina,” were a haven for and a hub of Black community life. But between 1990 and 2010, Albina changed dramatically—it became majority White. In We Belong Here, sociologi…

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Jess Reia, "Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities" (Intellect, 2025) 34:40

2M ago34:40

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What happens when precarious urban cultural laborers take data collection, laws, and policymaking into their own hands? Buskers have been part of our cities for hundreds of years, but they remain invisible to governments and in datasets. From nuisance to public art, this cultural practice can help us understand the politics of data collection, arch…

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Magdalena Maria Turek, "Buddhist Hermits in Eastern Tibet: Saint-Making and Ascetic Performance" (Routledge, 2025) 1:19:13

2M ago1:19:13

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Magdalena Maria Turek is an independent research scholar. She received her PhD from Humboldt University, Germany, and was a Research Fellow with the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Program in Buddhist Studies at the American Council of Learned Societies, USA. Her research examines how contemporary reiterations of Tibetan Buddhist orthopraxy, loca…

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Ela Przybylo, "Ungendering Menstruation" (U Minnesota Press, 2025) 40:35

2M ago40:35

40:35

Ungendering Menstruation by Ela Przybyło discusses why and how menstrual pain needs to be incorporated into discussions of gender, embodiment, and disability. Honing a "cranky" approach to being a menstruating body expected to accept and embrace trauma, Ungendering Menstruation examines menstrual suppression, toxicity, and the cooptation of menstru…

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Nicholas Thomas, "Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific" (Apollo, 2020) 56:16

2M ago56:16

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In Voyagers: The Settlement of the Pacific (Apollo, 2020), the distinguished anthropologist Nicholas Thomas tells the story of the peopling of the Pacific. In clear, accessible language Thomas shows us that most Pacific Islanders are in fact 'inter-islanders', or people defined by their movement across the ocean and between islands, rather than 'tr…

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Anahid Matossian, "Syrian-Armenian Women Migrants in Armenia: Gender, Identity and Painful Belonging" (Bloomsbury, 2025) 1:11:53

3M ago1:11:53

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After the outbreak of the 2011 Syrian War, a number Syrian-Armenians who had lived in the territory for generations, fled to the Republic of Armenia. This book traces the experiences of Syrian-Armenian women as they navigated their changing and gendered identities from their adopted 'homeland' to their socially constructed new 'ancestral' home in A…

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Laurie Denyer Willis, "Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil" (U California Press, 2023) 47:05

3M ago47:05

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Through deep attention to sense and feeling, Go with God grapples with the centrality of Evangelical faith in Rio de Janeiro's subúrbios, the city's expansive and sprawling peripheral communities. Based on sensory ethnographic fieldwork and attuned to religious desire and manipulation, this book shows how Evangelical belief has changed the way peop…

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Decolonizing Ukraine: The Indigenous People of Crimea and Pathways to Freedom 51:19

3M ago51:19

51:19

Decolonizing Ukraine, by Dr. Greta Lynn Uehling, illuminates the untold stories of Russia's occupation of Crimea from 2014 to the present, revealing the traumas of colonization, foreign occupation, and population displacement. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork in Ukraine, including over 90 personal interviews, Dr. Uehling brings her readers into the…

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Siri Schwabe, "Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile" (Cornell UP, 2023) 49:58

3M ago49:58

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Two juxtaposed years frame the subject matter of Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile. In one, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet’s troops stormed Chile’s presidential palace. In the other, 1948, Zionist militias expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. That 1973 should move memories in Chile is obvi…

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Janet McIntosh, "Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics" (Oxford UP, 2025) 1:24:08

3M ago1:24:08

1:24:08

Even casual observers of the military will notice the unique ways that service members use language. With all of the acronyms and jargon, some even argue that membership in the military requires learning a whole language. But rather than treat military-specific language as a cultural difference of the institution or a technical requirement for the …

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Myles Lennon, "Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2025) 1:06:47

3M ago1:06:47

1:06:47

In the face of accelerating climate change, anticapitalist environmental justice activists and elite tech corporations increasingly see eye to eye. Both envision solar-powered futures where renewable energy redresses gentrification, systemic racism, and underemployment. However, as Myles Lennon argues in Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Sha…

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Michael Amoruso, "Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil" (UNC Press, 2025) 1:09:00

3M ago1:09:00

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In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemp…

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Daanika Kamal, "Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women" (Oxford UP, 2025) 51:29

3M ago51:29

51:29

Pakistani women are increasingly pursuing legal avenues against acts of domestic violence. Their claims, however, are often dismissed through character allegations that label them as 'bad' women in need of control, or 'mad' women not to be trusted. Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of 'Bad' and 'Mad' Women (Oxford University Pre…