Best Liminal State Podcasts (2025)

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

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2h ago58:49

58:49

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

2h 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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Vanessa Diaz, "Manufacturing Celebrity: Latino Paparazzi and Women Reporters in Hollywood" (Duke UP, 2020) 50:01

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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

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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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COFFEE BREAK - Mike Wilson (of Harley Poe) Talks About Pissing For The Man 3:39

7d ago3:39

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Todays COFFEE BREAK features Mike Wilson of Harley Poe. He discusses pissing for authority figures & other fun stuff too. Get coffee roasted by Pepe Bandit: stayfreecoffee.com/discount/SHIPFREE Listen to the full episode - Mike Wilson of Harley Poe on opening & closing a record shop & the DIY ethos #28: Spotify open.spotify.com/episode/6AzBDnGXyRT3…

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Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage 41:01

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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

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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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Coming Home To Yourself: Beyond Addiction & Mental Health Struggles w/ Jason Shiers #56 58:06

15d ago58:06

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In this episode, we dive deep into the journey of overcoming addiction & mental health challenges with certified Psychotherapist, Jason Shiers. From the early trauma of losing his father to battling addiction, Jason shares his transformative path to self-discovery & healing. We explore the profound insights & experiences that led him to embrace lif…

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

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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

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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

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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

23d 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

26d 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

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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

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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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Walter Mitty & His Makeshift Orchestra - Finding A New Album & A New Self, Buried In A Cave #55 53:19

27d ago53:19

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In this episode, Walter Mitty shares his journey as an artist, discussing the origins of his name, the evolution of his music & its transformative power to forge a journey of personal reinvention. A unique twist in this journey involves the symbolic act of burying an album in a cave, representing the mystery & depth of personal transformation. We a…

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

1M ago40:35

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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

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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

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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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The Waves Of Folk Punk, Friendship & Film w/ Jak of Shibby Pictures #54 51:13

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Jak & Pepe delve into the evolution of folk punk, discussing its origins, the impact of key bands like Days N Daze, & the role of music videos in the genre. They explore the various waves of folk punk, the importance of documenting the scene, & the deliberate approach some contemporary artists take in their music & performances. The discussion also…

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

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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

2M ago51:19

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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…

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Heather Sutherland, "Seaways and Gatekeepers: Trade and State in the Eastern Archipelagos of Southeast Asia, C.1600-c.1906" (NUS Press, 2021) 55:47

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The eastern archipelagos stretch from Mindanao and Sulu in the north to Bali in the southwest and New Guinea in the southeast. Many of their inhabitants are regarded as “people without history”, while colonial borders cut across shared underlying patterns. Yet many of these societies were linked to trans-oceanic trading systems for millennia. Indee…

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MC Homeless on Connecting Rap, Folk Punk & Dogs #53 56:17

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MC Homeless & Pepe explore how the early days of folk punk & DIY rap were intertwined. They discuss the impact of early connections, memorable performances, & the evolution of MC Homeless as a rapper. They reflect on the importance of community in the music scene, the challenges of documentary filmmaking, the excitement of returning to music after …

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Shayna M. Silverstein, "Fraught Balance: The Embodied Politics of Dabke Dance Music in Syria" (Wesleyan UP, 2024) 54:30

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A vivid and intricate study of dance music traditions that reveals the many contradictions of being Syrian in the 21st century Dabke, one of Syria's most beloved dance music traditions, is at the center of the country's war and the social tensions that preceded conflict. Drawing on almost two decades of ethnographic, archival, and digital research,…

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Maya J. Berry, "Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons" (Duke UP, 2025) 1:25:12

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In Defending Rumba in Havana: The Sacred and the Black Corporeal Undercommons (Duke University Press, 2025), anthropologist and dancer Maya J. Berry examines rumba as a way of knowing the embodied and spiritual dimensions of Black political imagination in post-Fidel Cuba. Historically a Black working-class popular dance, rumba, Berry contends, is a…

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Thiago P. Barbosa, "Racializing Caste: Anthropology Between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970)" (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) 43:04

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Racializing Caste: Anthropology Between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905-1970) (De Gruyter, 2025) analyzes how racial knowledge has circulated in transnational entanglements, particularly between Germany and India, into the research on human variation in India, racializing the understanding of caste and ethnicity. It focuses …

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Lieba Faier, "The Banality of Good: The UN's Global Fight Against Human Trafficking" (Duke UP, 2024) 55:44

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In The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member-state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts…

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Candace Lukasik, "Martyrs and Migrants: Coptic Christians and the Persecution Politics of US Empire" (NYU Press, 2025) 50:58

2M ago50:58

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Coptic Orthodox Christians comprise the largest Christian community in the Middle East and are among the oldest Christian communities in the world. While once the objects of American missionary efforts, in recent years Copts have been in the spotlight for their Christianity. A spate of ISIS-related bombings and attacks have garnered worldwide atten…

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Spiritual Bypassing, Non-Dualism Explained, and the 4th State of Consciousness with Jacob Kyle 42:22

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In this episode, Jacob Kyle offers a curated selection of teachings from Sādhana School, Embodied Philosophy’s year-long curriculum of contemplative study and practice. The episode weaves together reflections on states of consciousness, metaphysics, emotional transformation, and the pitfalls of spiritual bypassing, drawing deeply from Indian philos…

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Yasmin Moll, "The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2025) 59:07

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The New Preachers of Egypt—so named because of their novel preaching styles, which incorporate everything from melodrama to music to self-help—came to prominence on the world's first Islamic television channel on the cusp of the Arab Spring uprisings. They promoted an innovative and inclusive Islamic piety that millions of young middle-class viewer…

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Wired For Chaos: Harley Flanagan of Cro-Mags Unpacks His Story #52 1:12:16

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summary In one of my favorite conversations to date, Harley Flanagan (founder of the Cro-Mags) explores his life story & the complexities of his experiences. Expect to hear about his family legacy, a chaotic childhood, the realities of growing up in a unique environment &, difficult topics such as abuse &, grief. He discusses the impact of punk roc…

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Kevin B. Anderson, "The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism" (Verso, 2025) 1:00:22

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Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx's Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism (Verso, 2025) encourages to look again at the intellectual and political work of a figure some may assume has been exhausted: Karl Marx. Following on from his earlier landmark study Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Socie…

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Tamar R. Shirinian, "Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia" (Duke UP, 2024) 1:06:40

3M ago1:06:40

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Tamar Shirinian is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her new book, Survival of a Perverse Nation: Morality and Queer Possibility in Armenia (Duke UP, 2024), studies the relationships between gender, sexuality, nationalism, political-economy, and social reproduction and how these are experienced,…

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Robert Garland, "What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife" (Princeton UP, 2025) 49:49

3M ago49:49

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A lively story of death, What to Expect When You're Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife (Princeton University Press, 2025) by Dr. Robert Garland explores the fascinating death-related beliefs and practices of a wide range of ancient cultures and traditions—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Hindu, Jewish, Zoroastrian, Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Earl…

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Andrew Smith, "First People: The Lost History of the Khoisan" (Jonathan Ball, 2022) 1:14:34

3M ago1:14:34

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First people communities are the early groups of hunter gatherers, herders, and the oldest human lineages of Africa, some migrating from as far as East Africa to settle across southern Africa, in countries like Namibia, Botswana and South Africa. In First People: The Lost History of the Khoisan, archaeologist Andrew Smith, who has excavated at some…

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Agustín Fuentes, "Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary" (Princeton UP, 2025) 45:11

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Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biology of sex, drawing on the latest science to explain why the binary view…

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Katarina Kušic, "Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia" (University of Michigan Press, 2025) 59:37

3M ago59:37

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Studies of statebuilding and peacebuilding have been criticized for their disregard of people living the consequences of intervention projects. Beyond International Intervention: Politics of Improvement in Serbia (University of Michigan Press, 2025) by Dr. Katarina Kušic takes on the task of engaging with spaces and peoples not usually present in I…

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Safe Journey w/ Mr. Michael Motorcycle #51 59:10

3M ago59:10

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Michael Schneeweis (Mr. Michael Motorcycle / Friends In Real Life) & Pepe explore the theme of safe journeys. Pepe shares a couple of stories as metaphors for life's challenges & Michael offers his thoughts in response. Ultimately, they emphasize the value of relationships, support systems & tools in overcoming obstacles & finding safety in an unpr…

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Lina Pinto-García, "Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia" (U Chicago Press, 2025) 1:00:34

3M ago1:00:34

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In Maraña: War and Disease in the Jungles of Colombia (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Lina Pinto-García delves into the relationship between war and disease, focusing on Colombian armed conflict and the skin disease known as cutaneous leishmaniasis. Leishmaniasis is transmitted through the bite of female sandflies. The most common manifestatio…

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Maya Mayblin "Vote of Faith: Democracy, Desire, and the Turbulent Lives of Priest Politicians" (Fordham UP, 2024) 1:19:46

3M ago1:19:46

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A richly cinematic and compelling look at priest-politicians in Brazil and their religious and secular entanglements, Vote of Faith: Democracy, Desire, and the Turbulent Lives of Priest Politicians (Fordham UP, 2024) explores the complex intersection of democracy, patriarchy, and religiosity in Brazil. For over a hundred years, Catholic priests hav…