The monthly podcast about linguistic discrimination. Learn about how we judge other people's speech as a sneaky way to be racist, sexist, classist, etc. Carrie and Megan teach you how to stop being an accidental jerk. Support this podcast at www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod
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Tibet Language Podcasts
Waking Up Closer to Tibet takes listeners on a riveting journey of unravelling Tibet, its rich history, culture, art, tradition, religion, and people. On this show, public speaker and translator Tenzin Chodon (@tenzin.chodon.24) interviews experts who know Tibet in their own unique ways every week. This is an HT Smartcast Original.
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A podcast to help you learn to talk Tibetan
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Interviews with Anthropologists about their New Books Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology
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Jürgen Schaflechner, "Hinglaj Devi: Identity, Change, and Solidification at a Hindu Temple in Pakistan" (Oxford UP, 2018)
1:26:58
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1:26:58About 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
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1:02:47As 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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Michael Rowe, "Researching Street-Level Bureaucracy: Bringing Out the Interpretive Dimensions" (Routledge, 2024)
40:09
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40:09Researching 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)
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1:04:05Orthodox 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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Send us a text We have a few things to say about Pinker. Part of the War on Science The Language Instinct Pinker on Race Realism Co-authored paper on overregularization The Open Letter to the LSA The article that Carrie was interviewed for, but not named, about the Open Letter Our episode on dogwhistling The Harper's Letter Guardian on his appearan…
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Gina Vale, "The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State" (Oxford UP, 2024)
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56:55The 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)
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42:26In 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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Laurian R. Bowles, "Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness, and Modernity in Accra" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)
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1:03:02Headstrong: 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
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1:39:40Today 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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Nidhi Mahajan, "Moorings: Voyages of Capital across the Indian Ocean" (U of California Press, 2025)
1:04:03
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1:04:03Moorings: 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
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1:07:48American 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
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51:10Encountering 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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Jovana Diković, "The Laissez-Faire Peasant: Post-Socialist Rural Development in Serbia" (UCL Press, 2025)
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55:05What 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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Darcie Deangelo et al., "Demilitarizing the Future" (Anthem Press, 2025)
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50:25Demilitarizing 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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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)
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58:30Can 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)
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58:49Landscapes 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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Maan Barua, "Plantation Worlds" (Duke UP, 2024)
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58:49
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58:49In 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
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58:04Big-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)
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50:01While 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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53:28Bettina 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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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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1:07:54The 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)
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1:02:03In 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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1:17:25On 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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Send us a text Carrie and Megan talk with Adam Aleksic about his new book, Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language. Bromism and ChatGPT Support the show Contact us: Threads us @vocalfriespod Bluesky us @vocalfriespod.bsky.social Email us at [email protected] Thanks for listening and keep calm and fry on…
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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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1:12:16From 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
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1:08:59“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
1:29:26
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1:29:26A 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)
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52:22In 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
1:22:35
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1:22:35The 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)
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1:07:12Gardens 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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Jess Reia, "Urban Music Governance: What Busking Can Teach Us about Data, Policy and Our Cities" (Intellect, 2025)
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34:40What 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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Shani Adia Evans, "We Belong Here: Gentrification, White Spacemaking, and a Black Sense of Place" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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32:37
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32:37Although 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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Magdalena Maria Turek, "Buddhist Hermits in Eastern Tibet: Saint-Making and Ascetic Performance" (Routledge, 2025)
1:19:13
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1:19:13Magdalena 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)
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40:35Ungendering 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)
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56:16In 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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1:11:53After 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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Send us a text Carrie and Megan talk with Megan C. Reynolds, Dwell magazine editor, about her book, Like: A History of the World's Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word. Putin and Russian Support the show Contact us: Threads us @vocalfriespod Bluesky us @vocalfriespod.bsky.social Email us at [email protected] Thanks for listening and keep calm …
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Laurie Denyer Willis, "Go with God: Political Exhaustion and Evangelical Possibility in Suburban Brazil" (U California Press, 2023)
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47:05Through 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
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51:19Decolonizing 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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Janet McIntosh, "Kill Talk: Language and Military Necropolitics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
1:24:08
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1:24:08Even 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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Siri Schwabe, "Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile" (Cornell UP, 2023)
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49:58Two 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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Myles Lennon, "Subjects of the Sun: Solar Energy in the Shadows of Racial Capitalism" (Duke UP, 2025)
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1:06:47In 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)
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1:09:00In 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)
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51:29Pakistani 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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55:47The 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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