Best Bristol University Press Podcasts (2025)

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From faultlines to frontlines: Neoliberalism vs. people-powered movements 56:58

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1d ago56:58

56:58

In many ways neoliberalism is an extreme ideology, much like fascism and communism, but we very rarely recognise it as such. It hides behind the free-market, deregulation and privatisation, but in reality it’s quietly increasing isolation, inequality, poverty, disease and environmental threat. In this episode, Richard Kemp speaks with Peter Beresfo…

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

5d 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

5d 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

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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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K. Ian Shin, "Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America's Pacific Century" (Stanford UP, 2025) 1:07:42

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This episode, which is co-hosted with Delaney Chieyen Holton, features Dr. K. Ian Shin discussing his recently published book, Imperial Stewards: Chinese Art and the Making of America’s Pacific Century (Standford UP, 2025). Imperial Stewards argues that, beyond aesthetic taste and economics, geopolitics were critical to the United States’ transform…

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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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Erased Voices and Unspoken Heritage 41:01

14d 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

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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

21d 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

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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

26d 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

28d 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

30d 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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Yuki Kato, "Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City" (NYU Press, 2025) 1:07:12

1M 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

1M 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

1M 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

1M 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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Has Racism Really Changed? From Black Lives Matter to EDI Backlash and Beyond 41:56

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Despite claims that we now live in a post-racial society, race continues to disadvantage those from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds. In this episode, Richard Kemp speaks with Kalwant Bhopal, author of the second edition of ‘White Privilege: The myth of a post-racial society’, about why those from black and minority ethnic communities continue…

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

1M 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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Kelly A. Spring, "SPAM: A Global History" (Reaktion, 2025) 32:00

2M ago32:00

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The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a conflict that solidified SPAM’s place in global food culture. Created by Hormel Foods in 1937 to utilize surplus pork shoulder during the Great Depression, SPAM became an essential resource during the Second World War, and helped shape perceptions of American culture. SP…

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

2M 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

2M 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

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

2M ago1:24:08

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

2M ago1:06:47

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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

2M 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

2M ago51:29

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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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Safety net or patchwork quilt? Getting to grips with the welfare state 48:10

2M ago48:10

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The welfare state is often talked about as a universal safety net, a system designed to catch anyone who falls. But does that image really capture how different countries understand and organise welfare around the world? In this episode, George Miller talks to Professor Paul Spicker, author of What Is the Welfare State For?, about some of the histo…

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

2M ago54:30

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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

2M ago1:25:12

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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

2M ago43:04

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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

2M ago55:44

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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

3M 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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Yasmin Moll, "The Revolution Within: Islamic Media and the Struggle for a New Egypt" (Stanford UP, 2025) 59:07

3M ago59:07

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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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Is basic income the answer to our age of crisis? 39:08

3M ago39:08

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As basic income trials take place around the world, the idea can no longer be dismissed as purely utopian. But can it truly reshape economies and societies? In this episode, Richard Kemp talks with Howard Reed and Elliott Johnson, two of the co-authors of Basic Income: The Policy That Changes Everything, about the reality of basic income. They expl…

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

3M ago1:00:22

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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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Coll Thrush, "Wrecked: Unsettling Histories from the Graveyard of the Pacific" (University of Washington Press, 2025) 30:13

3M ago30:13

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The Northwest Coast of North America is a treacherous place. Unforgiving coastlines, powerful currents, unpredictable weather, and features such as the notorious Columbia River bar have resulted in more than two thousand shipwrecks, earning the coastal areas of Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island the moniker “Graveyard of the Pacific.” Beginni…

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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

3M ago45:11

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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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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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A humanist looks at the night sky 46:47

3M ago46:47

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What does a humanist feel when they gaze up at the stars? In this episode, George Miller speaks to philosopher Richard Norman, author of What Is Humanism For?, about wonder, meaning and morality in a world without God. Their conversation traces Norman’s intellectual journey, from religious upbringing to secular commitment, and explores how humanism…