The second episode of our two-part mini-series, showcases a roundtable discussion held at the 2023 American Anthropological Association’s Annual meeting in Toronto. In this episode, anthropology scholars gather to celebrate the work of Harsha Walia and share reflections on how her scholarship has influenced their own research, writing and activism.…

A discussion featuring Harsha Walia, alongside community organizers and migrant workers representing Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC), took place at the American Anthropological Association's 2023 Annual Meeting in Toronto. This episode is the first part of a two-part mini-series highlighting the impact and contributions of Harsha Walia’s…

In this episode, Professor Nick Seaver, Professor Veronica Barassi, and Alex Moltzau discuss the intersection of anthropology and algorithms. What exactly can anthropology bring to the table in understanding them? How can we use anthropological concepts and methods to make sense of algorithms? And how does this research translate into practice?For …

In this episode, fellow podcasters, Frankie Younger and Dr. Anthony Jerry share how they combined podcasting with community engagement to create podcasts as archival spaces for the voices of historically marginalized communities.By Society for Cultural Anthropology

In our latest episode in this series What Concepts Do we welcome guest producer Nazlı Özkan, who leads us through a discussion of New Media. How has newness been produced as a feature of media in different political and historical contexts, and how can anthropological approaches help us understand how technological novelty becomes a part of statecr…

In this episode, Dr. Willi Lempert discusses anthropology of outer space, focusing on historical and ongoing forms of colonialism on and off of Earth, as well as indigenous futurisms and alternative imaginations of outer space. Our interview with Dr. Lempert was conducted in May 2023.For more, visit https://culanth.org/fieldsights/astro-colonialism…

AnthroBites: Disability with Dr. Arseli Dokumaci.AnthroBites is a series from the AnthroPod team, designed to make anthropology more digestible. Each episode tackles a key concept, text, or theme, and breaks it down into manageable, bite-sized chunks. In this episode, Dr. Arseli Dokumaci discusses disability, ethnography, and her recent book Activi…

Anthropology can be presented in various forms - what does it mean to share anthropology through podcasts? In the latest episode in the What Does Anthropology Sound Like series, we explore anthropological podcasts as method and as output. This episode features Dr. María Eugenia Ulfe Young (from the Nuestras Historias desde Cuninico podcast), PhD Ca…

In this AnthroPod episode, we provide a retrospective on the Virtual Otherwise conference from the perspective of the local node in Agria, Greece. Touching on matters of accessibility, engagement, and multimodality, we ask: Whither anthropology conferencing?By Society for Cultural Anthropology

This episode is devoted to thinking through the specificity of the United States as a place in which to conduct fieldwork.For show notes, please visit : https://culanth.org/fieldsights/contributed-content/anthropodBy Society for Cultural Anthropology

In this episode, Professors Sophie Bjork-James, Carolyn Sufrin, and Elise Andaya share what the anthropology of abortion looks like in their fieldsites and how those sites will change in a post-Roe world, and we break down this topic with the help of other scholars of reproduction.For show notes, please visit https://culanth.org/fieldsights/anthrop…

In part 2 of our series on sound and borders, cultural geographer Tom Western talks with Nick Smith about the work of the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum (SGYF) in Athens, Greece. Featuring sound clips created by the SGYF team, the discussion unpacks the concept of active citizenship and the ways that sound can challenge the static character of border…

This is the second episode in the series "What Concepts Do." In this episode, Contributing Editor Sharon Jacobs unpacks the concept of solidarity, alongside anthropologists Darryl Li, Amahl Bishara, Lesley Gill, and Dimitrios Theodossopoulos. What is solidarity, and who can practice it? Is solidarity something we do within communities, or beside al…

In this episode, anthropologist and artist Alex Chavez talks about performance, migration and nationalism in the United States. For show-notes, please visit https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-sound-of-borders-a-conversation-with-alex-chavezBy Society for Cultural Anthropology

Cassandra Hartblay, Cristiana Giordano, and Greg Pierotti discuss performance as ethnographic medium in the third installment of What Does Anthropology Sound Like, an Anthropod Series. For transcriptions, visual content, and other resources related to this episode of Anthropod, please visit: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/what-does-anthropology-so…

In this episode, Contributing Editors Joyce Rivera-González and Michelle Hak Hepburn unpack the concept of resilience, alongside anthropologists Roberto Barrios, Elizabeth F.S. Roberts, Cynthia Wesley-Esquimaux, Andrew Wooyoung Kim, and Jason Cons. Where did the concept of resilience originate from, and how is it so widespread? What are the benefit…

Professor Kamari Clarke reflects on her ethnographic work in Africa, her thinking on the legacies of colonialism in the discipline of Anthropology, and her recent work with the Radical Humanism Initiative.For the transcription and show-notes of this episode, please visit: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/radical-humanism-and-decolonization-an-interv…

The Ottoman archives contain just over a hundred photographs that look like old family portraits, but they were created for an entirely different purpose. They document the renunciation of Ottoman nationality, "terk-i tabiiyet," by Armenian emigrants bound for the US and elsewhere. As our guest Zeynep Devrim Gürsel explains, the photographs were "a…

Katherine Verdery reflects on working through her Securitate file and ethnographers' positionalities, her research in Eastern Europe prior to the fall of communism, and what anthropology offers at moments when the episteme shifts.By Society for Cultural Anthropology

Writing ethnographic poetry with Darcy Alexandra and Ather Zia. This is the second installment in the What Does Anthropology Sound Like series, in which we ask anthropologists to share their work and insights with us on the different forms their anthropological practice takes. In this episode, the theme is poetry.…

The "Anthropology and/of Mental Health" series is a two-part exploration of anthropologists' experiences with mental health. In this episode, Anar expands the conversation about mental health in anthropology through conversations and contributions about attention, grief, and unexpected changes to our plans for fieldwork and research. For more infor…

Hunleth and Yount-André discuss Hunleth's research on children's caregiving amid Zambia's tuberculosis (TB) outbreak and trace parallels with today's COVID19 pandemic. They look at the role of proximity, recognizing the different ways children offer care, how to discuss disease with children and problematize the idea of disclosure, and the moral va…

Jonathan Rosa discusses raciolinguistic ideologies, a framework developed by Rosa and Professor Nelson Flores (University of Pennsylvania) to critique the racialization of various speaking subjects and their linguistic practices. The interview begins with a focus on this concept and related themes in Rosa’s book, then turns to a consideration of br…

Sophie Chao and Bianca Williams discuss activism, organizing, and anthropology in the first installment of a new Anthropod series: What Does Anthropology Sound Like.By Society for Cultural Anthropology

In this episode, AnthroPod Contributing Editor Anar Parikh talks to Prof. Beatriz-Reyes Foster and Prof. Rebecca Lester about their blog series "Trauma and Resilience in Ethnographic Fieldwork" on Anthrodendum. For more, visit https://culanth.org/fieldsights/contributed-content/anthropodBy Society for Cultural Anthropology

Ruth Behar speaks with Kristen Ghodsee about how anthropologists can be public intellectuals: They discuss how can anthropologists maintain credibility as scholars within the academy while also speaking to broader audiences; the necessity of patience and thinking of a career over the long duree; the productive spaces and possibilities within the di…

Guests Camilla Ida Ravnbøl and Marie Kolling explore the impact that digitalizing economies have on communities that are poor and highly cash dependent. The episode features Ravnbøl's research with Roma migrants at the Roskilde Festival, a music festival in Denmark that went cashless in 2017 but has developed accommodations for cash-dependent Roma …

Mark Schuller on anthropological work in, with, and on NGOs.By Society for Cultural Anthropology

Guests Namita Dharia and Tulasi Srinivas discuss the possibilities for an anthropology of wonder. Their conversation builds out from Srinivas’s latest book, "The Cow in the Elevator: An Anthropology of Wonder," and explores questions of positionality in the field, canonical inheritances, and experiments with ethnographic writing. Sonic landscapes f…

I am exhausted, emotionally and otherwise... hey all, Dan here... just posted this last episode with calls from listeners, and a song at the end with a story that wraps into ViW... So, this is it. Thank you all. Check out virtueinthewasteland.com for where you can find us, now that the curtain has descended on this episode of our life. Make sure yo…

In "When Fieldwork Breaks Your Heart," guest producer Aisha Sultan considers the question: what do you do when fieldwork threatens to break your heart? While graduate seminars and methodological reflections within anthropology often focus on the possibilities ethnography affords as the cornerstone of the discipline, Sultan here contends with its bl…

So, if the title of the show doesn't give it away.... surprise! After 300+ weeks, 3 continents, dozens of states and hours of conversation, we are hanging up the microphones and turning the lights out on the ViW project. But, not without a bang. This is the second to last- we ask that you call the hotline at 844-393-0012 and leave a 60-second messa…

Giving shows their titles is a funny thing. I’ve probably done 250 or so of them, and I rarely think much about it. Also, when I myself look for podcasts, all I care about is the title of the episode. The very thing I wasn’t paying attention to! Preposition! To which, I had not paid my attention. My attention bill was late…. you get it. So this tit…

I used to think it was really cool when people broke the 4th wall. You know, like, in Fight Club or the original Pink Panther when something happened to remind you that you were indeed watching a film reel. There is nothing as clever here, but a little twist which might make you take notice. Usually we banter for a few minutes, talk around the subj…

“(W)Rap on: Gender/Sexuality” is the third episode of the (W)Rap On series at AnthroPod, which brings anthropologists into conversation with artists, activists, and scholars from other disciplines and perspectives. The series is loosely inspired by James Baldwin and Margaret Mead’s 1970 conversation Rap on Race, and was conceived by Hilary Leathem …

Sometimes our shows start with really simple ideas. For instance, one of us might think of something that would be relevant to the podcast and send the article, idea, etc… via text. We do a little reading, figure out what the “bigger story” at play is, and… voila. An hour and a half later, plus editing time (we sometimes do that!) and we’ve got ano…

Time to clear out the old phone machine and respond to some of the more common, or curious questions we received. The first half hour of the show has us talking about 2019, Dan's favorite movies of the year, and reading a very revealing and honest email. the next hour is all your calls- a few notes: Dan says "American" when talking about a piece of…

Happy New Year! On today’s show we talk about the biggest and best of 2018 and what we might look forward to in 2019. It’s an episode with the two guys doing what they love most, chatting with each other about challenges in culture and the church. We decided to look at the “biggest” and “best” stories of 2018, with Jeff taking the “biggest” stories…

Anthropologist Jason De León and journalist Maria Hinojosa discuss migration, U.S. border militarization, and teaching and writing in political times. Journalist Julio Ricardo Varela moderates the conversation. This episode is part of the (W)rap On: Series, inspired by the original 1970 conversation between writer James Baldwin and anthropologist M…

Little known fact: the original name of Virtue in the Wasteland was “Jeff and Dan’s Vanity Project to Explore Their Hobbies” but we decided to go a little more broad and talk about society and religion and stuff… Maybe that’s not exactly how it played out, but there is a funny bit of guilt we feel whenever we dive head first into a topic that is se…

Andrew Syed (formerly Andrew Paquin) visited Jeff recently, during which time Dan was in Dallas related to the new 1517 Academy (check it out). Andrew was Jeff's colleague at a previous institution, until politics and conceptions of Christian political beliefs resulted in a controversy. Andrew and Jeff explore this backstory, which several news out…

This roundtable discussion explores the recently published Reading List for a Progressive Environmental Anthropology. The crowdsourced reading list is a project organized by Bridget Guarasci (Franklin and Marshall College), Amelia Moore (University of Rhode Island), and Sarah Vaughn (University of California, Berkeley). Crafting this reading list a…

Christmas movies and carols and traditions and….. we could go on and on. And in fact, we have gone “on and on” for over 5 years now doing a special Christmas show. On today’s show the guys are back together again in the comfy confines of the ViW Irvine studios and it felt like old times. The thesis of today’s show is that the strange “thrill of hop…

I don’t have any naked baby photos. Frankly, I don’t have any baby photos. I blame either a house fire or parental indifference. Nonetheless, I wonder if I might not start subtitling my talks as “naked baby photos” not because there are, but because when I overshare, that’s the closest thing I can relate to how I’ll probably make you feel when I sh…

From Here We Still Stand 2018: This is a talk with Jeff blowing up any ideas of works righteousness and refuses to settle with a message that’s just another doctrine to keep straight or moral code to live up to. Maybe you’re a bear, maybe you’re a butterfly, listen to this talk and it will make sense.…

David Zahl leads Mockingbird Ministries and has a forthcoming book about secular religion and self-righteousness in America. We talk virtue signaling, popular music, Bob Dylan's Christian era, and Charlottesville, VA. Pre-order Dave's book ! virtueinthewasteland.com

So, this show was a long time coming. Since earlier in this year we had been playing phone and email tag with student filmmaker Jessica van der Wyngaard regarding her new documentary project that chronicles the lives of those influenced by Josh Harris, for good or ill. The first interveiw is a conversation with the filkmmaker- an Autralian, living …

On this weeks episode we welcome back an old guest of the show: Emily Joy. Since last being on our show, Emily Joy has contributed to Jeff's book Sexy as well as co-founded the #churchtoo movement and has become something of a lightning rod for issues of abuse in the church. We interviewed Emily Joy while travelling through Nashville, and when she …

On this weeks’ episode we take you back to the 2nd Annual Here We Still Stand conference in beautiful, if slightly milquetoast, San Diego (just kidding San Diego, we love you, as we have recorded at least once a year from your confines only to eventually praise your street food, socio-economic diversity and weather). Think of it as part of the road…

Eric Dorman discusses his personal transition from progressivism to classic conservatism despite being a never Trumper, and the pragmatic nature of Tennessee politics. He works for a nonprofit news source that serves the homeless in Nashville, is a frequent contributor to Mockingbird, and runs his own site called Kept Republic. virtueinthewasteland…