episode 164: Anna M. Gade, “Muslim Environmentalisms: Religious and Social Foundations” (Columbia UP, 2019)
The relationship between Islam and the environment has a long and rich history across various Muslim societies...
episode 229: Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger, "Re-Engineering Humanity" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
Every day, new warnings emerge about artificial intelligence rebelling against us.,,
episode 61: Catherine Besteman, "Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine" (Duke UP, 2016)
Besteman writes about her ethnographic encounter in the 1980s with Somalis from the village of Banta who she then re-encounters in 2006 in the town of Lewiston,..
episode 683: Rachel Chrastil, "How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Chrastil explores the most personal of women’s decisions from the 1500s on...
episode 147: Wendy Bottero, "A Sense of Inequality" (Roman and Littlefield, 2020)
Bottero offers a detailed and challenging new approach to how we conceive of, how we study, and how we might challenge, social inequality...
episode 308: Filippo Marsili, "Heaven Is Empty: A Cross-Cultural Approach to 'Religion' and Empire in Ancient China" (SUNY Press, 2018)
Marsili offers a new comparative perspective on the role of the sacred in the formation of China’s early empires (221 BCE–9 CE)...
episode 55: Josh Reno, "Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness" (U California Press, 2019)
Seven decades of military spending during the cold war and war on terror have created a vast excess of military hardware – what happens to all of this military waste when it has served its purpose and what does it tell us about militarism in American culture?
episode 32: Kenneth R. Valpey, "Cow Care in Hindu Animal Ethics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019)
What does cow care in India have to offer modern Western discourse animal ethics?
episode 162: Narges Bajoghli, "Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic" (Stanford UP, 2019)
Bajoghli presents a riveting ethnography of pro-regime media networks in Iran, and sketches an intimate portrait of the actors, projects, and infrastructures invested in preserving and packaging the memory of the Islamic revolution 40 years later...
episode 57: Gediminas Lankauskas, "The Land of Weddings and Rain: Nation and Modernity in Post-Socialist Lithuania" (U Toronto Press, 2015)
Lankauskas explores Lithuanians’ pursuit of “modernity”, combining archival and ethnographic data...