This episode brings together historians and anthropologists to explore questions that are anthropological in scale: race, racism, whiteness, white supremacy, and white nationalist movements in North America and Europe. Kathleen Belew is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago, whose book, Bring the War Home, explores the recent history of white nationalist movements and organising in the years between the Vietnam War and the Oklahoma City bombing.  Alexandra Minna Stern is a Professor of History, American Culture and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, whose work has investigated the intersections of eugenics, racism, and gender in American politics. Her most recent book is Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate. Britt Halvorson is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Colby College whose most recent work, along with our fourth guest, has turned to investigate the ways in which whiteness and white supremacy are embedded in narratives of Mid-Western identity and place-making. Their forthcoming book is provisionally titled Real Americans: A Global History of the Midwest and White Supremacy. And Joshua Reno is a Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University, and the co-author, with Britt, of Real Americans.

Episode #41: Kathleen Belew, Britt Halvorson, Joshua Reno, and Alexandra Minna Stern

We are delighted to bring you a conversation between Matt, Tim, and Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought at The New School, Hugh Raffles. Raffles is the author of three books. The first of which, In Amazonia: A Natural History, is an ethnography about how rivers and humans co-constitute one another in the east Amazon of Brazil. Raffles’ second book, Insectopedia, is a collection of tales about humans and insects that takes us from the discovery of language among bees to artistic representations of contaminated butterfly wings in Chernobyl. His most recent book, The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time, is a bracing tale of time, memory, and loss, written through stories of stone. Across all three books Raffles has developed a deeply philosophical, historical, and poetic way of writing stories anthropologically that remain open to readers beyond the academy. What Raffles does with these subjects, in researching and writing about them, is somewhat alchemical, spinning them into meditations on humanity that are searing, deep, and evocative, like art; his fascination on the page is contagious. We hope you enjoy this conversation with Hugh Raffles, on his career and process, what he is learning from newer generations of anthropologists, crafting an authorly voice, and supporting others to find and craft theirs.

https://www.newschool.edu/lang/faculty/hugh-raffles/

Works mentioned
Hartman, S 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. WWNorton Press, New York. 
Stepanova, M 2021. In Memory of Memory. Fitzcarraldo Editions, London, England. 

Show Credits
This episode was produced by Matt Barlow and Timothy Neale, and edited by Matt Barlow, Timothy Neale, and Cameo Dalley. Conversations in Anthropology is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society and made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association.

Episode #42: Hugh Raffles

In this episode, Cameo speaks with Imelda Miller, of the Queensland Museum, and Olivia Robinson, of the State Library of Queensland. With over two decades of curatorial work and collaboration, they not only share their insights about collection and exhibition, but — as an Australian South Sea Islander and Bidjara woman, respectively — they share their insights about reimagining curation itself in a way that engages, empowers, and gives voice and agency to their communities.

Episode #43: Imelda Miller and Olivia Robinson

Cameo Dalley talks to Fred Myers (Silver Professor at New York University) and Jason Gibson (Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Fellow at Deakin University), both of whom work on Aboriginal Australian ceremony and material culture. The conversation roams over reflections on happenstance in their careers, the making of and reception of their work, and the evolving role of the anthropologist and anthropological knowledge in Indigenous communities. 

https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/jason-gibson
https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/fred-myers.html


Works Mentioned

Gibson, Jason M (2020) Ceremony Men Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection, SUNY Press, Albany, N.Y.

Myers, Fred (1986) Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines Smithsonian Institution Press, Wash., D.C. (reprinted in paperback by University of California Press, 1991) 

Myers, Fred (2002) Painting Culture: The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Myers, Fred (2019) The Difference that Identity Makes: Indigenous Cultural Capital in Australian Cultural Fields.  Canberra:  Aboriginal Studies Press.

Remembering Yayayi (film) Directors, Pip Deveson, Fred Myers, Ian Dunlop.


Show Credits

This episode was produced by Cameo Dalley on the lands of the Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, and it was edited by David Boarder Giles and Mythily Meher.

Episode #44: Fred Myers and Jason Gibson

In this episode, Tim sits down with Associate Professor Monica Minnegal to chat to Dr. Will Smith, an environmental anthropologist and research fellow at Deakin University. Will’s book, ‘Mountains of Blame: Climate and Culpability in the Philippine Uplands’ recently published with University of Washington Press, explores the political ecologies of forests in relation to the experiences and effects of climate change on the island of Pala’wan, in the Philippines. 

This conversation tackles some thorny questions around Indigenous understandings of changing climates, the refusal by communities to be categorized by governments as vulnerable victims or resilient saviours, and more-than-human relations marked by fear and violence, rather than reciprocity, flourishing, or love. As Will states, the forests are full of malevolent spirits, and he has been bitten by a lot of stuff in the forests of Pala’wan.
Enjoy this great conversation between Will Smith, Monica Minnegal, and Tim Neale. 

Show Credits
Lead Production: Tim Neale
Editing: Mythily Meher, Tim Neale, and Matt Barlow.

This episode was recorded by Tim Neale on the lands of Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Check us out on twitter @ anthroconvo.

Episode #45: Will Smith and Monica Minnegal

This month we bring to you a wonderful conversation between Matt and Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Western Sydney University, Dr. Malini Sur. 

Malini is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in India, Bangladesh and Australia on the themes of agrarian borderlands, cities and the environment. This conversation orbits around Malini's recently book 'Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India-Bangladesh Border' (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), which recasts established notions of citizenship and mobility along the violent--yet generative--borderlands between India and Bangladesh. Equal parts ecology, infrastructure, surveillance, and bureaucracy, this conversation will resonate for many well beyond the eastern Himalaya. 

Show Credits
Lead Production: Matt Barlow
Editing: Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow

This conversation was recorded on the unceded lands of Kaurna and Dharag First Nations People. 

Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo

Episode #46: Malini Sur

For this episode, Cameo and Tim caught up with Professor Jessica Cattelino of the University of California Los Angeles. Jessica is a sociocultural anthropologist who has worked extensively with Seminole people of Florida in the United States. Her first book High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Duke, 2008), explores sovereignty and the politicisation of gaming, while her soon to be released second book, follows water in the Florida Everglades. Both works develop critical approaches to recognition politics, settler colonialism and Indigeneity, with relevance across settler states. The conversation also covers Jessica’s approach to service and governance within the academy, and the ways in which it reproduces societal structures and inequities. 

Interested in learning more? Jessica recommends Melanie Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy’s introduction to their special issue of Decolonization: Indigeneity Education & Society, “Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water”; Teresa Montoya’s work on permeability; Courtney Lewis’s book, Sovereign Entrepreneurs: Cherokee Small-Business Owners and the Making of Economic Sovereignty; and Carla Scaramelli’s book, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey.

Show Credits
Lead Production: Cameo Dalley
Editing: Cameo Dalley and Tim Neale 

This conversation was recorded by Tim Neale on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. 

Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo and our website anthroconvo.com

Episode #47: Jessica Cattelino

We return with a conversation recorded, this past summer, between Ceridwen Dovey and our own Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles. Dovey is a Sydney-based writer of fiction, creative non-fiction, and in-depth essays and profiles, as well as a filmmaker. Born in South Africa, she grew up between South Africa and Australia, studied as an undergraduate at Harvard University and as a postgraduate in anthropology at New York University. But, as we learn in this episode, Dovey did not become an anthropologist, and instead moved to a different but related set of analytical and representational problems as a fiction writer. Is fiction ethnographic? How do the commitments of creative non-fiction and anthropology differ? And, what does the moon think about all this? Tune in to find out.

Interested in learning more? Check out https://www.ceridwendovey.com/ 

Show Credits
Lead Production: Timothy Neale
Deputy Production: David Boarder Giles and Mythily Meher
Editing: Timothy Neale and Mythily Meher

This conversation was produced by Timothy Neale on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

Check us out on Twitter @ anthroconvo and our website anthroconvo.com

Episode #48: Ceridwen Dovey

In this episode, Mythily talks to Anne Galloway and Laura McLauchlan. Anne is a former academic and current farm witch who, in both roles, has spent a weird amount of time getting to know sheep. Laura is a multispecies anthropologist at the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW and lectures with the UNSW Environment and Society group. Anne and Laura are also, it must be said, dear friends. As they speak of friendship, policy, care, death, and killing, anthropology emerges as a way into practices and relations that could maybe (we hope) inform a ‘better world’. Anne and Laura are both deeply invested—through their entanglements with sheep and farmers (Anne), hedgehogs and ecological conservation workers (Laura)—in understanding what sophisticated practices of love, kindness and friendship look like. So we talk through the sticky and unruly nature of lived ethics; of what it means to dislike with respect. Or, to kill with love. And also, of choosing to walk away from academia.

This episode was produced by Mythily Meher, with editing and production support from Tim Neale and Matt Barlow. Mythily lives and works in Aotearoa New Zealand, and we recognise Māori in Aotearoa as tangata whenua (people born of the whenua [land/placenta]), whose right to sovereignty here is inalienable.

Conversations in Anthropology is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and with support from the Australian Anthropological Society.

Works mentioned:
‘Lively Collaborations: Feminist Reading Group Erotics for Liveable Futures’ by Laura McLauchlan (in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy)

‘The Mushroom at the End of the World’ by Anna Tsing

‘Power in the Helping Professions’ by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig

Also, more generally, the expansive works of Deb Bird Rose, and Maria La Puig Bellacasa

Episode #49:  Anne Galloway and Laura McLauchlan

Where do things go when they are lost, discarded, or forgotten? What social afterlives do they lead? And perhaps more importantly, whose lives are constituted among the detritus? In the first Anthropology@Deakin podcast, Tim Neale (Deakin) and guest Sabra Thorner (Deakin) discuss the anthropology of waste, food sharing, the Food Not Bombs movement, capitalism and much more with David Boarder Giles (Deakin). David is a Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University and you can kind out more about his work at https://dhboardergiles.wordpress.com/about/

Notes: the Anthropology@Deakin podcast is produced by David Boarder Giles and Tim Neale. Music supplied by Bradley Fafejta and Brand New Math.

Episode #1: David Boarder Giles

What can anthropology bring to the study of public policy? What is ‘audit culture’ and how does this term help us to understand changes occurring in Western societies? In the third Anthropology@Deakin podcast, Tim Neale (Deakin), David Boarder Giles (Deakin) and guest Jill Blackmore (Deakin) discuss the rise of neoliberalism in the contemporary university with Cris Shore (University of Auckland). Cris's main research interests lie in the interface between anthropology and politics, particularly the anthropology of policy and the ethnography of organisation. His most recent book, co-edited with Susan Wright, is Death of the Public University? Uncertain Futures for Universities in the Knowledge Economy (Berghahn Press, 2017).

Notes: the Anthropology@Deakin podcast is produced by David Boarder Giles and Tim Neale. Music supplied by Bradley Fafejta and Brand New Math.

Episode #3: Cris Shore

What does attention to light reveal about the workings of power? What can anthropologists learn from cultural geography? In the fifth Anthropology@Deakin podcast, David Giles (Deakin University) and guest Melinda Hinkson (Deakin University) discuss illumination and space with Tim Edensor (RMIT/Manchester Metropolitan University). Tim is the author of Tourists at the Taj, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life, and Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality, and From Light to Dark: Daylight, Illumination and Gloom, as well as the editor of Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities and Bodies. He has written extensively on national identity, tourism, ruins and urban materiality, mobilities and landscapes of illumination and darkness.

Episode #5: Tim Edensor

In this seventh episode of the Anthropology@Deakin podcast, David Giles and Timothy Neale are joined by Lara Fullenweider to discuss belonging, pastoralism and the intercultural with Cameo Dalley (University of Melbourne). Cameo is the McArthur Postdoctoral Fellow in anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Her current research project has investigated the multiple realms in which kardiya and Ngarinyin Aboriginal belonging is manifest in the Kimberley region. She has published on topics of identity, indigeneity and the intercultural and her most recent publication examines education-driven mobility for Indigenous youth.

Episode #7: Cameo Dalley

Episode 10! Once again, one of the pod-hosts is off on their own – this time David Giles presents a conversation he recorded with Hugh Gusterson about a wide range of topics including public anthropology, the ethics of activist-inspired fieldwork, secrets, and academic precarity. Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. Previously, he taught at MIT's program on Science, Technology, and Society, and at George Mason's Cultural Studies program. His expertise is in nuclear culture, international security, and the anthropology of science. He has written two books on the culture of nuclear weapons scientists and antinuclear activists: Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1996) and People of the Bomb: Portraits of America's Nuclear Complex (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). Gusterson also co-edited Why America's Top Pundits Are Wrong (University of California Press, 2005) and its sequel, The Insecure American (University of California Press, 2009). He is currently writing a book on the polygraph.

Some further reading:
Gusterson H. (1998) Nuclear rites: A weapons laboratory at the end of the Cold War: University of California Press.
Gusterson H. (2007) Anthropology and militarism. Annual Review of Anthropology 36: 155-175.
Gusterson H. (2017) Homework: Toward a critical ethnography of the university AES presidential address, 2017. American Ethnologist 44: 435-450.

Episode #10: Hugh Gusterson

In Episode 13, we hand over the microphones to Mythily Meher, Hannah Gould, Martha Macintyre and Tanya King for a special roundtable on the place of the #metoo movement in the work-lives of anthropologists. Mythily and Hannah are part of the #metooanthro campaign, advocating for a safer, more just, discipline. They use this conversation with feminist anthropologists of different generations to consider how the #metoo movement against sexual assault and harassment might affect, or even alter, the cultures and institutions surrounding anthropology, and to imagine the possible futures that may come of this. Mythily Meher is an anthropologist and sessional academic, currently lecturing in Gender and Culture Studies at Sydney University. She tweets at @tythily. Hannah Gould is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. Get in touch at hannahgould.com and twitter @hrhgould. Martha Macintyre is an Associate Professor and Honorary Senior Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne and Adjunct Professor at The Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at The University of Queensland. Tanya King is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Deakin University. 

Follow (or join) the activities of the #metooanthro collective: www.metooanthro.org or @metooanthro (on twitter and instagram).

Conversations in Anthropology@Deakin is produced by Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles with support from the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University.

Episode #13: #MeTooAnthro with Mythily Meher, Hannah Gould, Martha McIntyre and Tanya King

In our 14th episode, we are lucky enough to get in a room with both Niko Besnier and Ghassan Hage. In this episode, our guests cover a raft of topics befitted of their wide interests, including discussions of ‘the global’, the political economy of sport, public anthropology, activism in academia and… knowing your enemies! Niko is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and, this year and last year Research Professor in the Department of Social Inquiry at La Trobe University here in Melbourne. He has an extraordinary list of achievements to mention, including that he is the author of books such as On the Edge of the Global: Modern Anxieties in a Pacific Island Nation and Gossip and the Everyday Production of Politics, has written prolifically on the topics of gender, sexuality and sport in the Pacific, and is editor-in-chief of the journal American Ethnologist. Ghassan is Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of four books, including White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society and, most recently, Is Racism an Environmental Threat?
 
Conversations in Anthropology@Deakin is produced by Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles with support from the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University.

http://pacific.socsci.uva.nl/besnier/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghassan_Hage

Episode #14: Niko Besnier and Ghassan Hage

We are firmly in our teens now, back in your feed with Episode 16. In this episode, David is accompanied in his hosting duties by Sam Balaton-Chrimes, Lecturer in Politics at Deakin University. Their guest is Akhil Gupta, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and also a visiting Professor of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Melbourne. This episode, like Akhil's work, explores questions of transnational capitalism, infrastructure, and corruption, primarily in India. Akhil’s work has become required reading across the discipline, interrogating anthropological theory from the margins, drawing on critiques of development, postcoloniality, globalization, and the state. Most recently, he has been investigating the phenomenon of the call centre and what it can tell us about the future of global capitalism. He has written and edited numerous books including Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Duke University Press, 1998), to most recently Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India (Duke University Press, 2012).

Episode #15: Akhil Gupta with Sam Balaton-Chrimes

What's a genetic dream? What are psychiatry's truths? We are back from a brief break with a conversation about all this and much more between David, Tim, Eben Kirksey (Deakin University) and our visiting guest Nikolas Rose. For those who do not know him, Nikolas is a Professor of Sociology and one of the founders of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College, London. Most broadly, his work explores what it means to be human, and the ways in which science and expertise have transformed the very possibilities of the human culturally, politically, and even biologically. He is the author of numerous influential books on power, governance and the self including 'Powers of Freedom: Reframing political thought' (Cambridge, 1999), 'The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century' (Princeton, 2009) and most recently 'Our Psychiatric Future' (Wiley, 2018).

Episode #17: Nikolas Rose

It's time for some reports from 'the field', thanks to a recent trip by Tim to the east coast of the USA. In this episode we have two conversations, the first with Rosalind Fredericks (NYU) and the second with Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins). 

Rosalind is Associate Professor of Geography and Development Studies at New York University. Her research and teaching interests are centered on development, urbanism, and political ecology in Africa. In this episode, she discusses her new book 'Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal,' published recently by Duke University Press, as well as new research in Dakar.

Anand Pandian, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of several books, including 'Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India' (Duke, 2009), an co-editor of several great collections. In this episode, he discusses his forthcoming book, titled 'A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times', as well as the emergent futures of anthropological writing and conferences.

Conversations in Anthropology@Deakin is produced by Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles, with production support from Lachy Mackenzie. The podcast is also supported by the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University and made in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association.

Episode #20: Rosalind Fredericks and Anand Pandian

On the road again! In our 24th episode, we bring you two conversations recorded by Tim at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) annual meeting, which was hosted at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. The first interview is with geographer Heather Dorries (University of Toronto) and sociologist Robert Henry (University of Calgary), two of the editors of the forthcoming collection 'Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie West'. The second interview is with anthropologist William Lempert (Bowdoin College), an ethnographer and filmmaker, and editor of the 2018 special issue of Cultural Anthropology on 'Indigenous Media Futures'. How to summarise all this? It's impossible! Colonialism and land planning, the erasure of urban Indigenous life, the search for extraterrestrial life, and so much more. Our thanks to the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association for support for this episode.

Episode #24: NAISA 2019 with Heather Dorries, Robert Henry and Willi Lempert

A late festive treat? An early new year surprise? Our new episode features a conversation with the renowned anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Across their illustrious career, Nancy has researched social suffering and structural violence in a variety of contexts, including Ireland, Brazil, South Africa and, internationally, through the global trade in kidneys and other organs. Most recently, she has written about the scandal of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. She is the author of 'Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland’ (1979), 'Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil’ (1989) and 'The Last Commodity: Post-Human Ethics, Global (In)Justice and the Traffic in Organs’ (2008), as well as numerous articles, edited collections, and other book chapters. She is also the co-founder of Organs Watch, a watchdog organisation that monitors organ trafficking. In this episode, we twist and turn through a number of topics, discussing Nancy’s childhood, solidarity and militant anthropology today, disagreement as intellectual practice, relating to the Pope and much much more.

This episode is hosted and produced by Timothy Neale and David Boarder Giles and features guest host Tanya King. This podcast is made with support from the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University and in partnership with the American Anthropological Association.

For more on Nancy Scheper-Hughes see: https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/nancy-scheper-hughes

Episode #27: Nancy Scheper-Hughes

We’ve got a roving mic on the loose. In this episode, that mic is in the hands of David Giles, as he roamed the halls of the 2019 joint meeting of the American Anthropological Association and Canadian Anthropology Society in Tkaronto/Toronto. There, David caught up with two bright minds of migration studies, namely Jason De León and Teresa Mares. What does an anthropological framework bring to the study of borders? How do you do an ethnography of borders? This episode covers some big contemporary questions. Jason is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at UCLA, and Director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a long-term study of clandestine border crossing on the Mexico-USA border. Teresa is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Vermont, and has conducted extensive ethnographic research on food access and food security among Latino/a in the United States.

Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at https://conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

Episode #29: Jason De León and Teresa Mares

We're changing up our schedule and format a little to bring you some mini-episodes of short and sharp conversations with anthropologists around the themes of crisis and the digital. The first conversation is with Adia Benton, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Adia is a cultural anthropologist with interests in global health, biomedicine, development and humanitarianism, and is the author of 'HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone' (University of Minnesota, 2015) and well as numerous articles. In the interview, Adia and Tim discuss the current COVID-19 pandemic, virality, relevance, and her article 'Ebola at a Distance: A Pathographic Account of Anthropology's Relevance' (Anthropological Quarterly, 90:2, 2017). Find more about Adia Benton at: https://ethnography911.org and https://twitter.com/ethnography911

Episode 31.1: Adia Benton

Number 2 in our series of mini-episodes featuring conversations with anthropologists about crisis and the digital. This episode, Timothy Neale speaks to Jonah Lipton, a post-doctoral researcher based at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa and the ESRC Centre for Public Authority and International Development at the London School of Economics. A specialist in the anthropology of West Africa, Lipton conducted fieldwork in Sierra Leone immediately before and during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and in this conversation he reflects on that work and how it is shaping his interpretation of the current COVID-19 pandemic. For more on Lipton's work visit: http://www.lse.ac.uk/africa/people/Researchers/JonahLipton or look him up on Twitter @Jonah_Lipton

--
Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

Episode 31.2: Jonah Lipton

Hello, anthro-enthusiasts! In this episode, we present a pre-COVID conversation that David Giles recorded with the esteemed anthropologist Anna Tsing, a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and director of the AURA: Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene at Aarhus University. Dr Tsing likely needs little introduction, as someone whose research and writing on globalisation and capitalism has travelled far outside of anthropology and academia. She is the author several books including 'In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place' (1993)and 'Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection' (2004), both based on fieldwork in South Kalimantan, Indonesia. More recently, she published an ethnography of the Matsutake mushroom and its entanglement in diverse human worlds and economies - 'The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins' (2015) - which won both the Gregory Bateson Prize and the Victor Turner Prize. In this conversation, David and Dr Tsing discuss her training in anthropology, working for things you believe in, telling terrible stories beautifully, and the possibilities of ethnography in the Anthropocene. 

--
Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

Episode 32: Anna Tsing

We at 'Conversations in Anthropology' hope you are all surviving and thriving as we bring you another episode, recorded by our very own David Boarder Giles during a (pre-pandemic) trip to Turtle Island (aka North America) and the American Anthropological Association annual meeting. In this episode, we hear from Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg and Risa Cromer, three anthropologists who have each made major contributions to our understandings of gender, reproduction and disability. Rapp and Ginsburg are both Professors of Anthropology at New York University, where Ginsburg is also the Director of the Graduate Program in Culture and Media. Cromer is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Purdue University. Each scholar has a fearsome biography to reckon with, and listeners may already be familiar with Rapp's book 'Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America' (1999) and Ginsburg's 'Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community' (1989). In this fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, our three guests discuss many topics including how, whether in life or academia, you often don't know what the universe has planned for you.

--
Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

Episode 33: Rayna Rapp, Faye Ginsburg and Risa Cromer

Algorithms and artificial intelligence are on the menu for our 36th adventure in anthropology! In this episode, we present two conversations with two great Science and Technology Studies scholars: Dr Nick Seaver and Dr Thao Phan. Dr Seaver, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, examines themes of taste and attention in his research, drawing on his ethnographic research with US-based developers of algorithmic music recommender systems. Dr Phan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University, where her research who focuses on gender, AI, and algorithmic cultures.
--

For more on our sparkling guests, see:
https://twitter.com/npseaver
Seaver, Nick. "What should an anthropology of algorithms do?." Cultural anthropology 33.3 (2018): 375-385.  https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/download/ca33.3.04/90

https://twitter.com/thao_pow
Phan, Thao. "Amazon Echo and the aesthetics of whiteness." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5.1 (2019): 1-38. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/download/29586/24800

--
Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

Episode #36: Nick Seaver and Thao Phan

Cruising towards the end of 2020, we are back with a new conversation between Matt, Tim and Radhika Govindrajan about relatedness, lives with other species, and the changing context for doing ethnography today. Dr Gonvindrajan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington whose research spans the fields of multispecies ethnography, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of religion, South Asian Studies, and political anthropology. Their outstanding first book 'Animal Intimacies' (University of Chicago Press, 2018) is an ethnography of relatedness in the Central Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in India, and the book has since been was awarded the 2017 American Institute of Indian Studies Edward Cameron Dimock Prize in the Indian Humanities and the Society for Cultural Anthropology's Gregory Bateson Prize in 2019.

--
Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

Episode #38: Radhika Govindrajan

Hello anthro-enthusiasts, we are back for 2021 with a conversation convened by Cameo Dalley on animals, industrialisation, eating and all the manifold issues that unfold at their intersections, featuring special guests Alex Blanchette and Catie Gressier. 

Dr Blanchette is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University and has published widely on the politics of industrial labor and life in a post-industrial United States. His books include 'Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm' (Duke University Press, 2020) and the collection 'How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet', edited with Sarah Besky(University of New Mexico Press, 2019). Dr Gressier, an ARC DECRA Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Western Australia, has written extensively about the anthropology of food, settler identities, and issues of health and illness, including in her books 'At Home in the Okavango: White Batswana Narratives of Emplacement and Belonging' (Berghahn Books, 2015) and 'Illness, Identity, and Taboo Among Australian Paleo Dieters' (Palgrave, 2017).
--
Conversations in Anthropology is a podcast about life, the universe, and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and supported by the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University. Find us at conversationsinanthropology.wordpress.com or on Twitter at @AnthroConvo

Episode #39: Alex Blanchette and Catie Gressier

Pop the kettle on and sit back for our first 'tea' themed episode! For this episode, Matt invited Michael Dunford, a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at ANU whose research explores labour, language, and tea in Myanmar, to join him in conversation with Sarah Besky and Mythri Jegathesan. 

Sarah Besky is a cultural anthropologist and Associate Professor in the International Labour and Labour Relations School at Cornell University. Her research uses ethnographic and historical methods to study the intersection of labor, environment, and capitalism in the Himalayas. Her work analyzes how materials and bodies take on value under changing political economic regimes and explores the diverse forms of labor that make and maintain that value.

Her first book, The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (University of California Press, 2014) explores how legacies of colonialism intersect with contemporary market reforms to reconfigure notions of the value of labor, of place, and of tea itself.  Her second book, Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (University of California Press, 2020) blends historical and ethnographic research on science, value, and the idea of quality in the tea industry to analyze efforts at economic reform in India.  Another book, How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019), a volume co-edited with Alex Blanchette, brings together contemporary theoretical conversations in posthumanism with classic and continually relevant questions about political economy, precarity, and the meanings of work.  

Sarah’s new research explores the intersections of agricultural extension and experimentation, colonial and postcolonial governance, and the everyday productive and reproductive work of farming in the Himalayan region of Kalimpong, West Bengal.

Mythri Jegathesan is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Santa Clara University. Her research focuses on gender, labor, minority politics, and development in the Global South, and has explored the social and economic experiences of Tamil women tea plantation residents and workers in Sri Lanka, where she has conducted field research since 2005. She is currently researching the first women's trade union in Sri Lanka, the dynamics of transnational organizing across formal and informal employment sectors, and the changing development practices of local NGOs in postwar Sri Lanka. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University and has received grants from the National Science Foundation, American Association for University Women, and American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies. Her first book 'Tea & Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Postwar Sri Lanka', published in 2019 by the University of Washington Press, was awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize by the Society for the Anthropology of Work.

Episode #40: Sarah Besky and Mythri Jegathesan

A podcast about life, the universe and anthropology produced by David Boarder Giles, Timothy Neale, Cameo Dalley, Mythily Meher and Matt Barlow. Each episode features an anthropologist or two in conversation, discussing anthropology and what it has to tell us in the twenty-first century. This podcast is made in partnership with the American Anthropological Association and with support from the Faculty of Arts & Education at Deakin University.

Popular tracks by Conversations in Anthropology