AnthroPod is produced by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. In each episode, we explore what anthropology teaches us about the world and people around us.
Iran has dominated the US news cycle throughout 2026 so far. The U.S. and Israeli war of aggression in Iran just passed its 100th day, having come on the heels of the Islamic Republic regime’s brutal repression of protests around the country in January. Among other things, these events have thrust a spotlight on the complex relationship between Iran and its diaspora, and the varied and contradictory perspectives diasporic Iranians hold when it comes to events inside Iran. In this episode, we speak with anthropologist Amy Malek about her book, Culture Beyond Country: Strategies of Inclusion in the Global Iranian Diaspora (NYU Press, 2025) and its resonances in our current moment.
Content warning: This episode contains discussion of sexual violence, sexual assault, imprisonment, and intimate partner violence. This episode is the second installment of our mini-series on love and anthropology. What happens when love and violence are not experienced as opposites but as deeply entangled? In dialogue with Dr. Luisa Schneider, whose work examines love, violence, and legal intervention in Sierra Leone, we explore how intimate relationships are negotiated under conditions of insecurity, inequality, and post-conflict rebuilding. Through the striking local metaphor of teeth and tongue jammed together, Dr. Schneider reveals how love operates as something frictional, relational, and irreducible to simple narratives, and what is at stake when legal systems attempt to govern it. Her research also reveals how laws designed to protect can, without local grounding, produce new forms of harm by criminalizing the relationships they claim to safeguard and silencing the voices they intend to amplify. We hope this conversation deepens the investigation of love within our discipline begun in our first episode, and illuminates the importance of grounded and contextual understandings of love and its entanglements.
This is the first of a three-part miniseries covering the 2025 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. The conference presentations we’ll share with you today revolve around the stories people tell themselves about themselves; the ways people come to connect with and understand history; how people carry and transmit cultural traditions; and the emotional performances that help people process and move forward. We’ll move from political activist spaces to sports performances, from diasporic family histories to more recent narratives around forced migration—guided along the way by music and sound recordings from some of this episode’s interlocutors.
This is the second episode of the two-part miniseries on linguistic anthropologists working with indigenous communities in Mexico. In this episode, Emiliana Cruz, a native Chatino speaker and scholar based at CIESAS, reflects on her research, her career, and the realities of Indigenous education in contemporary Mexico.
This episode is the first part of a two-part miniseries on linguistic anthropologists working with Indigenous communities in Mexico. In conversation with Mario Chávez Peón (CIESAS) and Carolyn O’Meara (UNAM), the episode introduces their research on Indigenous languages, their community-engaged fieldwork, and the activism that grows out of it, from developing writing systems alongside speakers to advocating for the rights and visibility of the communities they work with.
In this episode, we dive into the series of debates that have emerged around assisted suicide, both within and outside the boundaries of medico-legal institutions. Through a conversation with anthropologists Dr. Dwai Banerjee, Dr. Miki Chase, Dr. Sophia Jaworski, and Dr. Miranda Tuckett, we explore the ethical obligations that are raised around end of life care by the legalization of aid-in-dying and the practice of voluntary death.
This episode is about love. What does it mean to study love ethnographically and analytically? How might we speak of love, especially in today’s social and political climate? In dialogue with Dr Omar Kasmani, whose work explores migrant loves and intimacies in Berlin, we trace the hopes, heartbreaks, and potentialities that love can hold for field research and ethnographic writing. Bridging the subjective and the objective, the personal and the shared, the inward and the outward, love remains a concept as powerful as it is perplexing. We hope this conversation encourages a more deliberate investigation of love within our discipline, and highlights its richness and complexity as an essential lens for ethnographic inquiry.
In this episode, we dive into gender and sexual diversity, sexual dissidence, and their intersections with anthropology and education. Through a conversation with Dr. Joshua Liashenko, Director of LGBTQ+ Studies at Chapman University, we explore how queer anthropologists are engaging with these concepts in their approaches to research, training and teaching, particularly in relation to gay, lesbian, queer and trans communities in North America.
We discuss the historical development of anthropology’s engagement with sexuality and highlight the importance of bringing these conversations into the classroom, especially as anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policies continue to rise across North America, particularly in the United States. This episode also considers how these themes are being taken up in university settings, especially within Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts and offers resources for listeners who want to dive deeper into this work.
Recently, Tampa Bay has stoked controversy among U.S. anthropologists. Facing statewide rising fascism and oppressive laws targeting historically marginalized minorities, it's also the site of the 2024 American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting. In this episode of AnthroPod, we visit three Tampa-based anthropologists doing community-centered fieldwork among marginalized local communities.
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 scholarship.
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 show notes, please visit: culanth.org/fieldsights/anthropology-and-algorithms
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.
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 statecraft, activism, and everyday life?
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-conversation-with-willi-lempert
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 Activist Affordances. Our interview with Dr. Dokumaci was conducted in May 2023. Show notes: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/anthrobites-disability
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 Candidate Anuli Akanegbu (creator of BLK IRL®), and Dr. Dominic Boyer (co-creator of the Cultures of Energy podcast).
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?
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.
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 regimes in Greece and throughout the Mediterranean. For show-notes visit
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 allies? What are some of the shortcomings and challenges of solidarity? For show-notes and resources, visit https://culanth.org/fieldsights/what-solidarity-does
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-sound-like-performance
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 benefits and shortcomings of the concept? And how do anthropologists engage with resilience ethnographically?
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.
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 "anticipatory arrest warrants for a crime yet to be committed"--the crime of returning to the Ottoman Empire. Gürsel's research goes far beyond the story of the small number of photographs that remain as she has documented over four thousand individuals who went through the process of "terk-i tabiiyet." In this Ottoman History Podcast-AnthroPod collaboration, we talk to Gürsel about her research project on the production, circulation and afterlives of these photographs titled "Portraits of Unbelonging." It is a double-sided history that explores not only the context of Armenian migration and policing during the late Ottoman period but also the experiences of those pictured and their descendants following their departure from the Ottoman Empire. (Recorded August 2019)
In memory of Mary Lou Savage (née Khantamour)
Contributors: Beth Derderian (AnthroPod), Zeynep Devrim Gürsel (Rutgers University), and Chris Gratien (Ottoman History Podcast).
