Jul 16

Matthew Campbell, "The Man Who Stole the Gods: A True Story of War, Obsession, and a Global Art Conspiracy" (Penguin, 2026)

On June 10, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York returned two pieces of artwork to Cambodia: an Angkor statue and a sandstone lintel. It’s the latest repatriation effort by the U.S.’s premier art museum, and the third time the Met has had to give up Cambodian artifacts spec ... Show More

39m 29s

Jun 30

Chiara Formichi, "Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia" (Stanford UP, 2025)

In her most recent publication, Domestic Nationalism: Muslim Women, Health, and Modernity in Indonesia (Stanford UP, 2025), Chiara Formichi argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia's progress as guardians and promot ... Show More

1h 10m

Jun 24

Infrastructure, Nickel, and the Politics of Polyalignment in Indonesia

Indonesia is often framed as a key arena of China-Japan-US competition in the Second Cold War. In this episode, we talk with Trissia Wijaya about her book on the political economy of Chinese and Japanese infrastructure financing in Indonesia. She challenges the view that it is si ... Show More

42m 40s

Nov 2024

Ethel Tungohan, "Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care" (U Illinois Press, 2023)

Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement-Building, and Communities of Care (U Illinois Press, 2023) challenges the stereotype of downtrodden migrant caregivers by showing that care workers have distinct ways of caring for themselves, for each other, and for the larger tr ... Show More

1h 1m

Sep 2023

Allan Punzalan Isaac, "Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor" (Fordham UP, 2021)

From spectacular deaths in a drag musical to competing futures in a call center, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor (Fordham UP, 2021) examines how contracted service labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States ... Show More

52m 57s

Apr 2025

Communities of Care

The need for care - for radical care, for decolonial care, for accountable and reciprocal and emancipatory care - has never been more obvious. In a world where it is clear that institutions don’t care for us and that many of our elected political leaders just want to amass power ... Show More

50m 13s

Apr 2024

Fumilayo Showers, "Migrants Who Care: West Africans Working and Building Lives in U.S. Health Care" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

As the U.S. population ages and as health care needs become more complex, demand for paid care workers in home and institutional settings has increased. This book draws attention to the reserve of immigrant labour that is called on to meet this need. Migrants Who Care: West Afri ... Show More

1h 2m

Apr 2021

New Ethnographies of the Global South: In Conversation with Victoria Reyes and Marco Garrido

How can Sociology be nudged away from its traditional parochialism to embrace empirical work that focuses on the global south? Marco Garrido (assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago) and Victoria Reyes (assistant professor of sociology at the University of C ... Show More

1h 13m

Sep 2024

Sharon M. Quinsaat, "Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora" (U Chicago Press, 2024)

When people migrate and settle in other countries, do they automatically form a diaspora? In Insurgent Communities: How Protests Create a Filipino Diaspora (U Chicago Press, 2024), Sharon M. Quinsaat explains the dynamic process through which a diaspora is strategically construct ... Show More

55m 59s

Dec 2023

Sahana Ghosh, "A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands" (U California Press, 2023)

Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in the borderlands of northern Bangladesh and eastern India, A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security Across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (U California Press, 2023) chronicles the slow transformation of a connected region into national bord ... Show More

1h 10m

May 2024

Martin Dusinberre, "Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

In Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and Its Migrant Histories (Cambridge UP, 2023), Martin Dusinberre follows the Yamashiro-maru steamship across Asian and Pacific waters in an innovative history of Japan's engagement with the outside world in the late-nineteenth centu ... Show More

1h 6m

Oct 2023

Chrissy Yee Lau, "New Women of Empire: Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America" (U Washington Press, 2022)

This episode, which is co-hosted with Mika Thornburg, features a conversation with Dr. Chrissy Yee Lau, the author of the newly published New Women of Empire: Gendered Politics and Racial Uplift in Interwar Japanese America (U Washington Press, 2022). The book centers the compell ... Show More

56m 21s

Aug 2024

Francisca Yuenki Lai, "Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires" (Hong Kong UP, 2021)

Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires (Hong Kong UP, 2021) is the first book about Asian female migrant workers who develop same-sex relationships in a host city. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with Indonesian domestic workers ... Show More

1h 1m

Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, “The Labor ...