Apr 2025
Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)
After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ... Show More
1h 7m
Today
Isabel Heger-Laube, "China’s Landless Peasants and the Role of State-led Rural Urbanization: Narratives, Meaning Making, and the Puzzle of Social Stability" (Würzberg UP, 2025)
As part and parcel of China’s compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming rural Chinese people’s lives in unprecedented ways. This has led to different, often adverse outcomes ... Show More
1h 16m
May 3
Arely M. Zimmerman, "Contentious Citizenship: Salvadoran Activism and Belonging Across Borders" (U Arizona Press, 2026)
Contentious Citizenship: Salvadoran Activism and Belonging Across Borders (U Arizona Press, 2026) reshapes how we understand belonging, identity, and political participation in the context of migration. Drawing on decades of Salvadoran activism from the 1980s solidarity movement ... Show More
23m 24s
May 2025
The Poetics and Politics of Our Mental Health Metaphors: An Interview with Laurence Kirmayer
<p data-start="239" data-end="748">Laurence Kirmayer is one of the most influential figures in cultural psychiatry today. A psychiatrist, researcher, and theorist, he serves as James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at <a href= ... Show More
37m 34s
Mar 2021
Alan Klima, "Ethnography #9" (Duke UP, 2019)
Alan Klima’s Ethnography #9 (Duke University Press, 2019) was co-written by a ghost. And that’s just the start of what’s going on in this eerie, singular book. It’s a discussion of finance in post-crash Thailand, a study of non-material histories, and an examination of the limits ... Show More
1h 4m
Nov 2023
PT464 – Bessel van der Kolk, MD – Bodywork, Somatic Literacy, and Understanding Trauma: The Mind and Body Connection
<p>In this episode, Kyle interviews Bessel van der Kolk, MD: pioneer clinician, researcher, and educator on traumatic stress; Founder of the Trauma Research Foundation; Professor of Psychiatry at Boston University Medical School; Principal Investigator of the Boston site of MAPS' ... Show More
1h 6m
Sep 2024
Jack Palmer, "Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile" (McGill-Queen's UP, 2023)
Jack Palmer’s Zygmunt Bauman and the West: A Sociology of Intellectual Exile (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) invites us to reconsider a figure who sociology thought it knew well. Presenting Bauman as occupying an ‘exilic’ position as ‘in, but not of, the West’ Palmer pres ... Show More
1h 18m
Sep 2019
[Rerun] Jordan Peterson on Wonder, Creativity, and the Personality of Political Correctness
Today we have Dr. Jordan Peterson on the podcast. Dr. Peterson has taught mythology to lawyers, doctors and business people, consulted for the UN Secretary General, helped his clinical clients manage depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and schizophrenia, served as ... Show More
39 m
Dec 2020
166: Medical Humanities: Pandemics, Food Shaming & Social Science – Dr. Kari Nixon
<p>"Medical humanities can be defined as an interdisciplinary, and increasingly international endeavor that draws on the creative and intellectual strengths of diverse disciplines, including literature, art, creative writing, drama, film, music, philosophy, ethical decision makin ... Show More
54m 54s
Apr 2024
How a changing climate changes our minds, brains and bodies
<p>Neuroscientist and environmental journalist Clayton Aldern has travelled the world to meet scientists and doctors working at the intersections of environmental science, psychology and neuroscience to synthesize a new, interdisciplinary approach to a novel field — the neuroscie ... Show More
53m 19s
One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies fo ... Show More