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
Jan 16
Di Wu et. al, eds., "China As Context: Anthropology, Post-globalisation and the Neglect of China" (Manchester UP, 2025)
A provocative collaborative project, China as Context challenges the marginalization of Chinese-grounded ideas in academia, arguing that neglecting China distorts our understanding of global complexities. Through diverse ethnographic perspectives, this volume repositions China, u ... Show More
1h 19m
Jan 15
Sara Ann Swenson, "Near Light We Shine: Buddhist Charity in Urban Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2025)
Sara Swenson is Assistant Professor of Religion and Affiliated Faculty in Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages at Dartmouth College. Her areas of expertise include Religions of Southeast Asia, Buddhism in Vietnam, Gender and Sexuality, Affect Theory, and Ethnography. She rece ... Show More
1h 3m
Oct 2024
Bananapocalypse: Plantation Southeast Asia and Its Many Afterlives
This episode focuses on a cluster of issues of longstanding significance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies – plantation agriculture, global commodity chains or supply chains, exploitation of labour and environmental degradation, and resistance. To discuss these iss ... Show More
44m 22s
Oct 2024
Bananapocalypse: Plantation Southeast Asia and Its Many Afterlives
This episode focuses on a cluster of issues of longstanding significance in Southeast Asia and in Southeast Asian Studies – plantation agriculture, global commodity chains or supply chains, exploitation of labour and environmental degradation, and resistance. To discuss these iss ... Show More
44m 22s
Sep 2024
Thomas White, "China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier" (U Washington Press, 2024)
China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism - in the form of grazing bans, enclosu ... Show More
1h 6m
Mar 2025
Brendan A. Galipeau, "Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La" (U Washington Press, 2025)
Aiming to explore the Sino-Tibetan border region, which is renamed “Shangri-La” by the Chinese government for tourism promotion, Crafting a Tibetan Terroir (U Washington Press, 2025) examines how the deployment of the French notion of terroir creates new forms of ethno-regional i ... Show More
1h 16m
Oct 2024
Tamara Jacka, "Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China" (Anu Press, 2023)
Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China (Anu Press, 2023) provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a m ... Show More
54m 15s
Nov 2020
Michael Mascarenhas, "Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More" (Sage, 2020)
Michael Mascarenhas's book Lessons in Environmental Justice: From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More (Sage, 2020) provides an entry point to the field by bringing together the works of individuals who are creating a new and vibrant wave of environmental justice s ... Show More
41m 55s
Aug 2025
Nick Spencer, "The Landscapes of Science and Religion: What Are We Disagreeing About?" (Oxford UP, 2025)
The relationship between science and religion has long been a heated debate and is becoming an ever more popular topic. The scientific capacity to manipulate and change humans and their environment through genetic engineering, life extension, and AI is going to take a huge leap f ... Show More
38m 48s
Sep 2025
The Life Scientific: Tori Herridge
Elephants are the largest living land mammal and today our planet is home to three species: the African bush elephant, the African forest elephant, and the Asian elephant.But a hundred thousand years ago, in the chilly depths of the Ice Age, multiple species of elephant roamed th ... Show More
26m 30s
Sep 2024
Mariana Craciun, "From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy" (U Chicago Press, 2024)
From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers an examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind - and the nature of medical expertise - as they are trained in psychotherapy. While ... Show More
1h 46m
Oct 3
Jane Goodall, In Memoriam — What It Means to Be Human
The great primatologist and humanitarian, Jane Goodall, died on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91. It is a joy and a comfort to revisit our last broadcast of her 2020 conversation with Krista. Jane Goodall began her epic work studying chimpanzees in the Gombe forest without even ... Show More
50m 51s
How do we confront difference and change in a rapidly shifting environment? Many indigenous peoples are facing this question in their daily lives. Sensing Others: Voicing Batek Ethical Lives at the Edge of a Malaysian Rain Forest (U Nebraska Press, 2024) explores the lives of Batek people in Peninsular Malaysia amid the strange and the new in the borderland ... Show More
