Lisa Messeri, "In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles" (Duke UP, 2024)

Lisa Messeri, "In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles" (Duke UP, 2024)

In the mid-2010s, a passionate community of Los Angeles-based storytellers, media artists, and tech innovators formed around virtual reality (VR), believing that it could remedy society’s ills. Lisa Messeri offers an ethnographic exploration of this community, which conceptualized VR as an “empathy machine” that could provide glimpses into diverse social realities. She outlines how, in the aftermath of #MeToo, the backlash against Silicon Valley, and the turmoil of the Trump administration, it was imagined that VR—if led by women and other marginalized voices—could bring about a better world. Messeri delves into the fantasies that allowed this vision to flourish, exposing the paradox of attempting to use a singular VR experience to mend a fractured reality full of multiple, conflicting social truths. She theorizes this dynamic as unreal, noting how dreams of empathy collide with reality’s irreducibility to a “common” good. With In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles (Duke UP, 2024), Messeri navigates the intersection of place, technology, and social change to show that technology alone cannot upend systemic forces attached to gender and race.

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Sandra Rozental, "The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft" (Duke UP, 2026)

Sandra Rozental, "The Absent Stone: Mexican Patrimony and the Aftershocks of State Theft" (Duke UP, 2026)

Where and to whom do ancient things belong? What happens when they are stolen—not by a colonial power, but by a national museum claiming them as state patrimony? What kinds of healing and restitution ...

17 Syys 41min

John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian, "Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026)

John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian, "Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2026)

In John Charles Simon and Jennalee Donian’s Understanding Laughter and Humor: Why We Laugh, Why We Don’t, and Why It Matters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the authors put forward a comprehensive new the...

12 Syys 1h 6min

Francesca Sbardella, "Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister" (Berghahn Books, 2025)

Francesca Sbardella, "Inhabiting Silence: An Anthropologist in the Cloister" (Berghahn Books, 2025)

Monasteries are typically characterized by physical and symbolic limitations on access as they are usually known through written texts and accounts by nuns who live in that world but do not allow othe...

7 Syys 35min

Janaka Jayawickrama and Jerome Wright, "Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Janaka Jayawickrama and Jerome Wright, "Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

What went wrong with global mental health? Under the Gaze of Global Mental Health: A Critical Reflection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) critically examines how the globalisation of mental health through t...

6 Syys 1h 2min

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer et al eds., "Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer et al eds., "Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century" (Rutgers UP, 2026)

What does medical anthropology look like in the twenty-first century? That is the central question of Mapping Medical Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century, a new edited volume by Matthew J. Wolf...

6 Syys 53min

Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference

Relative Strangers: Romani Kinship and Palestinian Difference

Examining how memory, intergenerational transmission, and kinship work together, Relative Strangers (U Toronto Press, 2024) sheds light on Romani life in Palestine. Arpan Roy presents an ethnographic ...

5 Syys 54min

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani, "Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a Conservation Frontier" (U Arizona Press, 2025)

In the Anthropocene, a question has become increasingly urgent: What does it mean to be human? Set against the backdrop of southern Chile’s conservation frontier, Alterhumanism: Becoming Human on a ...

4 Syys 54min

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)

Chika Watanabe, "Play to Survive: Disaster Preparedness Along the Ring of Fire" (Stanford UP, 2026)

We live in a fragile world. This much is evident as stories abound of natural disasters that wipe out communities in an instant. How can we survive the future on such a planet, amid intensifying cli...

4 Syys 51min

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