Naomi Westerman, "Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief, and Bereavement Across Cultures" (404 Inklings, 2024)
Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology graduate student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning the end of lives from an academic pursuit into something dee...
26 Jul 202450min
Ed Pulford, "Past Progress: Time and Politics at the Borders of China, Russia, and Korea" (Stanford UP, 2024)
Anxiety may have been abounding in the old Cold War West that progress - whether political or economic - has been reversed, but for citizens of former-socialist countries, murky temporal trajectories ...
25 Jul 20241h 8min
Alexander Sasha Kondakov, "Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia" (UCL Press, 2022)
Violent Affections: Queer Sexuality, Techniques of Power, and Law in Russia (UCL Press, 2022) by Alexander Sasha Kondakov uncovers techniques of power that work to translate emotions into violence aga...
24 Jul 20241h 1min
Muslim Literacies in China
Tazin Abdullah speaks with Dr Ibrar Bhatt about heritage literacies, particularly as they are practiced by Chinese Muslims. Bhatt is the author of A Semiotics of Muslimness in China (Cambridge UP, 202...
23 Jul 202429min
Ujju Aggarwal, "Unsettling Choice: Race, Rights, and the Partitioning of Public Education" (U Minnesota Press, 2024)
What do universal rights to public goods like education mean when codified as individual, private choices? Is the “problem” of school choice actually not about better choices for all but, rather, abou...
20 Jul 202437min
Reid B. Locklin, "Hindu Mission, Christian Mission: Soundings in Comparative Theology" (SUNY Press, 2024)
For some four hundred years, Hindus and Christians have been engaged in a public controversy about conversion and missionary proselytization, especially in India and the Hindu diaspora. Hindu Mission...
18 Jul 202428min
Sarah Milton, "Ageing and New Intimacies: Gender, Sexuality and Temporality in an English Salsa Scene" (Manchester UP, 2024)
The 'baby boom' generation, born between the 1940s and the 1960s, is often credited with pioneering new and creative ways of relating, doing intimacy and making families. With this cohort now entering...
17 Jul 202451min
Paula Bialski on Middletech, Software Work, and the Culture of Good Enough
Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel talks with Paula Bialski, an Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, about her recent book, Middle Tech: ...
15 Jul 20241h 9min
