Aspired Communities, Contested Futures: Long-Term Recovery after the 3.11 Disaster in Japan
On March 11, 2011, a 9.1 magnitude earthquake struck off the coast of northeastern Japan triggering a massive tsunami and shifting the earth on its axis. Nearly 20,000 residents in the Tōhoku region l...
28 Apr 202331min
David Shulman and Heike Oberlin, "Two Masterpieces of Kuttiyattam: Mantrankam and Anguliyankam" (Oxford UP, 2019)
Kūṭiyāṭṭam, India’s only living traditional Sanskrit theatre, has been continually performed in Kerala for at least a thousand years. David Shulman and Heike Oberlin's Two Masterpieces of Kuttiyattam:...
27 Apr 202355min
Lucien van Liere and Erik Meinema, "Material Perspectives on Religion, Conflict, and Violence: Things of Conflict" (Brill, 2022)
How do objects become contested in settings characterized by (violent) conflict? Why are some things contested by religious actors? How do religious actors mobilize things in conflict situations, and ...
25 Apr 202343min
Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston, "The Transgender Studies Reader Remix" (Routledge, 2022)
Hello, this is Eric LeMay, a host on the New Books Network. Today I interview Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston about The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (Routledge, 2023). This is a book th...
24 Apr 202359min
Nicole Constable, "Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations" (U California Press, 2022)
Passport Entanglements examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports and other types of documentation play in gende...
23 Apr 202358min
Mitul Baruah, "Slow Disaster: Political Ecology of Hazards and Everyday Life in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam" (Routledge, 2022)
Mitul Baruah's Slow Disaster: Political Ecology of Hazards and Everyday Life in the Brahmaputra Valley, Assam (Routledge, 2022) presents a fascinating, ethnographic account of the challenges faced by ...
22 Apr 202349min
Sylvia Ang, "Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants" (Amsterdam UP, 2022)
The question of who is Chinese and how Chineseness as an identity is constituted has been a recurring question, particularly in the context of the extensive Chinese diasporic community. In Contesting ...
20 Apr 202342min
Joel E. Correia, "Disrupting the Patrón: Indigenous Land Rights and the Fight for Environmental Justice in Paraguay's Chaco" (U California Press, 2023)
The Paraguayan Chaco is a settler frontier where cattle ranching and agrarian extractivism drive some of the world's fastest deforestation and most extreme land tenure inequality. Disrupting the Patró...
20 Apr 202355min
