New Books in Anthropology

Hello, world! This is the Global Media & Communication podcast series.In this episode, our host Juan Llamas-Rodriguez discusses the book The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power (2022) by Dr. Lilie Chouliaraki and Dr. Myria Georgiou.You’ll hear about: What The Digital Border is about, its importance, and its implication; How the authors’ previous works helped build the foundation for writing this book collaboratively; Why and how the authors chose to focus on specific forms of media such as social media and journalism; A discussion of humanitarian securitization vis a vis entrepreneurial securitization; How to understand the theoretical shift from the “crisis of migration” to the “crisis of responsibility”; How do we contend the different temporalities of resistance as various actors produce or respond to border technologies and infrastructures; As the displacement of people are intensifying, what frameworks and toolkits can be useful for us to rethink global migration against the “crisis of imaginary” (imaginary as a representational framework that people normatively think about certain issues); What are the futures of globalization and its counter movements in Global North from the perspectives of migration and bordering; What are the areas the authors wish to further explore in the future. About the bookWhat is the role of digital technologies is shaping migration today? How do digital infrastructures, platforms, and institutions control the flow of people at the border? And how do they also control the public narratives of migration as a “crisis”? Finally, how do migrants themselves use these same platforms to speak back and make themselves heard in the face of hardship and hostility? Taking their case studies from the biggest migration event of the twenty-first century in the West, the 2015 European migration “crisis” and its aftermath up to 2020, Lilie Chouliaraki and Myria Georgiou offer a holistic account of the digital border as an expansive assemblage of technological infrastructures (from surveillance cameras to smartphones) and media imaginaries (stories, images, social media posts) to tell the story of migration as it unfolds in Europe’s outer islands as much as its most vibrant cities. You can find this book on the NYU Press website.Authors:Lilie Chouliaraki is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as the department’s Doctoral Program Director.Myria Georgiou is Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she also serves as Research Director.Host: Juan Llamas-Rodriguez is an assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, where he researches and teaches global media cultures, digital technologies, border studies, infrastructure studies, and Latin American media.Editor & Producer: Jing Wang is Senior Research Manager at CARGC at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.Our podcast is part of the multimodal project powered by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. At CARGC, we produce and promote critical, interdisciplinary, and multimodal research on global media and communication. We aim to bridge academic scholarship and public life, bringing the very best scholarship to bear on enduring global questions and pressing contemporary issues. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In 2013, the Journal of Burma Studies published an article titled “An Introduction to Wa Studies.” It seems that even within the last decade the Wa, an upland people living predominantly on what is today the Burma-China frontier, still needed to be introduced to other scholars of the region. Magnus Fiskesjö, the article’s author, began with the caveat that it was by no means complete and was intended only by way of brief introduction. But the article held out the promise of more, and now its author has delivered, with Stories from an Ancient Land: Perspectives on Wa History and Culture (Berghahn, 2021). In this episode, Magnus joins New Books in Southeast Asian Studies to discuss everything from rice beer to silver mining, opium production and warfare, the tension between the Wa egalitarian ethos and practices of slave holding, and the present and possible future conditions for a people on the periphery of mainland Southeast Asia in an age of intolerant ethno-nationalism.Like this interview? If so you might also be interested in: Holly High, Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village Jane Ferguson, Repossessing Shanland: Myanmar, Thailand and a Nation-State Deferred James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States Nick Cheesman is Associate Professor, Department of Political & Social Change, Australian National University and Senior Fellow, Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy, University at Buffalo (Fall 2022). He hosts the New Books in Interpretive Political & Social Science series on the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

A special bonus episode in honor of the 93rd Academy Awards on April 25, 2021! One of the most-nominated films at this year's Oscars is "Nomadland," adapted from a book of the same name by journalist Jessica Bruder. "Nomadland" is about a 21st-century American phenomenon - the post-2008 increase in (mostly elderly) people who practice "vandwelling," living in vans, trucks, or other mobile housing and traveling the country in search of seasonal jobs. This episode talks about the characteristics of this nomadic community, how they adhere to an anthropological definition of the term "nomad," and nomadism in US history.Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License.All other sounds courtesy of the BBC Sound Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In his new book, Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space (MIT Press, 2022), Mathew Gandy explores urban nature as a multilayered material and symbolic entity. The book examines the articulation of alternative, and in some cases, counterhegemonic, sources of knowledge about urban nature produced by artists, writers, scientists, as well as curious citizens, including voices seldom heard in environmental discourse. The book is driven by Dr. Gandy’s long-standing fascination with spontaneous forms of urban nature ranging from postindustrial wastelands brimming with life to the return of such predators as wolves and leopards on the urban fringe. Dr. Gandy develops a critical synthesis between different strands of urban ecology and considers whether “urban political ecology,” broadly defined, might be imaginatively extended to take fuller account of both the historiography of the ecological sciences, and recent insights derived from feminist, posthuman, and postcolonial thought.In this episode, Tayeba Batool talks to Dr. Mathew Gandy about his inspiration to write this book, and how an attention to spontaneous ecologies adds to the critical discourse on “new cultures of nature” and the “constellation” of diverse ecological relations, ideas, and assemblages. Moving beyond planned urban spaces (such as parks), Dr. Gandy argues that an attention to the “marginal or interstitial spaces of urban nature” or wastelands brings forward the most compelling assemblages of relations, biodiversity, and life in cities. The conversation also highlights the role of language in setting up taxonomic borders and ideological agendas for species and diversity, and advocates caution against global theories of urban change. Dr. Gandy also shares his thoughts on future direction of urban political ecology and how the book innovates across disciplines of botany, geography, cultural history, and urban studies.You can also learn more about his film project, “Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin” here.Dr. Mathew Gandy is Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography and Fellow of King’s College at University of Cambridge. Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania.Tayeba Batool is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

This episode looks at the main types and categories of nomads, how they live, and the similarities and differences between them.Music in this episode: Desert City by Kevin MacLeod. License.All other sounds courtesy of the BBC Sound Effects Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

For some, automation will usher in a labor-free utopia; for others, it signals a disastrous age-to-come. Yet whether seen as dream or nightmare, automation, argues Munn, is ultimately a fable that rests on a set of triple fictions. There is the myth of full autonomy, claiming that machines will take over production and supplant humans. But far from being self-acting, technical solutions are piecemeal; their support and maintenance reveals the immense human labor behind "autonomous" processes. There is the myth of universal automation, with technologies framed as a desituated force sweeping the globe. But this fiction ignores the social, cultural, and geographical forces that shape technologies at a local level. And, there is the myth of automating everyone, the generic figure of "the human" at the heart of automation claims. But labor is socially stratified and so automation's fallout will be highly uneven, falling heavier on some (immigrants, people of color, women) than others. In Automation Is a Myth (Stanford UP, 2022), Munn moves from machine minders in China to warehouse pickers in the United States to explore the ways that new technologies do (and don't) reconfigure labor. Combining this rich array of human stories with insights from media and cultural studies, Munn points to a more nuanced, localized, and racialized understanding of the "future of work."Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In her latest book, Life in Citiations: Biblical Narratives and Contemporary Hebrew Culture (Routledge, 2019), Ruth Tsoffar studies several key biblical narratives that figure prominently in Israeli culture. Life in Citations provides a close reading of these narratives, along with works by contemporary Hebrew Israeli artists that respond to them. Together they read as a modern commentary on life with text, or even life under the rule of its verses, to answer questions like: How can we explain the fascination and intense identification of Israelis with the Bible? What does it mean to live in such close proximity with the Bible, and What kind of story can such a life tell? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

Where do the spices we find in our kitchen cabinets come from? What can we learn from tracing spices and their commodities and how does their trade impact the livelihoods of ethnic minority farmers in the Sino-Vietnamese uplands?Annuska Derks and Jean-Francois Rousseau, co- editors with Sarah Turner of the book Fragrant Frontier Global Spice Entanglements in the Sino Vietnamese Uplands, joined Julia Heinle discussing their recently published NIAS Press edited volume.Fragrant Frontier demystifies the contemporary spice trade originating from the Sino-Vietnamese uplands and is available as an Open Access Book on the NIAS Press Website here.Purchase a hardcopy of the book here.& check out the visual story maps here.Annuska Derks is an associate professor and departmental co-director at the University of Zurich. She is a social anthropologist interested in social transformation processes in Southeast Asia, in particular in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand. Her research focuses on migration, labor, gender, as well as the social lives of things, and interrogates discourses of development and innovation.Jean-François Rousseau is an associate professor at the University of Ottawa. He is a development geographer with research focusing on the relationships between agrarian change, infrastructure development – especially hydropower dams and sand-mining – and ethnic minority livelihood diversification in Southwest China.Sarah Turner is Professor of Geography at McGill University. She is a development geographer specializing in ethnic minority livelihoods, agrarian change, and everyday resistance in upland northern Vietnam and southwest China. She also works with street vendors and other members of the mobile informal economy, as well as small-scale entrepreneurs in urban Southeast Asia. Widely published, she is also an editor of the journals Geoforum and Journal of Vietnamese Studies.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, the University of Helsinki and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

The American Midwest is often thought of as uniformly white, and shaped exclusively by Christian values. However, this view of the region as an unvarying landscape fails to consider a significant community at its very heart. Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest (NYU Press, 2022) uncovers the long history of Muslims in a part of the country where many readers would not expect to find them.Edward E. Curtis IV, a descendant of Syrian Midwesterners, vividly portrays the intrepid men and women who busted sod on the short-grass prairies of the Dakotas, peddled needles and lace on the streets of Cedar Rapids, and worked in the railroad car factories of Michigan City. This intimate portrait follows the stories of individuals such as farmer Mary Juma, pacifist Kassem Rameden, poet Aliya Hassen, and bookmaker Kamel Osman from the early 1900s through World War I, the Roaring 20s, the Great Depression, and World War II. Its story-driven approach places Syrian Americans at the center of key American institutions like the assembly line, the family farm, the dance hall, and the public school, showing how the first two generations of Midwestern Syrians created a life that was Arab, Muslim, and American, all at the same time.Muslims of the Heartland recreates what the Syrian Muslim Midwest looked, sounded, felt, and smelled like—from the allspice-seasoned lamb and rice shared in mosque basements to the sound of the trains on the Rock Island Line rolling past the dry goods store. It recovers a multicultural history of the American Midwest that cannot be ignored.Joseph Stuart is a scholar of African American history, particularly of the relationship between race, freedom rights, and religion in the twentieth century Black Freedom Movement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology

In The Dancer's Voice: Performance and Womanhood in Transnational India (Duke UP, 2022) Rumya Sree Putcha theorizes how the Indian classical dancer performs the complex dynamics of transnational Indian womanhood. Putcha argues that the public persona of the Indian dancer has come to represent India in the global imagination—a representation that supports caste hierarchies and Hindu ethnonationalism, as well as white supremacist model minority narratives. Generations of Indian women have been encouraged to embody the archetype of the dancer, popularized through film cultures from the 1930s to the present. Through analyses of films, immigration and marriage laws, histories of caste and race, advertising campaigns, and her own family’s heirlooms, photographs, and memories, Putcha reveals how women’s citizenship is based on separating their voices from their bodies. In listening closely to and for the dancer’s voice, she offers a new way to understand the intersections of body, voice, performance, caste, race, gender, and nation.Sneha Annavarapu is Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at Yale-NUS College. Lakshita Malik is a doctoral student in the department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work focuses on questions of intimacies, class, gender, and beauty in South Asia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/anthropology