Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchLesley Nicole Braun, "Congo's Dancers: Women and Work in Kinshasa" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
Episode 172
Today I spoke with Lesley Nicole Braun to talk about her new book on Congo's dancers. Dance music plays a central role in the cultural, social, relig…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Arseli Dokumaci, "Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds" (Duke UP, 2023)
Episode 22
For people who are living with disability, including various forms of chronic diseases and chronic pain, daily tasks like lifting a glass of water or…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Julia Elyachar, "On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo" (Duke UP, 2025)
Episode 395
On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo (Duke University Press, 2025) by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis …
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Judd B. Kessler, "Lucky by Design: The Hidden Economics of Getting More of What You Want" (Little, Brown Spark, 2025)
What's the secret to scoring a reservation at a hot new restaurant? When should you enter a lottery to increase your odds of winning? Why did your ne…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Matt Dawson, "The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies" (Routledge, 2023)
Episode 288
Matt Dawson's The Political Durkheim: Sociology, Socialism, Legacies (Routledge, 2023) presents Durkheim as an important political sociologist, inspi…
5 months, 3 weeks ago
Henry Grabar, "Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World" (Penguin, 2023)
Episode 146
Parking, quite literally, has a death grip on America: each year a handful of Americans are tragically killed by their fellow citizens over parking s…
5 months, 4 weeks ago
Henrike Kohpeiß, "Bourgeois Coldness" (Divided Publishing, 2025)
Bourgeois Coldness (Divided Publishing, 2025) refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois…
6 months ago
Suvi Rautio, "The Invention of Tradition in China: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade" (Springer Nature, 2024)
Episode 120
Today, anthropologist Professor Anru Lee is joining NBN as a guest host to interview me, Suvi Rautio, on my new book, The Invention of Tradition in C…
6 months ago
Karma F. Frierson, "Local Color: Reckoning with Blackness in the Port City of Veracruz" (U California Press, 2025)
Episode 392
The Caribbean port city of Veracruz is many things. It is where the Spanish first settled and last left the colony that would go on to become Mexico.…
6 months ago
Emanuel Deutschmann, "Mapping the Transnational World: How We Move and Communicate Across Borders, and Why It Matters" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Episode 156
Increasingly, people travel and communicate across borders. Yet, we still know little about the overall structure of this transnational world. Is it …
6 months ago