Episodes
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Applied Anthropologist Chris Reeder Young employs her background in urban and medical anthropology to advocate for lower-income homebuyers and older homeowners who wish to age in place.
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Dr. David Sutton returns to explore the politics of food and commensality, or eating together, on the Greek island of Kalymnos, both as a way of connecting the past and present and as a form of resistance against external cultural pressures.
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Missing episodes?
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Action Anthropologist Dr. Dana Powell collaborates with Navajo (Diné) energy activists and African-American environmental justice activists, using anthropological methods and perspectives to assist in defining and resolving social problems.
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Business anthropologist Dr. Amy Goldmacher discusses how her ethnographic work empowers product and software designers to better understand their users and customers. Using anthropological research methods, she helps design new and improved products, software, and experiences that better meet people’s needs.
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Lyndsey Craig delves into the anthropology of pubic hair grooming, discussing sexual signaling, the symbolism of pubic hair with respect to hygiene, marital status, or fertility, how body hair is tied to beauty aesthetics, and how the removal of hair is both an intimate practice and a form of identity communication.
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Dr. Beatriz Reyes-Foster is a medical anthropologist whose book Psychiatric Encounters explores how culture shapes the diagnosis, care, and outcomes of mental illness in a mental hospital in Yucatan, Mexico.
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Environmental anthropologist Dr. Jessica O’Reilly works in the least populated continent on earth by far: Antarctica. Working with an array of scientists, she turns the anthropological gaze on science itself, helping to demystify the scientific process and how scientists come to know what they know.
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Researching the history and architecture of mosques in America, anthropologist Dr. Jacqueline Fewkes examines the relationship between local history, physical space, and social practice to showcase the incredible diversity of contemporary Muslim communities.
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Why do modern humans in industrialized nations face dental problems that don’t affect primates, modern hunter-gatherers, and previous generations of humans? Biological Anthropologist Dr. Julia Boughner explains how cultural practices affect the development of our teeth and jaws.
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Adoption is a culturally and historically complicated process that we like to envision as purely altruistic, yet usually involves moving children from less- to more-advantaged communities. Folklorist and anthropologist Dr. Patricia Sawin examines how parents’ stories of international adoption help build new families, while sometimes over-simplifying difficult issues of race, privilege, and the power and limits of love.
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At the intersection of business anthropology and the anthropology of food, Jesse Dart researches how and why tech companies offer their employees free food. Looking at the same company’s practices in several different countries, he draws out how patterns of eating reflect regional cultural beliefs about labor, land, and tradition, and how corporate practices both reflect and transform these ideas as well.
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Gail Carriger is an archaeologist and bestselling author whose steampunk romance series reimagines the technology, social diversity, and moral rigidity of Victorian England. While her British Isles are home to werewolves, vampires, and the occasional preternatural, the fantasy elements allow her to explore historical and contemporary issues of colonialism, gender and sexuality, social class, and technological fads.
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When leaders of multicultural societies emphasize ethnic division over national unity, assigning blame to the “other” and focusing on our differences rather than our similarities, the stage is set for political violence… or worse. Dr. Jennie Burnet’s research into the causes and consequences of the 1994 Rwandan genocide reveals why we should be concerned about the current political moment in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, but it also suggests ways people can come together and take action to unify. Through diverse political representation, adept leadership, and public reinforcement of unity over division, other nations can avoid the catastrophic legacy that Rwandans are still recovering from today.
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By looking at the lives and changing politics of archaeologists studying New England shell middens, Dr. Kirakosian examines how meaning shifts over time, how knowledge is created, whose knowledge counts, and why responsible science means taking into account the power and perceptions of the people behind the research.
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Aging is a cultural phenomenon, made easier or harder depending on our expectations of friendships and families and our beliefs about what makes us a person. Medical Anthropologist Dr. Janelle Taylor talks about her research into successful friendships with folks with dementia, how friendships can adapt in the face of dementia, and why those relationships are crucial to patients and their family caregivers.
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To combat growing the wildfires in Arizona, select inmates are temporarily released from prison to battle the flames. In this episode, I talk with anthropology doctoral candidate Lindsey Raisa Feldman works alongside and photographs the complex labor politics of these men and women, whose dangerous job is both exploitative and intensely meaningful.
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Dr. Jeanine Staples, Associate Professor at Penn State, researches the intersection of race, gender, education, and literature, revealing how young black girls internalize social messages about their lack of worth, how those messages threaten the girls’ health and well-being, and how schools both perpetuate the messages and offer a unique opportunity to stop them.
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The Ganga River in India is a goddess – but does that mean she provides for her followers, or her followers need to protect her? Environmental Anthropologist Dr. Georgina Drew explains how a river is many things to its surrounding inhabitants, and how taking an ethnographic approach means viewing the partnership between the environment and culture, as well as how each impacts the other.
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