AnthroPod

Iran has dominated the US news cycle throughout 2026 so far. The U.S. and Israeli war of aggression in Iran just passed its 100th day, having come on the heels of the Islamic Republic regime’s brutal repression of protests around the country in January. Among other things, these events have thrust a spotlight on the complex relationship between Iran and its diaspora, and the varied and contradictory perspectives diasporic Iranians hold when it comes to events inside Iran. In this episode, we speak with anthropologist Amy Malek about her book, Culture Beyond Country: Strategies of Inclusion in the Global Iranian Diaspora (NYU Press, 2025) and its resonances in our current moment.

This is the first of a three-part miniseries covering the 2025 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. The conference presentations we’ll share with you today revolve around the stories people tell themselves about themselves; the ways people come to connect with and understand history; how people carry and transmit cultural traditions; and the emotional performances that help people process and move forward. We’ll move from political activist spaces to sports performances, from diasporic family histories to more recent narratives around forced migration—guided along the way by music and sound recordings from some of this episode’s interlocutors.

This is the second episode of the two-part miniseries on linguistic anthropologists working with indigenous communities in Mexico. In this episode, Emiliana Cruz, a native Chatino speaker and scholar based at CIESAS, reflects on her research, her career, and the realities of Indigenous education in contemporary Mexico.

This episode is the first part of a two-part miniseries on linguistic anthropologists working with Indigenous communities in Mexico. In conversation with Mario Chávez Peón (CIESAS) and Carolyn O’Meara (UNAM), the episode introduces their research on Indigenous languages, their community-engaged fieldwork, and the activism that grows out of it, from developing writing systems alongside speakers to advocating for the rights and visibility of the communities they work with.

Rethinking anthropological research through tension, comparison, transparency, and shared knowledge-making around notion of collaboration.