AnthroPod

A Black feminist anthropology of college football, race, labor, and care.

In this episode, we dive into the series of debates that have emerged around assisted suicide, both within and outside the boundaries of medico-legal institutions. Through a conversation with anthropologists Dr. Dwai Banerjee, Dr. Miki Chase, Dr. Sophia Jaworski, and Dr. Miranda Tuckett, we explore the ethical obligations that are raised around end of life care by the legalization of aid-in-dying and the practice of voluntary death.

This episode is about love. What does it mean to study love ethnographically and analytically? How might we speak of love, especially in today’s social and political climate? In dialogue with Dr Omar Kasmani, whose work explores migrant loves and intimacies in Berlin, we trace the hopes, heartbreaks, and potentialities that love can hold for field research and ethnographic writing. Bridging the subjective and the objective, the personal and the shared, the inward and the outward, love remains a concept as powerful as it is perplexing. We hope this conversation encourages a more deliberate investigation of love within our discipline, and highlights its richness and complexity as an essential lens for ethnographic inquiry.

In this episode, we dive into gender and sexual diversity, sexual dissidence, and their intersections with anthropology and education. Through a conversation with Dr. Joshua Liashenko, Director of LGBTQ+ Studies at Chapman University, we explore how queer anthropologists are engaging with these concepts in their approaches to research, training and teaching, particularly in relation to gay, lesbian, queer and trans communities in North America.

We discuss the historical development of anthropology’s engagement with sexuality and highlight the importance of bringing these conversations into the classroom, especially as anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policies continue to rise across North America, particularly in the United States. This episode also considers how these themes are being taken up in university settings, especially within Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts and offers resources for listeners who want to dive deeper into this work.

Recently, Tampa Bay has stoked controversy among U.S. anthropologists. Facing statewide rising fascism and oppressive laws targeting historically marginalized minorities, it's also the site of the 2024 American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting. In this episode of AnthroPod, we visit three Tampa-based anthropologists doing community-centered fieldwork among marginalized local communities.