AnthroPod

We’ve all been there—dashed hopes, longing, feeling the distance between the life we’re living and the life we want. Disappointment emerges in today’s world in a variety of spaces and social registers. But what does it feel like, how do we know it… what does it do? In 2022, anthropologists Sarah Muir and Jessica Greenberg published a review article on the anthropology of disappointment. This episode digs into their article and the affects, aesthetics, and practices around disappointment. In addition to Greenberg and Muir, we’ll hear from Chantal Croteau, Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza, and Fuad Musallam on disappointment in their ethnographic fields.

In this episode of AnthroPod, Contributing Editor Daillen Culver sits down with Jerika Loren Heinze to discuss the concept of auto-reflexivity and the systemic risks, traumas, and safety challenges faced by researchers conducting fieldwork.

This is the second of a three-part miniseries covering the 2025 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. Throughout this miniseries, you’ll hear segments from some of the panels and roundtables organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the conference. This second part engages with the central theme of race across borders. This involves questioning how borders are shaped by embodiment, memory, and movement and power. From the streets of New Orleans to the borderlands of the Dominican Republic and Haiti; from Puerto Rican and Black diasporas to queer diasporas; from performance spaces to the bureaucratic offices of Berlin, these presentations ask: What does it mean to live, move, and make kin under the shadow of borders? And how do people create spaces of freedom and resistance within and along border regimes? Show notes: culanth.org/fieldsights/aaa-2025-part-2-race-across-borders

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. Show notes: https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/iranian-diaspora-perspectives

Content warning: This episode contains discussion of sexual violence, sexual assault, imprisonment, and intimate partner violence. This episode is the second installment of our mini-series on love and anthropology. What happens when love and violence are not experienced as opposites but as deeply entangled? In dialogue with Dr. Luisa Schneider, whose work examines love, violence, and legal intervention in Sierra Leone, we explore how intimate relationships are negotiated under conditions of insecurity, inequality, and post-conflict rebuilding. Through the striking local metaphor of teeth and tongue jammed together, Dr. Schneider reveals how love operates as something frictional, relational, and irreducible to simple narratives, and what is at stake when legal systems attempt to govern it. Her research also reveals how laws designed to protect can, without local grounding, produce new forms of harm by criminalizing the relationships they claim to safeguard and silencing the voices they intend to amplify. We hope this conversation deepens the investigation of love within our discipline begun in our first episode, and illuminates the importance of grounded and contextual understandings of love and its entanglements. Show notes: https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/a-dialogue-on-love-2-how-to-live-with-violent-love