Since the early 2000s, the Canadian government has attempted reconciliation with Indigenous Nations through varied efforts: treaty processes, government commissions, rebranding campaigns for settler-owned businesses, workshops for state and local officials, school curriculum changes, and a recently christened national holiday. However, Joseph Weiss argues, these state-driven initiatives reinforce Indigenous subordination to the settler state. This incisive study of the varied responses from both Indigenous Nations and individuals illuminates how reconciliation is implicated in ongoing colonial erasure.
Critically engaging with a variety of fields, including Indigenous studies, anthropology, history, political theory, semiotics, and museum studies, Weiss captures the multiple scales at which these contested dynamics unfold and explores their underlying technologies of erasure. Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Contemporary Canada (UNC Press, 2026) unpacks how reconciliation offers amends for anti-Indigenous violence while disavowing responsibility for that violence, and argues that settler promises of reconciliation cannot be reconciled to the fact of Indigenous sovereignty. Nevertheless, Weiss illustrates how Indigenous Peoples refuse erasure at every turn, instead building alternate futures and lived worlds that are not always already colonially overdetermined.

Joseph Weiss is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, American Studies, Science and Technology Studies at Wesleyan University and where he also chairs the anthropology department. He is also the author of Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism

Elliott M. Reichardt, MPhil, is a PhD Candidate in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Elliott's research interests are in capitalism, colonialism, and socio-ecological health in North America. Elliott also has long standing interests in medical anthropology and the history of science and medicine.

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This episode features a conversation with Ravikant Kisana, Dean of the School of Liberal Education and Languages at Galgotias University in India, about his book Meet the Savarnas: Indian Millennials Whose Mediocrity Broke Everything. We discussed the term “savarna” and how his personal experiences as a student and professor in liberal institutions led him to write the book, the performativity and insularity of upper castes, the importance of endogamy to caste social reproduction, and how to understand the recent shift from claims to castelessness to overt assertions of caste pride.

Guest

Ravikant Kisana, Dean, School of Liberal Education and Languages, Galgotias University, India

References:

B.R. Ambedkar, “Castes in India”

Babasaheb: an honorific for B.R. Ambedkar meaning “respected father.”

IIMs: Indian Institutes of Management

Mayawati: first Dalit woman chief minister of India who served in the state of Uttar Pradesh as the leader of the Bahujan Samaj Party.

BSP: Bahujan Samaj Party founded in 1984 and focused on representing the interests of Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and religious minorities.

OBC parties: see above

Veds/Vedas: ancient Sanskrit scriptures

Kayasth: scribal and administrative caste originating in Maharashtra, Bengal, and Odisha.

Marwari: mercantile caste originating in the Marwar region of Rajasthan.

Baniya: mercantile caste originating in the states of Rajasthan and Gujarat. Baniya and Marwari are overlapping categories.

Jat: agricultural caste originating in the regions of Sindh and Punjab.

Noida: a city in the National Capital Region that falls within the state of Uttar Pradesh

Congress: Indian National Congress, one of India’s main national political parties founded in 1885.

MGNREGA: The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 is an Indian labor law guaranteeing at least 100 days of paid, unskilled manual work per financial year to rural households.

Read the transcript here

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Mothers and fathers use their time differently, with women spending roughly twice as many hours on family labor as men. But what about the gendered differences in the ways women and men think? What’s on Her Mind examines the cognitive labor that families depend on, and reveals why this essential aspect of family life is disproportionately handled by women—even in couples that aspire to practice equality. While most accounts of household labor center on how people use their time, Dr. Allison Daminger focuses on a less visible and less easily quantifiable aspect of family life. She introduces readers to the concept of cognitive labor—anticipating, researching, deciding, and following up—and shows how women in different-gender couples do most of this critical work.

Dr. Daminger argues that cognitive labor has less to do with personality traits—for example, she’s type A while he’s laid-back—and more to do with learned skills that men and women deploy in distinct ways. Yet not all couples fall into the personality trap. Dr. Daminger looks at different-gender couples who achieve a more balanced cognitive allocation while also exploring how queer couples carve out unique relationships to the gender binary. Drawing on original, in-depth interviews with members of different- and same-gender couples, What’s on Her Mind points to new ways of understanding the interplay between who we are as individuals and the cognitive work we do on behalf of our families.

Our guest is: Dr. Allison Daminger, who is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She’s the author of What’s On Her Mind; her work has also been featured in publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, Psychology Today, and the Atlantic.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and editor. She is the producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

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Worker Centered: Allyship & Action in the Contemporary Labor Movement (Oxford UP, 2024) is a close-to-the-ground, ethnographic narrative of a workplace organizing campaign at a company whose workforce was primarily low wage and immigrant. The book details the overall strategy of the campaign and its ultimate failure to win its core demands. The organization used an innovative strategic model and insisted on the importance of worker leadership. And yet allies and staff participated in a campaign that, although continually framed as such, was decidedly not led by workers. Ultimately, Worker Centered challenges conventional notions of political representation, inviting reflection on the complexities of organizing the marginalized and speaking on their behalf.

Our guest Biko Koenig is an Assistant Professor in the Government and Public Policy programs at Franklin & Marshall college in Lancaster, PA. He is also co-founder of Research Action, a worker-owned research and organizing firm that performs research and analysis for unions, solidarity economy organizations, community groups and social justice campaigns. Trained as an ethnographer and qualitative specialist at the New School for Social Research, Koenig's research investigates questions of political behavior and mobilization that centers the experiences of everyday actors as they seek to challenge status-quo power relationships.

My co-host today is Joe Zerilli, and MA student in the Communication program at Oakland University.

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In an era of deepening polarization, Sari Hanafi examines how social scientists often reproduce the very injustices they seek to challenge, taking entrenched positions while dismissing alternative perspectives.

He introduces the concept of symbolic liberalism - a contradiction in which individuals espouse classical liberal principles, yet act in politically illiberal ways. This, he argues, has exacerbated the pathologies of late modernity: authoritarianism, economic precarity, and environmental destruction, now all unfolding in a climate where reasonable debate seems increasingly impossible.

Examining key flashpoints of contemporary polarization, Hanafi critiques how symbolic liberalism inflates the universality of rights while simultaneously narrowing the space for dialogue. Rather than this rigid ideological stance, he calls for a dialogical turn, a renewed public sphere where diverse conceptions of the ‘common good’ engage in genuine conversation.

Blending political and moral philosophy with sociological critique, Hanafi offers a path forward in an age when intellectual exchange is more necessary, yet also more imperilled, than ever. Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology (Liverpool UP, 2025) is not just a critique of polarization but a critical and impassioned call to reclaim meaningful intellectual discourse.

Sari Hanafi is a Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University of Beirut. He served as President of the International Sociological Association (2018–23) and Vice President of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (2015–16). An International Fellow of the British Academy, he was also the Editor of Idafat: The Arab Journal of Sociology (2007–22). His contributions to the field have been recognized with some of the Arab world’s most prestigious academic awards, including the Abdelhamid Shouman Award (2014) and the Kuwait Award for Social Science (2015). In 2019, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the National University of San Marcos, Peru.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: here

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Given the sometimes extraordinary politicization of culture, it is surprising that Sesame Street has gained acceptance and legitimacy in more than fifty countries. Sesame Street's global success raises two questions. First, how does a US icon like Sesame Street spread around the world, gaining acceptance as a local cultural product? Second, how does the nonprofit that created it, Sesame Workshop, and its partners around the world navigate cultural differences, manage conflicts, and construct shared collective representations to create Sesame Street programs that resonate with local audiences?

In Sesame Street Around the World: Culture, Politics, and Transnational Organizational Partnerships (Oxford UP, 2025), Dr. Tamara Kay answers these questions using data from seven years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork and 200 in-depth interviews with Sesame Workshop staff and international partners-including their real-time interactions-from seventeen countries within four regions around the world.

Dr. Kay argues that Sesame Workshop's secret is its engagement in coproduction, meaning it works with partners as a transnational team to create local Sesame Street programs together. Through coproduction, Sesame Workshop and its partners create new collective identities by constructing value to align their interests and exchanging complex cultural knowledge to both customize and build alliances. She traces the successive processes of coproduction, beginning with the imagination of the cultural product, to its disassembly, reconstitution, and dissemination. Coproduction privileges the creation of new knowledge that emerges from transnational interaction, and uses that new knowledge to create a hybrid cultural product. The Sesame Street case grapples with and illuminates culture in transnational interaction, providing insight into a range of other transnational organizational partnerships and different kinds of hybrid cultural products.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Working-Class Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce in Scotland, 1855–1939 (Oxford UP, 2025) by Professor Eleanor Gordon, Professor Katie Barclay, and Dr. Jeff Meeks is the first book-length study of the history of working-class courtship and marriage in Scotland, from the establishment of civil registration to the introduction in 1939 of legislation which abolished irregular marriage and introduced civil marriage. Adopting a 'life course' approach, the book explores the social, economic, and cultural contexts of romantic partnerships, from courtship through to marital or family dissolution.
Drawing from a wide range of sources that capture official accounts and discourses on the one hand, and the testimony and experience of working-class people on the other, the book offers a uniquely broad and textured view of courtship and marriage in this period. In so doing, it advances recent historiographical debates surrounding marriage in the Anglophone world, particularly the mutability of 'love', and whether the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted a social and cultural 'turning point' for the working classes in terms of choice of marriage partner, the nature of the marital relationship, and the parent-child relationship. The book also engages with debates about extra-marital sexual activity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether the family was more or less 'stable' than the contemporary family, and the different ways that marriages broke down before the advent of divorce reform. This has important implications for wider European and North American historiography, and raises timely questions about the primacy of the 'traditional family' in policy and public discourse.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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In Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing (San Diego State UP, 2024),  Michael James Roberts, Kristin Lawler, and David P. Cline take the widespread participation of skateboarders and surfers in the Black Lives Matter movement as a catalyst to reconsider the significance of the cultural politics of surfing and skateboarding. It is the first academic volume to bring together leading scholars in the areas of both surfing and skateboarding studies. This episode also invites Jarret Rose to discuss his contribution to this anthology.

Michael O. Johnston, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Sociology at William Penn University, where he specializes in the cultural and interpretive study of space, behavior, and identity. His scholarship examines how designed environments shape social interaction, connectedness, and moral life across diverse settings. He is the author of The Social Construction of a Cultural Spectacle: Floatzilla (Lexington Books, 2023) and Community Media Representations of Place and Identity at Tug Fest: Reconstructing the Mississippi River (Lexington Books, 2022). His current research projects include the study of escape rooms as emotion-structured environments, temporal urban environments in rural historical towns, student experiences of hanging out and being at home while at college and university, and a more recent study on the making of rodeo. To learn more about his work, visit his personal website, Google Scholar profile, or connect with him on Bluesky (@professorjohnst.bsky.social) or Twitter/X (@ProfessorJohnst). He can also be reached directly by email.

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Many of us take diapers for granted. Yet diaper insecurity is a common, often hidden consequence of poverty in the US, where nearly half of American families with young children struggle to get enough diapers.

Drawing on interviews with mothers dealing with this overlooked issue, in Living Diaper to Diaper: The Hidden Crisis of Poverty and Motherhood (U California Press, 2026) Dr. Jennifer Randles shows how diapers have unique practical and symbolic significance for the well-being of families. Tracing the social history of diapering, Randles unravels a complex story of caregiving inequalities, the environmental impacts of child-rearing, and responsibility for meeting children’s basic needs. Yet it is also a hopeful story: the book chronicles the work of people who manage diaper banks as well as the growing diaper distribution movement.

A hard-nosed yet nuanced tale of parenting, Living Diaper to Diaper is an eye-opening examination of inequality and poverty in America.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Detroit seemed to experience an explosive rebirth following its bankruptcy, the largest in US municipal history. It was as if the slate had been wiped clean and the color line erased in the nation’s largest Black city. Detroit Never Left explains the relation between racism and space by analyzing the ways opportunities changed in the years leading up to and following bankruptcy.
Based on a variety of data, including in-depth interviews with people who identify as “Latina/o/x” in their early 20s, ethnographic observation, and media coverage, in Detroit Never Left: Black Space, White Borders, Latino Crossings (NYU Press, 2026), Dr. Nicole E. Trujillo-Pagán shows how a dialectic between empty and concrete abstractions created new opportunities for outside investment, often at the expense of residents' fortunes. She reveals space is much more than a neutral backdrop; It is continually produced through abstractions that act like bordering and crossing practices to control resources and opportunities. With broad implications for analyses of space and opportunity, Detroit Never Left tackles important contradictions in the post-bankruptcy city. For example, urban youth do not want to be moved out or isolated in their barrio. Similarly, many Detroiters feel spatial changes happen “to,” instead of “for” them. Ultimately, residents’ concerns underscored broader tensions between democratic inclusion and racialized capitalism.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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