Members of an encampment at a public university in New York City are on trial for felony charges. In 2024, students across the world launched encampments to challenge university financial ties to Israel in response to the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban public university system in the United States, celebrates and valorizes its long and storied history of activism. However, the administration reacted differently during the 2024 police raid on the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at its flagship campus in Harlem. Comparing the CUNY student movements of the mid-1990s and 2024, this episode asks: What are the conditions in which institutions like the university choose to repress struggles for social justice? At what point do stories of struggle become institutionally palatable?

Thayer Hastings is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center in New York City. He is a scholar of political anthropology, the anthropology of colonialism, and Middle East and Palestinian studies. His dissertation focuses on how everyday modes of documentation in contemporary Jerusalem, where Palestinians have to prove their presence to the Israeli state in order to maintain access to their homeland, change the way political belonging is understood.

Our thanks go to Prison Radio, which published the speech Mumia Abu-Jamal gave to the CUNY encampment in April 2024. All audio samples used in this episode are from the Gaza Solidarity Encampment of April 2024. These artifacts were collected and preserved by the CUNY Encampment Archive. The CUNY Digital History Archive is a rich resource that provided much crucial background information for the social movement history of CUNY activism. 

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

The gold industry, alongside nation-states, has marginalized the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector for decades, but now things seem to be changing. The industry has realized that engaging with the ASM sector could be more beneficial for their reputation than excluding it. While once ASM was viewed as a risk, now it is seen as an opportunity.

Anthropologist Giselle Figueroa de la Ossa spent more than 20 months studying the gold value chain and the actors involved in it. In this episode, she explores this recent shift around ASM and its unintended consequences.

Giselle Figueroa de la Ossa is a Colombian anthropologist and a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the London School of Economics. Her research explores the labor, ethics, and affects that make gold a valuable substance demanded by the tonnes. She draws from her multifaceted ethnographic research among bureaucrats, technocrats, and entrepreneurs who work on a gold mineral traceability project in Colombia and financiers who work on responsible gold sourcing in London, Switzerland, and Paris. . She is the founding director of the Laboratorio de Antropología Abierta (Open Anthropology Lab), an organization in Colombia that, since 2018, produces audiovisual content for nonacademic audiences to increase the impact of academic research.

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Milpa is an ancestral way of farming in Mexico and other regions of Mesoamerica that involves growing an assortment of different crops in a single area without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. This provides people in the region with a wide variety of foods and a balance of nutrients. In recent years, with the introduction of farming based on synthetic herbicides, milpa has changed, and land is used to grow just a single crop. This change in agriculture has led to the rise of ultra-processed foods in these rural areas, which is impacting the nutritional health of the people. This change in agriculture, together with the rise of ultra-processed foods in these rural areas, is affecting the nutritional health of the people.

In this episode, bioanthropologist Anahí Ruderman shares her experiences working with a milpa growing community in Veracruz, Mexico, that is resisting the food of globalization as it tries to cook up a healthier future.

Anahí Ruderman is an Argentinean biological anthropologist with a Ph.D. in biological sciences from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. She is currently an associate researcher at the Instituto Patagónico de Ciencias Sociales y Humanas of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas of Argentina. Anahí is interested in  processes related to the nutritional status and diet of contemporary populations in Latin America in the context of globalization and food transitions. She uses analytical tools from different disciplines that range from human evolutionary biology, population genetics, and human ecology to history and sociopolitics.

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

In the last two decades, an unprecedented wave of Chinese investment and migration to Africa has transformed many economies on the continent. But this has also provoked a storm of controversy, as some criticize the situation as exploitative neocolonialism. Others defend this migration as development assistance and an act of solidarity between regions jointly victimized by European colonialism. 

In this episode, anthropologist Justin Lee Haruyama takes us to Zambia, where Chinese investment is bringing two cultures together in the country's mines. Justin speaks with local Zambians and researchers on Chinese migration to examine the complicated impacts Chinese activity is having in Africa today.

Justin Lee Haruyama is a British Columbia–based writer, researcher, and anthropologist. He is a fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies and incoming assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and has received grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Fulbright Program, and Wenner-Gren Foundation. Justin’s research examines the controversial presence of Chinese migrants and investors in Zambia today. His writing has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The South China Morning Post, Anthropology News, Somatosphere, Cultural Anthropology, and elsewhere.

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

While researching the history of parole in South Africa, a lawyer and anthropologist discovers the origins of the N2 road, which she drives everyday. Now interested in this highway’s history, she explores how this and other roads were used to expand territory and exploit people during South Africa’s colonial periods under Dutch and British rule, and how they kept people separate during the country’s apartheid government from 1948 to 1994. In the present, she learns of a new highway project that threatens to repeat this legacy of racist displacement.

Nicole van Zyl is a South African lawyer and Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of the Western Cape. Her doctoral research explores connections between the first systemized forms of early release from incarceration and the modern practice of parole. She is interested in how incarceration as punishment communicates belonging and exclusion from society, and how this relates to present-day conflicts around South Africa’s land redistribution as an atonement for colonial and apartheid crimes.

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

In existence for more than 70 years, the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) is the site of the longest ceasefire in the world. What can this region teach us about the long, intended—and unintended—consequences of this form of a truce?

In this episode, sociocultural anthropologist T. Yejoo Kim uncovers how residents have been surviving through decades of sonic violence and propaganda, and explores  recent developments in such long-lasting psychological warfare.  She also details how a former excavationist remembers discovering human remains at the DMZ. Even after more than 70 years, the ceasefire allows war to reverberate through the skies and unsettle the earth below.

T. Yejoo Kim is a sociocultural anthropologist researching the political economy of the Korean DMZ. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her dissertation builds upon the anthropology of borders and the economy, diaspora and transpacific studies, and critical disability frameworks. Her research has been funded by Fulbright and the Korea Foundation.

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

In this episode, social anthropologist Luis Alfredo Briceño González talks about his experiences as a foreign researcher in Chile. During his fieldwork, he met Marta, a Venezuelan woman residing in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Santiago. Marta and her family held a mock election to protest not being able to vote in their home country during the presidential elections in 2024. Through her story, Luis discusses the enduring emotional and political ties that migrants often have with their home countries.

Luis Alfredo Briceño González is a doctoral candidate at the Potificia Universidad Católica de Chile. His research focuses on migration and auto-constructed settlements in contexts of informality. He conducted fieldwork in Santiago de Chile, a city that has become an important host to migrants in South America. Before his Ph.D., he worked as a research assistant on the Latin American Anti-Racism in a “Post-Racial” Age project.

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

When it comes to the division of labor in hunter-gather societies, the stereotype is generally that men hunt and women gather. But when a recent study claimed that women in hunter-gather societies hunt just as much as their male counterparts, the finding made news around the world. But why does gender equality in the past matter so much today?

This episode focuses on the complexities of work, gender, and power throughout human evolution. Evolutionary anthropologist Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias guides us through what these can tell us about gender roles in humanity’s past and the origins of uneven power dynamics.

Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias is a postdoctoral researcher in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her research aims to reconstruct the past of contemporary hunting and gathering people from different places in Africa to better understand the processes that shaped the enormous genetic and cultural diversity on the continent today. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining genetic, ecological, and archaeological analyses with ethnographic fieldwork among hunter-gatherer populations in the Republic of Congo. Previously, she worked in the Yucatán Peninsula, studying the drivers of linguistic diversity.

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

Since its emergence in 1960s Harlem, the LGBTQ+ “ballroom scene” has expanded into a transnational subculture. For outsiders, understanding how a ball functions can take time. 

Join linguistic anthropologist Dozandri Mendoza as they “walk” us through a night at a kiki ball in Puerto Rico. They introduce us to DJs, commentators, performers, and the Boricua Ballroom children who are refashioning the techniques of their trans-cestors. Dozandri guides us through both the expectations of those on the sidelines of the ballroom runway and the anticolonial political meanings behind the Puerto Rican ballroom scene. 

Dozandri Mendoza is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Their doctoral research focuses on trans forms of creative expression in the Puerto Rican ballroom scene. Dozandri explores the representation of Puerto Rican linguistic practices in the archive of ballroom history. They also examine what verbal and embodied art forms such as reading, throwing shade, commentation, and walking a category teach us about diasporic memory, decolonial critique, and trans survival. Their work centers around a multimodal and performance-based ethnographic installation called the “Kiki Ball del Palabreo” held in Puerto Rico in 2023. Dozandri’s research has been supported by a Society for Visual Anthropology/Lemelson Foundation Fellowship, the Duberman-Zal Fellowship from the Center for LGBTQ+ Studies, and grants from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB. 

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

The United Fruit Company was a U.S. multinational corporation and at one time, the largest landholder in Central America. To maintain authority in this part of the world, the company stamped out labor reform, collaborated with U.S.-backed coups, and, oddly enough, invested in archaeology. Why?

In this episode, anthropologist Charlotte Williams explores the company’s role in preserving the past. She discusses United Fruit's botched conservation project at the Maya site of Zaculeu and the ongoing impacts of that program. 

Charlotte Williams is a Mellon Democracy and Landscapes Initiative fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University (2024–2025), and a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research explores how archaeology as a discipline has been used in U.S. imperial projects, with a focus on how the United Fruit Company used archaeology to grow territorial power in Central America. Charlotte has worked on community museum projects, coordinated decolonizing museum programs, and co-curated an independent art exhibition.

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SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is produced by Written In Air. The executive producers are Dennis Funk and Chip Colwell. This season’s host is Eshe Lewis, who is also the director of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program. Production and mix support are provided by Rebecca Nolan. Christine Weeber is the copy editor. 

SAPIENS is an editorially independent magazine of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Press. SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human is part of the American Anthropological Association Podcast Library. 

This episode is part of the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship program, which provides in-depth training for anthropologists in the craft of science communication and public scholarship, funded with the support of a three-year grant from the John Templeton Foundation.