91. Auto-Reflexivity and Fieldwork Safety

This episode of AnthroPod is the third in a miniseries sharing highlights from talks organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology at the 2025 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. The presentations we’ll share with you today deal with the disastrous world we live in, a world where capitalist interests and geopolitical conflict threaten traditional forms of agriculture and land custodianship, where enduring violence and conflict have joined forces with anthropogenic climate change to drive communities to ruin. But we’ll also share presentations about people who are imagining and developing livable futures, learning from lessons from their past and rekindling their relations with the environment and nonhuman others. Presenters: Hagwil hayetsk (Charles Menzies) Susanna Hoffman Courtney Desiree Morris Kerry Ryan Chance Kristin Skrabut Meredith Welch-Devine Gorkem Aydemir-Kundakci Eilis Lanclus Aanmona Priyadarshini Jonathan Eaton Show notes: https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/aaa-2025-part-3-environment-disaster-viable-futures

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

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. Show notes: culanth.org/fieldsights/aaa-2025-part-1-storytelling-performance-history

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.