Social Impact Episodes

Produced in collaboration with Experience by Design. We are witnessing a moment in our lifetimes that we will hopefully never see again. The world is gripped in a pandemic of a scale unseen for a century. Beyond the human toll, we are seeing how healthcare systems people once had trust in crumble before their eyes. In this episode, Adam and Gary talk with Shelley White and Meenakshi Verma-Agrawal of the Simmons University Masters of Public Health program on what we learn from this moment, and ho...

Why More Security Never Feels like Enough Storyslamming Anthropology Series, Story 3. Written and Performed by Astrid Countee In recent years, the terms Public and Anthropology have been paired with more frequency. Yet, what this seemingly suspect partnership is, how it could function, and what goals it could have are still in relative formation. Today, public anthropology might mean several different things ranging from jargony lectures that are “open to the public”, digital media (like blogs...

In this special interview, TAL's Ryan Collins talks with scholar, activist and artist Jason de Leon about the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border. In addition to these roles, de Leon is a MacArthur Fellow and National Geographic Explorer. He uses his platforms to create public dialogue, exhibitions, and media about undocumented migration, the human costs of the US immigration policy known as 'deterrence through force.' This very human conversation reveals the emotional toll, and ...

In this episode, Adam and Aneil reflect on Aneil’s fieldwork in climate finance. Climate finance is an area of finance focused on mobilizing investment for climate change solutions, namely infrastructure that is sustainable. Aneil’s research is centered on the growth of the green bond market within climate finance. Green bonds are debt instruments that finance infrastructure deemed sustainable by the climate finance community, such as public transit, green building, renewable energy, and water i...

Storyslamming Anthropology Series, Story 2. Written and Performed by Taylor Genovese In recent years, the terms Public and Anthropology have been paired with more frequency. Yet, what this seemingly suspect partnership is, how it could function, and what goals it could have are still in relative formation. Today, public anthropology might mean several different things ranging from jargony lectures that are “open to the public”, digital media (like blogs, videos, or podcasts) that are generally ...

Edible Insects part 1. Will crickets ever catch on as an alternative source of protein in the United States? How about cockroach “milk”? Why do people in so many parts of the world NOT eat insects? Where does that disgust for or against eating certain things come from? Adam is joined once again by guest host and biological anthropologist Andrea Eller to dig into edible insects, what just might be a new marketing idea for McDonald's, and how insects reveal underlying cultural trends of disgust, e...

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move, an audio collaboration between the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association, and This Anthro Life Podcast. In this fifth and final episode, Adam Gamwell, Leslie Walker, and Ryan Collins focus on cultural survival, a complex subject framed by migration, misconceptions over language and identity, as well as by resilience of the human spirit across borders. With a subject like cultural survival, the ...

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move , an audio collaboration from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association and This Anthro Life Podcast In the US, fashion has been relegated to large impersonal retail spaces and increasingly online stores. Fashion in the US, as many know all too well, is transactional. The sense of community one has through clothing is often expressed through style though it is exceedingly rare for truly deep rel...

Welcome to CultureMade: Heritage Enterprise in a World on the Move, an audio collaboration series from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the American Anthropological Association and This Anthro Life Podcast. Join hosts Adam Gamwell, Leslie Walker and Ryan Collins as they explore what it means to craft, form, and make culture in a world defined by movement, migration, and changing borders. Step into behind the scenes conversations and candid interviews from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. He...

This Anthro Life is opening the conversation with EPIC (the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Community) on the theme of Evidence. Taking center stage at this year's Annual EPIC Conference. “Evidence” is a subject of increasing social importance in today’s political climate. What constitutes evidence and when it is found to be credible all have far-reaching consequences. Because of this, practicing anthropologists are exploring concerns of and around evidence through experimentation, new methodolo...

On this episode of This Anthro Life, hosts Ryan Collins and Adam Gamwell are joined by TAL correspondent and guest host Astrid Countee and by a very special guest, Valorie Aquino. They joined us to talk about the 2017 March for Science. Valorie is one of the key organizing 30’s something scientists who helped make the 2017 march a reality. As she conveys in this episode, doing so was no easy task. This required countless late nights, missed social occasions, hours of frustration, and unfortunate...

Welcome listeners to the second installment of our Diversity and Inclusion crossover series, bringing together This Anthro Life with Brandeis University. For those of you who are new to the show, This Anthro Life (TAL) was launched as a scholar-practitioner program designed to bring anthropological and social science research and thinking to interdisciplinary and public audiences. The original idea behind the podcast is to use our skill sets and toolkits as anthropologists to translate and socia...

Welcome to Story Slamming Anthropology. This series features both innovative narrative and audio performance drawing on the deep toolkit and methods of anthropology. The goal with Story Slamming Anthropology is to invoke the public facing spirit of Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Melville Herskovits and many others to speak to 21st century concerns from a comparative perspective in clear language. The narratives here are based on juxtapositions, seemingly counter- or non- intuitive linking’s of subje...

Welcome listeners to the first installment of our Diversity and Inclusion crossover series, bringing together This Anthro Life with Brandeis University. For those of you who are new to the show, This Anthro Life (TAL) was launched as a scholar-practitioner program designed to bring anthropological and social science research and thinking to interdisciplinary and public audiences. The original idea behind the podcast was to use our skill sets and toolkits as anthropologists to translate and socia...

In this Conversations episode, This Anthro Life hosts Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins are joined by author Andrew Rowen to discuss his new novel, Encounters Unforeseen: 1492 Retold. Coming in the months trailing the 525th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s (or Cristobal Colon’s) voyage to the America’s, Rowen’s novel seeks to add some much needed depth to the modern myths on the subject. Encounters Unforeseen doesn’t start at the (in)famous voyage, or even in Europe. Instead, The drama alternat...

Hey Listeners! Adam and Ryan are back from their brief summer hiatus (a time filled with fieldwork, dissertation writing, and travels abound) with new content, a fresh Patreon campaign, lined up interviews, an upcoming limited series on diversity in the university setting and much more! Support our new campaign on Patreon! Go ahead a click that nice image to visit our new page, to read about what we want to do, and how you can give securely. Just a dollar a month makes a huge difference for us! ...

This episode is a little different from our normal content. In it we feature a presentation Adam gave for Pivotal Labs in which he explores This Anthro Life’s (and his own) developing philosophy about conversations and podcasting as social technologies and what the worlds of anthropology and podcasting can do. Some topics Adam touches on include: what anthropology does in the world, conversation as “little social laboratories”, mapping the contemporary podcast ‘cosmos’, podcasters as cultural br...

FreeThink 6 – Who Are the 13,000? In this week’s Free Think, Adam and Ryan introduce a new member of our team, Matt Artz, who will be leading a new project to study and research you! We hit 13,000 subscribers in the past week which is a huge milestone for us. In order to keep This Anthro Life growing we would like to better integrate the desires of our listeners with how we market, produce, and choose our content. We want to get to know you! To do this we will be updating the What’s Your Story ...

Freethink #5: Finding Balance in the midst of Burnout In this week’s free think Ryan and Adam talk burning out and finding balance. They reflect on their travels to conferences for the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Society for American Archaeology and why conferences are inspirational and invigorating. Also the AMAZING fact that TAL now has over 11,000 subscribers!! Thank you so much to everyone for helping us build the tribe, let’s keep taking this to the top! Social Consciousness F...

As you may have noticed, TAL has been on a bit of a break from releasing new episodes. But, the good news is that we have not been idle. The other night when Ryan and Adam were out and about they got to talking about TAL and their perspectives on public anthropology. What does the future hold? What inspires change? Realizing they were on to something good, they pulled out a phone and hit record. This episode is what came out. We hope you’ll enjoy! This episode was recorded live and near a kitche...

with Aneil and Ryan Special Guest: Serra Hakyemez Is waiting political? Can you cut in line at Starbucks during your hectic morning commute? In this episode of TAL we team up with Serra Hakyemez, a Junior Research Fellow from the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University to discuss her paper entitled, “Waiting, Acting Political, Hope, Doubt, and Endurance in the Anti-Terrorism Courts of Northern Kurdistan”, which focuses on the ways political detainees’ families are actively ...

Today’s D+A minisode follows last week’s powerful conversation with Jara Connell on protests and people-powered forms of resistance. In this minisode Jara offers us a nugget of wisdom to be cautious about thinking all protests are the same or that we can even evaluate them with the same criteria. TAL D+A Minisodes are short, actionable steps you can take in your everyday life to become more socially savvy, culturally competent and holistic in your actions. If you have any suggestions for D+A mi...

What does mass-protesting accomplish? Does no arrests equate success? Why is protesting disruptive? And more! In this action packed episode of This Anthropological Life, Aneil, Adam, and Ryan talk to Jara Connell about mass protesting and the strategies behind social movements. Who is Jara Connell? Jara is a PhD candidate at Brandeis University. She focuses on race, space, and policing in Saint Louis. Jara’s Master’s thesis dealt with sex and gender politics in Ferguson. When Jara is not advoc...

Minisodes are finally here! If this is your first TAL Podcast experience, welcome! We recommend you start off with our regular Conversation series – 25ish minute dialogues about everything and anything human – one topic at a time. Design + Application (DnA, get it??) Minisodes are bite-sized actionable insights and social building blocks to help you become more socially savvy, culturally competent, and holistic in thinking and action. With D+A we move from anthropological thinking to anthropolo...