Erin Raffety, "Families We Need: Disability, ...

After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ...  Show more

In this episode I discuss the book Understanding Social Images: Essays on Visual Methods and Teaching Anthropology (Berghahn, 2025) with co-editors David Zeitlyn and Chihab El Khachab, a posthumous collection of writings by the late anthropologist Marcus Banks. Banks was a key t ...  Show more

An intimate account of rural New England families living on the edge of homelessness, as well as the practices and policies of care that fail them. Families on the Edge: Experiences of Homelessness and Care in Rural New England (MIT Press, 2023) is an ethnographic portrait of fam ...  Show more

Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China (Anu Press, 2023) provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a m ...  Show more

When children are born with disabilities or become disabled in childhood, parents often experience bewilderment: they find themselves unexpectedly in another world, without a roadmap, without community, and without narratives to make sense of their experiences. Amanda Apgar's boo ...  Show more

Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (MIT Press, 2021) by Dr. Anna Lora-Wainwright digs deep into the paradoxes, ambivalences, and wide range of emotions and strategies people develop to respond to toxicity in everyday life. An examination of the daily grind of ...  Show more