New Books in Anthropology

Latest Episodes:

Jeffrey Hoelle, "Cultivated: Plants, Hair, and the Aesthetic of Control" (Yale UP, 2026) Jun 13, 2026

Show notes

An exploration of the concept of cultivation, as conducted on both the land and the body, which expands our understanding of it as practice, aesthetic, and ideology.

In Cultivated: Plants, Hair, and the Aesthetic of Control (Yale University Press, 2026), Jeffrey Hoelle traces the imprint of cultivation across the naturally growing covers of the land and body—plants and hair. The book builds from research in the agricultural fields and cattle pastures at the edge of the Amazon rainforest to domestic landscapes and hair salons and shops in the frontier cities of Brazil and beyond. In spaces where the tangled forest once stood, clean pastures and ordered rows of crops now sit on properties with geometric edges. From rural spaces to immaculate lawns and cemeteries in the city, the imprint leads to the body, where hair, like plant growth, is cut, trimmed, and otherwise managed. Seemingly separate domains of agriculture, landscaping, and personal grooming are governed by a similar aesthetic of control.

This unique pairing of land and body expands our understanding of cultivation as a practice and as an ideology that operates in frontier Amazonia—but also closer to home, influencing how we conceptualize and interpret the covers that grow on and around us, and our imagined relations with nature in the future. Hoelle argues that we must understand this system of thought and the overlooked role it plays in environmental destruction and social inequality.

Jeffrey Hoelle is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research explores the social, cultural, and political-economic dimensions of environmental transformation and deforestation in frontier Amazonia. He is the author of Rainforest Cowboys: The Rise of Ranching and Cattle Culture in Western Amazonia (UT Press, 2015)

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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Patrick Brodie, "Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland" (Duke UP, 2026) Jun 13, 2026

Show notes

In Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland (Duke University Press, 2026), Patrick Brodie maps the shifting fortunes of the Irish economy before the 2008 financial crisis up to 2020, outlining how the Irish state moved from rampant and irresponsible financialized development to incentivizing private media infrastructure and policy as instruments for economic recovery. Brodie contends that while the Irish state’s investment in creative and technological sectors of media was supposed to bring resources back into the country and stabilize the economy, it instead rendered the country even more vulnerable to future instability and transferred wealth into the hands of multinational corporations. Through ethnographic work and close engagement with the Irish state’s policy and planning across a number of key media infrastructure sites, Brodie unfolds the very real environmental and social impacts of Ireland’s naturalized model of financialized, foreign direct investment-led infrastructural development. Richly researched and comprehensively argued, Wild Tides reveals the multifarious, unexpected ways that financialization reaches into the daily life of a nation.

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Mardi Reardon-Smith, "Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia" (Stanford UP, 2025) Jun 10, 2026

Show notes

Modern environmentalism often frames conservation as moral, humans damage nature, and conservation protects it. But Mardi Reardon-Smith’s Making Do: Conservation Ethics and Ecological Care in Australia,published by Stanford University Press in 2025, dismantles that comforting narrative and replaces it with something far more complex and candid.

Set on the Cape York Peninsula, the book explores how Aboriginal traditional owners, pastoralists, conservation workers, and government institutions navigate landscapes shaped by colonialism, climate instability, species diversity, cattle grazing, fire, and ecological loss. What emerges is not a story of heroes versus villains but a portrait of people trying to “make do” within damaged systems.

One of the book’s most provocative arguments is that care itself can be violent. Conservation often entails killing feral animals, managing landscapes by burning and fencing ecosystems, and deciding which species merit protection and which do not. Mardi challenges the romantic assumption that ecological care is inherently gentle or morally pure. Instead, care becomes a form of intervention, practical, political, and deeply contested.

Perhaps most importantly, Making Do rejects the illusion that environmental crises can be neatly solved. Climate change, biodiversity collapse, and ecological instability have already irreversibly transformed the world. The challenge now is not to return to an imagined past but to learn how to build livable futures amid uncertainty.

In a time when environmental discourse often swings between apocalyptic despair and technological optimism, Mardi offers a more grounded perspective. Ecological responsibility is imperfect, exhausting, and full of contradictions, yet it remains necessary.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research examines the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, particularly within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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Ladan Rahbari and Olga Burlyuk eds., "From the Margins: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity" (Open Book Publishers, 2026) Jun 08, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the New Books Network, I spoke with Dr Olga Burlyuk and Dr Ladan Rahbari about their new edited volume, From the Margins: Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity (Open Book Publishers, 2026). The book is open access.

As universities promote internationalisation while maintaining labour systems that leave many migrant scholars vulnerable, this volume builds on the editors’ 2023 collection (also featured on New Books Network) by incorporating global perspectives. Through personal and autoethnographic narratives, contributors examine visa insecurity, institutional exclusion, racialisation, loneliness, and overwork, while also highlighting joy, solidarity, and “resilience”.

By treating lived experience as critical knowledge, From the Margins offers a strong critique of contemporary academia and invites readers to consider whom universities serve, whose labour sustains them, and what a more equitable academic future could look like.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is an Assistant Professor in the School of Religion and Theology within the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research examines the intersections of religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, particularly within African diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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Eileen Otis, "Walmart: Made in China" (Stanford UP, 2026) Jun 06, 2026

Show notes

Walmart: Made in China (Stanford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Eileen Otis tells the story of Walmart's expansion in China, making the case that it is the story of a major shift in the structure of global capitalism. Walmart, argues Dr. Otis, is a leading actor in the rise of merchant capitalism, wherein the role of the merchant has changed from operating at the whim of industrialists, to leveraging control over large consumer markets. As Walmart's retail business grew at unprecedented rates across the globe, so too did this business model.

Walmart: Made in China documents the business's expansion into China not as a tale of seamless market entry, but as a case of frictions, improvisations, and labor struggles that reveal deeper transformations in global economic power. Drawing on years of fieldwork in Walmart stores across China, Dr. Otis traces an internal supply chain—from warehouse to checkout—where workers stock, promote, explain, and process goods under varying regimes of control. These labor regimes, structured by gender, migration, surveillance, and corporate rules and culture, as well as managerial oversight, reveal how capitalist value is realized, and how it can be contested.

At the heart of her analysis is the rise of a new system—merchant capitalism—in which control over consumer markets, rather than production, drives profit. Thus, Walmart: Made in China offers a compelling account of this shift in global capitalism, as it gets made and remade, on the retail floor.

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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Romani Grassroots Language Learning Jun 03, 2026

Show notes

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Emily Pacheco speaks with Dr Santiago Betancor Falcón (University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain) about his 2025 paper, Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. The conversation focuses on minoritised languages, autonomous language learning, and language activism.

Reference:

Betancor-Falcon, S. (2025). Autonomous language learning as political activism: Roma autodidacts as catalysts of the nascent Romani language revitalisation movement in Spain. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 44(6), 647-662. DOI here

For additional resources, show notes, and transcripts, go here.

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Dougald O’Reilly, "Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) Jun 01, 2026

Show notes

From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O’Reilly’s Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms’ to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia’s participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

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Cultural Competence Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All: Talking culturally responsive teaching with Dr Remy Low May 31, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, we are delighted to be joined by educator and researcher Associate Professor Remy Low to explore what cultural competence and culturally responsive teaching looks like in the classroom. He is committed to furthering culturally responsive education across schools, higher education, arts and cultural institutions, as well as community organisations. As a previous high school teacher, now published academic and lecturer, Remy chats to us about what “good teaching” is, and that cultural competence in the classroom is grounded in self-awareness, care, and responsiveness.

This episode is hosted by Dr. Pooja Mittal Biswas. Pooja Mittal Biswas is an Academic Facilitator at the National Centre for Cultural Competence and an award-winning educator and author. She is the author of ten books of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Her ninth book, Hunger and Predation (Cordite Books, 2023) was shortlisted for the 2024 NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, and her tenth book, The Maker of Garlands, was published by Vagabond Press in 2024.

Produced by: Adubi Plange, Dr Amy McHugh, Sarah Mashman

Podcast Artwork: Zein Arif

Resources

You can learn more about Associate Professor Remy Lowe through his University of Sydney Academic Research Profile.

Below are some of Remy’s works discussed in this episode of the Cultural Competence Collective:

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Christos Lynteris, "How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2026) May 30, 2026

Show notes

Today, rats are nearly synonymous with plague, but this association is surprisingly recent. For centuries, plague devastated populations without being linked to animals. So how did the rat become the symbol of one of history's deadliest diseases? In How Plague Got Rats: Mastering a Zoonotic Pandemic (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), Professor Christos Lynteris unravels this story by focusing on the Third Plague Pandemic, a global outbreak that began in China in the 1850s and claimed an estimated 15 million lives by the mid-twentieth century.

This was the first major pandemic recognized by scientists as zoonotic—spread from animals to humans—and it marked a turning point in both medical science and global health. Through a gripping historical investigation, Professor Lynteris explores how rats entered the medical imagination of the time. He reveals how scientific thinking about disease vectors evolved in tandem with colonial power structures as plague responses unfolded across Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From laboratory discoveries to imperial interventions, the rat became central not just to understanding plague, but to shaping new forms of epidemiological reasoning.

This provocative book shows how zoonosis emerged as a politically charged concept in the context of empire and pandemic crisis. It is a powerful history of how science, society, and colonialism converged around a creature now inseparable from the story of epidemic disease.

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“You Sound So Australian”: From Being Read to Rewriting the Room with guest Zindzi Okenyo May 30, 2026

Show notes

Welcome to the first episode of The Cultural Competence Collective podcast! For our first episode, we are joined by the multi-talented actress, musician and director, Zindzi Okenyo! You may recognise her from your TV screen on shows like Fisk, Wakefield and Play School, on stage from her multiple shows with Sydney Theatre Company or maybe you’ve heard her hits like ‘A Woman’s World’ as a solo artist Okenyo, or ‘Love + Kindness’ from her fun, family-friendly kids project Zindzi & the Zillionaires. Tune into our first episode as we chat with Zindzi about the importance of cultural competence, diversity and representation across the arts.

Show notes

This episode is hosted by Dr. Matthew Tyne, an Academic Facilitator at the National Centre Centre for Cultural Competence. He comes to cultural competence following 20 years of working in international community development, especially in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and sexual health promotion with diverse communities in Australia.

Produced by: Adubi Plange, Dr Amy McHugh, Sarah Mashman

Podcast Artwork: Zein Arif

Featured Music:

- A Woman’s World by OKENYO
- Anthropology by OKENYO

You can find more of Zindzi’s music on her webpage OKENYO: http://www.okenyo.com/

You can find music by Zindzi & the Zillionaires on their webpage: https://www.zindziandthezillionaires.com/about.

Resources

You can read more about DESTINY, Zindzi’s most recent piece of directorial work through the Melbourne Theatre Company: https://www.mtc.com.au/discover-more/backstage/destiny-programme/.

The Sydney Morning Herald article mentioned can be found here: https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/actor-musician-and-presenter-zindzi-okenyo-on-taking-risks-and-self-care-20180216-h0w7zu.html

If you are interested in developing your knowledge about race and racism, and deepen your understanding of the diversity of the world's cultural histories and identities, you can enrol in the NCCC’s free online course Confident conversations about race and racism: https://www.coursera.org/learn/confident-conversations-about-race-and-racism

Participants will learn about the dynamics of cultural difference, and how to increase their knowledge and ability to address inequity, bias and privilege, and to create space for effective dialogue about racism.

Mental Health Support Services:

For University of Sydney staff: CONVERGE

Converge offers multiple dedicated helplines for specialist services: