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About Aparna Gopalan

NBN Episodes hosted by Aparna:

South Asian Studies August 2, 2021

Everyday State and Politics in India

Government in the Backyard in Kalahandi

Sailen Routray

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
Set in the eastern state of Odisha in a district known as the “Somalia of India,” Everyday State and Politics in India: Government in the Backyard in Kalahandi (Routledge 2018) …
South Asian Studies October 6, 2020

Brand New Nation

Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in 21st-Century India

Ravinder Kaur

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
It is 21st century commonsense that India is an “emerging” economy. But how did this common sense itself emerge? How did India’s global image shift from that of a poverty-infested …
South Asian Studies September 16, 2020

Shareholder Cities

Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India

Sai Balakrishnan

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
In the thoroughly researched, lucidly narrated new book Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations Along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press), Sai Balakrishnan (Assistant Professor of City and Urban Planning …
General History July 17, 2020

The Broken Heart of America

St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States

Walter Johnson

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
St. Louis, Missouri is the city with the highest rate of police shootings in the United States. It’s the city with an 18 year difference in life expectancy between Black …
Anthropology July 14, 2020

The Government of Beans

Regulating Life in the Age of Monocrops

Kregg Hetherington

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
By the time Bolivian President Evo Morales was deposed in December 2019, it had become increasingly clear that Latin America’s Pink Tide – the wave of left-leaning, anti-poverty governments which …
South Asian Studies May 8, 2020

Making the Modern Slum

The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay

Sheetal Chhabria

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
In the 1870s, as colonial India witnessed some of the worst famines in its history where 6-10 million perished, observers watched in astonishment as famished people set out for the …
Anthropology May 5, 2020

Tea &amp

Tamil Women &amp

Mythri Jegathesan

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
In recent years, commodity chain analysis – the scholarly effort to piece together the production and consumption ends of various commodities – has really taken off. For goods ranging from …
Anthropology January 7, 2020

The Power of Debt

Identity and Collective Action in the Age of Finance

Hannah Appel, Sa Whitley, Caitlin Kline

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
As the upcoming 2020 U.S. election finally brings questions of economic justice center stage, this episode discusses the powerful short open-source book The Power of Debt: Identity and Collective …
South Asian Studies August 7, 2019

Ground Down by Growth

Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in 21st Century India

Alpa Shah

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
A recent UNDP report makes the astonishing claim that India has halved its poverty between 2006 and 2016. Moving us past the rosy picture, Alpa Shah and her co-author's multi-authored …
Critical Theory June 7, 2019

Dead Pledges

Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First Century Culture

Annie McClanahan

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
When teaching a public course called “The Age of Debt” this winter break, I had the strange realization that one of the the most successful readings in that course, the …
South Asian Studies May 24, 2019

Politicizing Creative Economy

Activism and a Hunger Called Theater

Dia Da Costa

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
In a world where heritage, culture, creativity, and the capacity to imagine are themselves commodified and sold under the banner of neoliberal freedom, (how) can art be harnessed for anti-capitalist …
Anthropology January 7, 2019

Land’s End

Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier

Tania Li

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
If you want to read just one book to properly understand capitalism, let it be Tania Li’s award-winning 2014 book Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier (Duke University …
South Asian Studies December 5, 2018

Landscapes of Accumulation

Real Estate and the Neoliberal Imagination in Contemporary India

Llerena Searle

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
Few who have visited India in the past two decades will have failed to noticed the sudden and spectacular urban transformation that has taken place in many of its cities …
South Asian Studies November 27, 2018

Financializing Poverty

Labor and Risk in Indian Microfinance

Sohini Kar

Hosted by Aparna Gopalan
Is microfinance the magic bullet that will end global poverty or is it yet another a form of predatory lending to the poor? In her new book Financializing Poverty: Labor …