Help Support the NBN and NBN en Español on Patreon | Visit New Books Network en Español!

New Books Network

About Alize Arıcan

Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican

NBN Episodes hosted by Alize:

Anthropology September 26, 2023

In Quest of a Shared Planet

Negotiating Climate from the Global South

Naveeda Khan

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Listen:
Based on the author’s eight years of fieldwork with the United Nations-led Conference of Parties (COP), In Quest of a Shared Planet: Negotiating Climate from the Global South (Fordham UP …
Mobilities and Methods September 12, 2023

Unsettling

The El Paso Massacre, Resurgent White Nationalism, and the US-Mexico Border

Gilberto Rosas

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Listen:
On August 3, 2019, a far-right extremist committed a deadly mass shooting at a major shopping center in El Paso, Texas, a city on the border of the United States …
Mobilities and Methods September 3, 2023

Filipino Time

Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor

Allan Punzalan Isaac

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
From spectacular deaths in a drag musical to competing futures in a call center, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor (Fordham UP, 2021) examines how contracted service labor performed …
Mobilities and Methods August 25, 2023

Space-Time Colonialism

Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements

Juliana Hu Pegues

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Listen:
As the enduring "last frontier," Alaska proves an indispensable context for examining the form and function of American colonialism, particularly in the shift from western continental expansion to global empire …
Anthropology August 12, 2023

An Elusive Common

Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis

Karen E. Rignall

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Karen E. Rignall's book An Elusive Common: Land, Politics, and Agrarian Rurality in a Moroccan Oasis (Cornell UP, 2021) details the fraught dynamics of rural life in the arid periphery of …
Anthropology August 11, 2023

Routine Crisis

An Ethnography of Disillusion

Sarah Muir

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Listen:
Argentina, once heralded as the future of capitalist progress, has a long history of economic volatility. In 2001–2002, a financial crisis led to its worst economic collapse, precipitating a dramatic …
Anthropology August 3, 2023

Landscapes of Care

Immigration and Health in Rural America

Thurka Sangaramoorthy

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Listen:
Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America (UNC Press, 2023) examines the ways immigrants, mainly from Latin America and the Caribbean, navigate the healthcare system in the United …
Anthropology July 29, 2023

After Stories

Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador

Irina Carlota Silber

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
After Stories: Transnational Intimacies of Postwar El Salvador (Stanford UP, 2022) builds upon Irina Carlota [Lotti] Silber's nearly 25 years of ethnographic research centered in Chalatenango, El Salvador, to follow the …
Middle Eastern Studies July 23, 2023

Circumcision and Medicine in Modern Turkey

Oyman Başaran

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
In Turkey, circumcision is viewed as both a religious obligation and a rite of passage for young boys, as communities celebrate the ritual through gatherings, gifts, and special outfits. Yet …
Anthropology July 19, 2023

Architectures of Hope

Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing

Moisés Kopper

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Moisés Kopper's Architectures of Hope: Infrastructural Citizenship and Class Mobility in Brazil's Public Housing (U Michigan Press, 2022) examines how communal idealism, electoral politics, and low-income consumer markets made first-time …
Mobilities and Methods July 10, 2023

Pressing Onward

The Imperative Resilience of Latina Migrant Mothers

Jessica P. Cerdeña

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Listen:
Pressing Onward: The Imperative Resilience of Latina Migrant Mothers (U California Press, 2023) centers the stories of mothers who migrated from Latin America, settled in New Haven, Connecticut, and overcame …
Mobilities and Methods July 5, 2023

Argonauts of West Africa

Unauthorized Migration and Kinship Dynamics in a Changing Europe

Apostolos Andrikopoulos

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Listen:
In rapidly changing and highly precarious contexts, unauthorized African migrants turn to kinship in search of security, stability, and predictability. Through the exchange of identity documents between “siblings,” assistance in …
Mobilities and Methods June 10, 2023

Dying Abroad

The Political Afterlives of Migration in Europe

Osman Balkan

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Listen:
On any given day, the remains of countless deceased migrants are shipped around the world to be buried in ancestral soils. Others are laid to rest in countries of settlement …
Anthropology June 8, 2023

Well Connected

Everyday Water Practices in Cairo

Tessa Farmer

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Listen:
Who is responsible for ensuring access to clean potable water? In an urbanizing planet beset by climate change, cities are facing increasingly arid conditions and a precarious water future. In …
Anthropology May 21, 2023

Life Beyond Waste

Work and Infrastructure in Urban Pakistan

Waqas Butt

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Over the last several decades, life in Lahore has been undergoing profound transformations, from rapid and uneven urbanization to expanding state institutions and informal economies. What do these transformations look …
Mobilities and Methods May 10, 2023

The Fluvial Imagination

On Lesotho’s Water-Export Economy

Colin Hoag

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Landlocked and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, the mountain kingdom of Lesotho became the world's first "water-exporting country" when it signed a 1986 treaty with its powerful neighbor …
Mobilities and Methods April 23, 2023

Passport Entanglements

Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations

Nicole Constable

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Passport Entanglements: Protection, Care, and Precarious Migrations (U California Press, 2022) examines the problems with documents issued to Indonesian migrant workers in Hong Kong and explores the larger role that passports …
Mobilities and Methods April 9, 2023

Crossing a Line

Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression

Amahl Bishara

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Palestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists …
Anthropology January 9, 2023

The Ends of Paradise

Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras

Christopher Loperena

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over …
Mobilities and Methods December 10, 2022

Oaxaca in Motion

An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration

Iván Sandoval-Cervantes

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Migration is typically seen as a transnational phenomenon, but it happens within borders, too. Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration (U Texas Press, 2022), documents a …
Anthropology August 5, 2022

Sextarianism

Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon

Maya Mikdashi

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
The Lebanese state is structured through religious freedom and secular power sharing across sectarian groups. Every sect has specific laws that govern kinship matters like marriage or inheritance. Together with …
Mobilities and Methods July 29, 2022

The Diasporic Condition

Ethnographic Explorations of the Lebanese in the World

Ghassan Hage

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Bridging the gap between migration studies and the anthropological tradition, Ghassan Hage illustrates that transnationality and its attendant cultural consequences are not necessarily at odds with classic theory. In The …
Mobilities and Methods July 26, 2022

Radical Resilience

Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility

Othon Alexandrakis

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
Radical Resilience: Athenian Topographies of Precarity and Possibility (Cornell UP, 2022) relates narratives of Athenians struggling to survive the impoverishment of relentless austerity measures, compounding emergencies, and human disasters of …
Mobilities and Methods July 15, 2022

Victims of Commemoration

The Architecture and Violence of Confronting the Past in Turkey

Eray Çayli

Hosted by Alize Arıcan
“Confronting the past” has become a byword for democratization. How societies and governments commemorate their violent pasts is often appraised as a litmus test of their democratization claims. Regardless of …