BielefeldANTHRO Book Podcast

The BielefeldANTHRO Book Podcast features discussions of new and classic books in anthropology with the authors who are either anthropologists based at Bielefeld University's Faculty of Sociology or our guest scholars.

Each episode offers listeners an overview of the featured book and the thought process behind it. Our goal is to highlight outstanding scholarship on real-world issues and make anthropology more accessible to a wider audience. We strive to release a new episode every two to three months.

Latest episode!

"Banking on words" book cover on a yellow background

Banking on words: The failure of language in the age of derivative finance (Chicago UP) by Arjun Appadurai

Guest: Arjun Appadurai (New York University)
Host: Hairuo Jin (Bielefeld University)
Release: May 2026

👉 Listen on: Bielefeld University website (No account or subscription required!)

Also on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Deezer

Upcoming episodes...

Kinship across distances: Gender, generation, and class dynamics in Chinese translocal families (UCL Press) by Zhenwei Wang

Guest: Zhenwei Wang (Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies)
Host: Yukun Sun (Bielefeld University)
Release: July 2026

Agents of migration: Institutional embeddedness of labour brokerage in Nepal (Springer Nature) by Sandhya A.S.

Guest: Dr. Sandhya A.S. (Bielefeld University)
Host: Mai Chi Nguyen (Bielefeld University)
Release: September 2026

Migrant labour in global factories: Care, welfare and government under market socialism in China and Vietnam (UCL Press) by Jake Lin, Minh T. N. Nguyen and Jingyu Mao

Guests: Jake Lin (University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley), Minh T. N. Nguyen (University Bielefeld) and Jingyu Mao (The University of Edinburgh)
Host: TBA
Release: TBA

Chinese development in late-socialist Laos: Negotiating debt and desire (Routledge) by Phill Wilcox

Guest: Phill Wilcox (Bielefeld University)
Host: TBA
Release: TBA

Team

Editor: Prof. Minh Nguyen (minh.nguyen@uni-bielefeld.de)

Hosts: Members of the Sociology of Transnationalisation and Social Anthropology Department, Bielefeld University.

Producers:

Lana Emmerling (lana.emmerling@uni-bielefeld.de)
Nguyen Vo (nguyen.vo@uni-bielefeld.de)