Date/Time
Date(s) - Fri 3 October
13:00 - 14:00
Through vivid encounters with Americans of many kind, Pandian shares tools to think beyond the twists and turns of our bracing present.
Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology
Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His books include A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times, and Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down, now available from Stanford University Press. A former department chair of anthropology, he serves now as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. He lives with his family in Baltimore, where he is currently working on a new book project on decay, waste, and the crafting of ecological futures.
In 2016, Anand Pandian was alarmed by Donald Trump’s harsh attacks on immigrants to the United States, the appeal of that politics of anger and fear. In the years that followed, he crisscrossed the country—from Fargo, North Dakota to Denton, Texas, from southern California to upstate New York—seeking out fellow Americans with markedly different social and political commitments, trying to understand the forces that have hardened our suspicions of others. The result is Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, a groundbreaking and ultimately hopeful exploration of the ruptures in our social fabric, and courageous efforts to rebuild a collective life beyond them.
Through vivid encounters with Americans of many kinds—including salesmen, truck drivers, police officers, urban planners, and activists for women’s rights and environmental justice—Pandian shares tools to think beyond the twists and turns of our bracing present. While the impasses draw from deep American histories of isolation and segregation, he reveals how strategies of mutual aid and communal caretaking can help to surface more radical visions for a life in common with others, ways of meeting strangers in this land as potential kin.
Join via Zoom or in person to discuss his journey and book. Registration is required for either.
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