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Welcome back to In the Thick of It. On this podcast, we talk with researchers about how they do what they do, one method at a time. This is a project of the Public Ethnography Lab, housed in the Department of Anthropology at American University. We are a center focused on making ethnographic work matter beyond academia. This is our second season, and it builds on conversations that began at the Public Anthropology Conference held in November 2025. Throughout the season, we will be in conversation with presenters from the conference who are using ethnography and qualitative methods across a wide range of fields. In the episodes, we will dive into the behind-the-scenes of their work by exploring the choices, challenges, and creativity that go into qualitative methods. My name is Eva, and I am your host.
The Roti Collective. In this episode, we talked with Dr. Mariam Durrani. She is a decolonial feminist, political anthropologist, and multimodal mediamaker. Her scholarship and advocacy are located at the intersection of global racialization, migration, Muslim youth, higher education, and the geopolitics of war in the US, Pakistan, and online. Dr. Durrani's current book project, "The Imperial Optic: Migration, Racialization, and War in US and Pakistani Higher Education," is based on long-term (2013-19) ethnography at a private Pakistani university and a public US college, broadens the scale and scope of how we understand the impact of imperialism in global higher education. Her second research, the Roti Collective, is a series of collaborative public & academic engagements about roti and roti-making as a global food culture and history that connects people across South and West Asia, East Africa, across the Caribbean, and their diasporas everywhere else.
Music Credits:
"Study And Relax" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/