In the Thick of It:
The Lab’s Podcast for Applied Ethnography
Season 2:
Extending the 2025 Public Anthropology Conference
About Season 2: Expanding the Public Anthropology Conference
In November 2025, the Public Ethnography Lab supported the Department of Anthropology at American University in bringing back the Public Anthropology Conference (PAC) after a seven-year hiatus. The 2025 conference was themed Public Knowing, Public Change and was held as a free, open-to-all convening at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington, D.C. The goals included (1) reinvigorating and expanding the beloved conference, (2) fostering a space of robust discussion, shared learning, and new connections, and (3) supporting knowledge and action that can fuel needed societal change.
An important shift within this reimagination was to see the conference as a critical base from which to continue and build upon this type of work year-round. The conference would be an annual touchpoint within a broader infrastructure that continually practices public anthropology, ethnography, and research translation.
Season 2 was designed with this exact purpose in mind – helping disseminate and expand the conversations from PAC 2025 to a broader audience. Each episode in the series features PAC presenters. In conversation with host Eva Rey, presenters discuss their contributions to PAC and how this connects to their ongoing use of ethnography and qualitative methods in a range of fields and settings. This season, listeners will hear from teenagers who use ethnography to talk back to adult-led studies on their demographic, a non-profit who uses qualitative research to address “furniture poverty,” an immigration research lab that trains new generations of researchers, and more.
New episodes are released every 2 weeks. Explore this season’s episodes below!
Listen to Season 2! New episodes release every 2 weeks.
