The University of Arizona Press

February 16, 2026

The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Jason Roberts author of We Stay the Same: Subsistence, Logging, and Enduring Hopes for Development in Papua New Guinea. Roberts is a practicing anthropologist who currently works on subsistence policy and natural resource management issues in Alaska. His work and research engages interests in development, sustainability, climate change, hope, and environmental justice.

When asked what drew him to the South Pacific and questions of political ecology, Roberts replied, “I got my undergraduate degree in forestry, but there were questions that I didn’t think we were asking. So that led me to the political ecology framework. . . . In graduate school, I learned about the special agriculture and business leases in Papua New Guinea, especially on New Hanover Island, and that sounded like the perfect topic to explore. . . . After doing some pilot research in 2012, things got rolling, and I found the topics from a theoretical perspective and humanistic perspective to be very interesting, and the Lavongai people were very welcoming.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book (now available in paperback):

On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

February 12, 2026

The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Allison Caine, author of Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands. Allison Caine is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Her research in Peru takes a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to understanding contemporary environmental problems in partnership with international and Indigenous citizen scientists. Her ongoing research program aims to understand diverse experiences of health and aging in changing landscapes in Peru and the United States.

When asked what drew her to follow the herders in the Andes and study them in the context of ecology, Caine replied, “So much of what we know about the earth’s climate comes from this part of the world. A few hours distance from where I work in Peru is the site of the Quelccaya Ice Cap. This is the site of an extensive climate science initiative where for decades, teams of scientists have been monitoring the earth’s climate . . . . So my primary goal was to write about climate change from the ground up: to go to this place that has generated so much knowledge and really understand how the people living there see the world, and see the world changing.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book:

In the high Andean grasslands 4,500 meters above sea level, Quechua alpaca herders live on the edges of glaciers that have retreated more rapidly in the past fifty years than at any point in the previous six millennia. Women are the primary herders, and their specialized knowledge and skill is vital to the ability of high-elevation communities to survive in changing climatic conditions. In the past decade, however, these herders and their animals have traversed a rapidly shifting terrain.

Drawing on the Quechua concept of k’ita, or restlessness, Allison Caine explores how herders in the community of Chillca in the Cordillera Vilcanota mountain range of the southeastern Peruvian Andes sense and make sense of changing conditions. Capricious mountains, distracted alpacas, and wayward children deviate from their expected spatial and temporal trajectories. When practices of sociality start to fall apart—when animals no longer listen to herders’ whistles, children no longer visit their parents, and humans no longer communicate with mountains—these failures signal a broader ecological instability that threatens the viability of the herder’s world.

December 4, 2025

The Arizona Highways podcast features an interview with Ann Lane Hedlund, author of Mac Schweitzer: A Southwest Maverick and Her Art. Hedlund is a cultural anthropologist who collaborates with Indigenous weavers and other visual artists to understand creative processes in social contexts. From 1997 to 2013 she served as a curator at Arizona State Museum and professor at University of Arizona, Tucson.

Asked about what is was like to chronicle the life of a person she had never met, Hedlund answered: “I lived with Mac artwork in my home . . . . I’m a cultural anthropologist who has worked with other artists my whole career, so I was used to watching artists. My fascination is in the artist’s process.” She approached Mac’s story as an anthropologist, as she said, “following the threads of the story.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

In Tucson during the 1950s, nearly everyone knew, or wanted to know, the southwestern artist Mac Schweitzer. Born Mary Alice Cox in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1921, she grew up a tomboy who adored horses, cowboys, and art. After training at the Cleveland School of Art and marrying, she adopted her maiden initials (M. A. C.) as her artistic name and settled in Tucson in 1946. With a circle of influential friends that included anthropologists, designer-craftsmen, and Native American artists, she joined Tucson’s “Early Moderns,” receiving exhibits, commissions, and awards for her artwork. When she died in 1962, Mac’s artistic legacy faded from public view, but her prize-winning works attest to a thriving career.

Author Ann Lane Hedlund draws from the artist’s letters, photo albums, and published reviews to tell the story of Mac’s creative and adventuresome life.

November 24, 2025

The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Ana Patricia Rodríguez, author of Avocado Dreams: Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area. Rodríguez is an associate professor of U.S. Latina/o and Central American literatures at the University of Maryland, College Park. She calls herself a “1.5 immigrant” because she moved to the United States when she was a child. She is past president of the Latina/o Studies Association (2017–2019).

After analyzing the work of professional writers and artivists, Rodríguez concludes her book with the creative work of her students from digital storytelling projects. Asked about the inspiration to bring Entre Mundos / Between Worlds digital storytelling into her classroom, Rodríguez answered: “I wanted to find ways we could tell our stories based on personal archives. And of course, families have a lot of pictures. So I wanted to find a way to use those photos we have in our albums, as well as the sounds we could capture and put into video. I had recorded sounds in El Salvador that I couldn’t hear in the United States; sounds like the songs of birds, sounds of the ocean, the sounds of parakeets flying at five o’clock in San Salvador. So I wanted my students to learn how to combine these types of images and sounds to create a story in a short amount of time, because with digital storytelling, you only have three to five minutes.”

Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

About the book:

For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community.

In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region.

November 18, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with K.G. Hutchins author of A Song for the Horses: Musical Heritage for More-than-Human Futures in Mongolia. Hutchins is a cultural anthropologist interested in the intersection of music and the environment. His research focuses on the roles that nonhuman animals, spirits, and other beings can play in cultural heritage, particularly in Mongolia and southern Appalachia.

Asked about how the context of his Mongolia research, Hutchins answered, “I’m a cultural anthropologist with a music background . . . so I asked musicians, ‘what’s important to know about Mongolian music, especially about the morin khuur, or horse fiddle?’ It permeates the soundscape of north Asian music, but we don’t know much about it. My advisors said that if you want to know about the horse fiddle, you need to know about the horses and the role they play in the way that you learn the instrument, and the way that you learn to be a listener of the instrument.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

As permafrost in Siberia continues to melt and the steppe in the Gobi turns to desert, people in Mongolia are faced with overlapping climate crises. Some nomadic herders describe climate change as the end of a world. They are quick to add that the world has ended before for Indigenous people in North Asia, as waves of colonialism have left the steppe with a complicated web of apocalypses. A Song for the Horses by K. G. Hutchins examines cases in which people respond to the pressures of climate change by drawing on cultural heritage to foster social resiliency. 

Hutchins’s ethnographic research, spanning more than a decade, provides a vivid and intimate portrayal of Mongolian life. Musicians use the morin khuur, or ‘horse fiddle,’ to engage with the subjectivities and agencies of nonhuman animals and other beings. This work is a significant contribution to the posthuman turn in social sciences, engaging with theories from prominent scholars such as Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. 

November 10, 2025

The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with Joe Watkins author of Indigenizing Japan: Ainu Past, Present, and Future. Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is an affiliated faculty member in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. He was president of the Society for American Archaeology from 2019–2021. His study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and populations on a global scale.

Asked about how he became interested in the Ainu people, Watkins answered, “A colleague at Hokkaido University in Japan asked if I would come to Japan to talk about the issues American Indians faced in terms of membership status, issues of repatriation and other issues of archaeology. . . . The four-day trip to Sapporo where I talked about these issues was the beginning of seventeen years of work with Hokkaido University on archaeological excavations that involved Ainu history, and of working with Ainu individuals to further discuss how archaeological work can impact Ainu communities.”

Listen to the full podcast here.

About the book:

Relaying the deep history of the islands of Japan, Watkins tells the archaeological story from the earliest arrivals some 40,000 years ago to 16,000 years ago when local cultures began utilizing pottery and stone tools. About 2,300 years ago, another group of people immigrated from the Korean peninsula into the Japanese archipelago, bringing wet rice agriculture with them. They intermarried with the people who were there, forming the basis of the contemporary Japanese majority culture. As the Japanese state developed on the central Islands of Honshu, Ryukyu, and Shikoku, the people of Hokkaido continued developing along a different trajectory with minimal interaction with the mainland until colonization in the mid-nineteenth century, when the people known as the Ainu came under Japanese governmental policy.