In the inaugural episode of the series, Ipshita talks to Dr Stefanie Mauksch about the ways in which economic anthropology and ethnographic research can help us understand the diverse experiences of entrepreneurship. Stefanie discusses her own professional path to studying entrepreneurship and her experiences doing ethnographic work at entrepreneurship events in different geographical and cultural contexts. One of the themes of this conversation is the friction between globally standardized discourses and localized, experiential life-worlds of entrepreneurship that create dynamic, shifting subjectivities among entrepreneurial actors.
Stefanie Mauksch teaches Anthropology at Leipzig University, Germany. She has conducted research on the global social entrepreneurship movement, startup communities and the effects of entrepreneurial initiatives, preferably in the Global South. Her research is largely focused on how entrepreneurship shapes local action in contexts of development, in particular Nepal and Sudan, and in specific social fields, such as meanings and experiences of dis/ability. She publishes her work in both disciplines of Anthropology and Organization Studies.
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Join Cindy for the fourth installment of “Economies of Discard” as she chats with Dr. Waqas Butt, Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Waqas’ research interests include caste, work and labor, waste, infrastructures, development, and value. Cindy and Waqas discuss his work in Lahore and the Punjab where he explores themes related to property and resources in waste infrastructures. Waqas is the author of “Waste intimacies: Caste and the unevenness of life in urban Pakistan” which appeared recently in American Ethnologist. He is currently working on a book project that explores the ways in which waste workers, who predominantly represent low or non-caste groups, have become essential components of urban life and waste infrastructures. 
Join Cindy for the third episode in this Spring’s collection, Economies of Waste and Discard. In this Episode Cindy is joined by Dr. Elana Resnick. Elana’s fieldwork among a group of Romani street sweepers in Sofia Bulgaria gave her first hand insight into the racialization of waste labor, as well as how this work has been affected by the post-socialist transition and EU accession. Elana Resnick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara. 
Join Cindy as she continues her exploration into the economic anthropology of waste and discards with Dr. Kathleen Millar. Kathleen is an associate professor of Anthropology at Simon Frasier University and is the author of Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump which won the Society for Economic Anthropology’s book award in 2020. She is also the co-Editor of The Anthropology of Work Review. Her work explores questions of the human condition that emerge in experience of work, economy and urban life in Latin America. 
In the first episode in the series, Cindy Isenhour talks with David Giles, an anthropologist who has long been working with the Food Not Bombs movement in cities like Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Boston and Melbourne. In these urban hearts of global capitalism David has scavenged food out of dumpsters and cooked with members to feed the community with food discarded by restaurants, grocers and food distribution facilities. Cindy and David talk about the absurdity of the criminalization of food sharing, David’s thoughts on abjection and about his new book coming out this spring with Duke University Press, A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People: World Class Waste and the Struggle for the Global City.