Explore every episode of the podcast Common Concerns

In the first episode of the “Common Concern” podcast, Siqi Tu and Sohail Jagat speak with Xiang Biao, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Looking back on his experiences and academic career in China and the United Kingdom, he traces the origins of his “Common Concern” approach.

The “Common Concerns” approach is an exercise in which researchers reflect together with their interlocutors. It is therefore not merely a research task carried out one-sidedly by the researchers. It is an analytical strategy designed to facilitate a type of research in which researchers can ultimately return to their conversation partners to report what they have discovered, what they think, what concepts emerge from this, or what further questions arise.

In this episode, Xiang Biao (Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) interviews Dr. Alf Gerlach, a senior psychoanalyst whose decades-long work bridges German psychoanalysis, Chinese social practice, and the Frankfurt School’s radical fusion of Freud and Marx. Together, they dissect a concept that reshapes how we see all social research: the social unconscious.

This episode dismantles the myth that "social science is neutral." It raises the question of the extent to which ignoring the social unconscious makes us complicit in the very problems we study.

In this episode, Xiang Biao sits down with Zhipeng Duan, a design researcher-turned-anthropologist, to dismantle the idea that powerlessness is a lack of power. Isn't it rather a blindness to the world’s hidden possibilities?

This episode reveals how "confrontation" can transform powerlessness into life force.

In this episode, Xiang Biao, Andrew Haxby, and Xenia Cherkaev examine "suspicion" as a Common Concern in Nepal's land market, where people are deeply suspicious of brokers who facilitate land transactions, even though these brokers operate "legitimately."

The conversation reveals how Kathmandu's land market has become a 30-year investment bubble that "never pops," fueled by remittances and complex family land ownership structures. Land prices have outpaced income by 4-5 times, creating a situation where land is both a family bond and a financial asset. Haxby connects Nepal's situation to other protests worldwide, framing suspicion as an emotional response to an economic system where "the money disappears" and everyone is skimming.

In this episode, Xiang Biao, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, interviews Insa Koch, Professor of British Culture at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Her work focuses on corruption, power, and political ontology, which challenge the very foundations of the Common Concerns approach. This is a critical conversation. Can we truly speak to people with these new concepts, or are we merely reinforcing the very systems we claim to criticize?

In this episode, Biao Xiang and researcher Siqi Tu speak about her ethnographic work on transnational education. Specifically, the phenomenon of affluent Chinese families sending their children to American private high schools at a young age.

What begins as a study of global mobility and elite education quickly unfolds into a profound meditation on the emotional, psychological, and existential costs of living a life meticulously engineered for success.

In this episode, Biao Xiang interviews two extraordinary thinkers: Don Kalb, whose new book "Value and Worthlessness" has been hailed as a landmark in Marxist anthropology, and Xenia Cherkaev, a scholar whose work bridges Eastern European social history with contemporary existential questions.

Together, they reimagine ethnographic research by centering hidden histories, relational use values, and the emotional weight of being “worthless” in a world obsessed with exchange and performance. They further explore how Post-Socialism reveals the limits of the left and why the right isn’t just “Xenophobia”, but a response to abandonment.

In this episode, Xiang Biao, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, speaks with Ferda Nur Demirci about her research on the indebtedness of miners in Soma, Turkey. Her findings reveal something that may seem contradictory to some: in a world of exploitation, debt is not merely a burden; rather, it can become a moral shield.

Ferda's research doesn't just tell a story about poverty or financial hardship. It explores how people, in the face of systemic precariousness, transform debt into self-discipline, solidarity, and even dignity.

In this episode, Xiang Biao talks to Olaf Zenker, a leading anthropologist whose work spans Southern Africa, Germany, and Northern Ireland. Together, they explore one of the most urgent questions of our time: What happens when people lose faith in liberalism — not because they reject its ideals, but because they feel it has failed them?

This post-liberal fatigue is a deep, relational exhaustion with systems that promised justice, equality, and democracy, but delivered only delay, disillusionment, and fragmentation.