Mark Beissinger (Princeton) recalls fieldwork in the Soviet Union, the transition to a “post-Soviet” experience, and speculates about the future of fieldwork in Russia as U.S.-Russia relations return to something resembling a new Cold War. A tireless mentor to dozens of comparativists, he reflects on his career and our shared ethical responsibility as archivists.

How many civil wars were there in Iraq after the U.S. invasion – and how did they really end? Roger Petersen of MIT describes a life of immersion, from road construction to honchoing a network of scholar-soldiers as they unspooled the complexity of a decade of war in Iraq. How does one get honest answers out of warlords in situations where they (and their entourage) have all the power? Is it possible to be a neutral observer in an ongoing war? Can ethnographicsensibility be taught -- and if not, as the profession incentivizes students to become technically-oriented in our training sequences, what is lost? Provocative, funny, blunt, and always thoughtful, Petersen's slow-rolled delivery is calibrated to get you wondering what you might learn if you got serious about active listening.

Wendy Pearlman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, where she is Crown Professor of Middle East Studies. She studies the comparative politics of the Middle East, social movements, and forced migration, and has conducted with more than 500 displaced Syrians since 2012. In this podcast we discuss how this data was curated ("midwife-ing") to create the award-winning We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from Syria (HarperCollins, 2017).