Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, with a joint appointment in Earth & Planetary Sciences.

His books include A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times, and Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life and How to Take Them Down, published in May, 2025 by Stanford University Press.

He has written that he sees these books as chapters in an ongoing anthropology of the open mind, a mind open to the differences and uncertainties of a wider world, committed to the significance of transformative encounters and relations. Openness of mind, he believes, is a necessary foundation for environmental ethics, the cultivation of ecological sensibility, the pursuit of livable relations with the natural world, a critical resource for the ecological trials of our time.
He serves as a curator of the Ecological Design Collective, a community for radical ecological imagination and collaboration.

We spoke with Anand Pandian on July 7, 2025 via FaceTime from his home in Baltimore, MD.

Articles pertinent to our conversation:

I crisscrossed America to talk to people whose views I disagreed with. I now have one certainty https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jun/01/united-states-polarization

What I learned from an unlikely friendship with an anti-masker https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/aug/19/anti-masker-unlikely-friendship

New Mexico sues US air force over Pfas pollution from military base https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/10/new-mexico-us-air-force-pfas

Landmark US study reveals sewage sludge and wastewater plants tied to Pfas pollution https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/04/pfas-pollution-sewage-wastewater

Trump administration yanks $15m in research into Pfas on US farms: ‘not just stupid, it’s evil’ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/11/trump-pfas-research-funding-farms

‘Alligator Auschwitz’: Nickname for new ICE facility renews debate over Nazi comparisons https://www.timesofisrael.com/alligator-auschwitz-nickname-for-new-ice-facility-renews-debate-over-nazi-comparisons/