Talk At The Library

(About Talk at the Library) The two podcast episodes ‘Talk at the Library’ are a result of us, a working group of the student association, consensually recording the event of the same name at the Department for Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies of the University of Zurich at the end of the spring semester 2023.(About the episode) In this first ‘Talk at the Library’ episode, Lindsay Vogt talks to Kathrin Eitel about her 2022 published monograph "Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia. Circularity, Waste and Urban Life in Phnom Penh" (Routledge 2022). In her PhD, Kathrin Eitel analyzed waste recycling practices in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh and identified postcolonial structures of "doing waste politics" that perpetuate prevailing notions of waste as detached from sociocultural contexts. After a quick introduction and a brief summary of a few main points by Lindsay, Kathrin reads a few paragraphs of her book. The two move on to discuss questions around gender, recycling and waste infrastructure as well as the life and work of Cambodian waste pickers – the edjai. As the recording happened in a library with an audience, you will be hearing some background noise. We are always looking forward to any input, ideas and general feedback regarding our small fachverein ethnologie Zurich podcast production. We thank both the department as well as the two speakers for the interesting talk and the opportunity for another inspiring anthropolitical episode!(About Kathrin Eitel) Kathrin Eitel is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the chair of Prof. Dr. Annuska Derks at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK). As a cultural anthropologist and feminist STS scholar, she previously worked as a research associate at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Goethe University in Frankfurt and in the study program Metropolitan Culture at HCU in Hamburg. Her current research project focuses on the disjuncture between urban planning resilience strategies, mega-technology projects, and local resilience practices by examining flood control strategies in HCMC (Vietnam), and freshwater scarcity in Istanbul (Turkey). Kathrin Eitel is particularly interested in the heteronormative worldviews inscribed in these resilience technologies, their tangible implications for urban life, and the opportunities for more participatory and co-laborative envisioning of an urban future. (Source: ISEK Ethnologie)(Mentioned Literature) The authors mentioned in the episode are Donna J. Haraway, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star and Gregory Bateson.