Circular Researching as a Method for Making Sense of the Urban Fabric

Past Events

Read and download the slide presentation here

Keynote Presentation

Kathrin Eitel will discuss the historical impact on waste recycling based on the socio-materiality of Phnom Penh’s recycling infrastructure today (what she calls ‘vivid infrastructures’). She will then go back and forth in the city’s history and provide insights on the waste fantasies that have developed over decades and their political impact. Finally, she will describe her methods of cyclic researching and multimodal ethnography.

Bio

Speaker: Dr. Kathrin Eitel is a cultural anthropologist with a focus on feminist science and technology studies and critical infrastructure studies. She is currently a Walter Benjamin Fellow (DFG) at USSH University in HCMC (Vietnam), the University of Osaka (Japan), and the Polytechnic University in Turin (Italy). For her PhD, she conducted extensive ethnographic research on the urban waste recycling system in Phnom Penh (Cambodia) and is currently carrying out research on flood resilience in Southeast Asian cities. She is the author of the book Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia (Routledge, 2023). More information: www.kathrineitel.com

Moderator: Dr. Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier, a research fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden and CKS Senior Research Fellow. Her research project, “Republican Visualities: Towards a New Archive of the Khmer Republic”, uses the theory of visual culture to reassess the republican period ‘on its own terms’, exploring a wide range of materials, including photos, newsreels, illustrated magazines, advertisements, movies, cartoons, and artworks. The objective is to produce a critical, multi-perspectival, interdisciplinary history of the Khmer Republic, and to map an expanded archive of that period, and the traces it has left in Cambodia.

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