Seminar
KTI Seminar: Uli Beisel (University of Bayreuth)
A new academic year means a new KTI seminar series! We kindly invite you to sign up for a slot on our seminar calendar. A We are happy to announce that we will kick off the new academic year with a long-awaited seminar: Tuesday’s speaker will be Uli Beisel, professor Culture & Technology in Africa at the University of Bayreuth.
This talk connects long-standing anthropological fieldwork on mosquito control in West Africa with an analysis of the recent mosquito-developments in Germany. Germany abounds with insect-related debates. By discussing mosquitoes in West Africa and invasive mosquitoes in Western Europe, I start to develop an analysis of mosquito-human-entanglements as "infrastructuring environments" (Blok, Nakazora & Winthereik, 2016). Such infrastructuring emphasises the entangled and co-constitutive character of how mosquito and human define each other and so co-create specific bio-social and environmental effects. This talk approaches both the agency of the humans aiming to control the mosquitoes and the agency of the mosquitoes creating new habitats for themselves by moving and mutating, as generative of particular human-mosquito landscapes. It demonstrates how a focus on infrastructuring allows us to bring contradictory and ambivalent concerns in health and ecology in conversation and tension with each other
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A related forthcoming publication is co-authored with Dr. Carsten Wergin: Beisel, U. and Wergin, C. "Understanding multispecies mobilities: from mosquito eradication to coexistence". In: Hall, M. and Tamir, D. Mosquitopia? The Place of Pests in a Healthy World. London: Routledge
Interested in giving a KTI seminar yourself? Don’t hesitate to sign up here! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wOEDeOv07g3KZ1C-AltUVoUiY3kq8LPeKs2SITJaaDA/edit.
Looking forward to seeing you!