urban ethnology, environmental ethnology, feminist science and technology studies, post/decoloniality, anthropology of waste/discard studies, anthropology of water, speculative approaches and co-laborative methods.

Cambodia, Vietnam, Turkey

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) and substitutes Dr. Esther Horat. 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. 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. This led to the monograph "Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia. Circularity, Waste and Urban Life in Phnom Penh" (Routledge 2022). 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.

More information: www.kathrineitel.com

Publications