Last Wednesday, June 14, the Seminar für Ethnologie of the MLU invited to a public lecture by Kim Fortun in the seminar room of the Max Planck Institute for Ethnological Research. Fortun spoke about "Late Industrial Ethnography Redoubled - Form Politics to Methods and back." Her research and teaching focus on environmental health, injustice and disaster; experimental ethnographic methods; and the poetics and politics of data infrastructure.

This project, in which Siarhei Liubimau - member of the CityIndustries-Network - participates, nurtures place-specific formats of applied, negotiated, never finished memorialization and meaning making in and about disrupted towns (with the primary focus on mono-functional towns after their productive phase). It blends the registers of institutions, rituals, communities, infrastructures, individuals, artifacts, dreams, media and norms, in order to open up spaces where memory and meaning making can strengthen each other.

Feminist speculations and interventions are not necessarily part of the canon of ethnographic methodology, but they are gaining importance in the wake of an increasing critique of postcolonial and hegemonic epistemic processes of knowledge production. In this talk, Kathrin Eitel from the University of Zürich, will explore where the potentials (and pitfalls) lie for epistemic methods as creative resistance. Join this talk in St. Gallen or Online!