Episode #16: Alison Kenner and Siad Darwish

Conversations in Anthropology

Episode 16 comes to you from the recent Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, where Timothy managed to catch up with Alison Kenner and Siad Darwish for a conversation. We talk about pollution, asthma, making things legible, the utility of 'the Anthropocene', and much more. Alison Kenner is Assistant Professor in the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Drexel University. Her anthropological work focuses on the study of contemporary health practices, and how biomedical science and emerging technologies shape the way we understand and care for chronic disease conditions. Her work can be found in a number of journals, including Health, Risk and Society and Cultural Anthropology, and her book Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change will be published by University of Minnesota Press in November 2018. Siad Darwish is an anthropologist who explores how unequal economic and socio-political orders are inscribed in bodies and landscapes through environmental pollution. He holds a Ph.D. from Rutgers University, where he recently defended his dissertation, Waste and the Environmental Legacies of Authoritarianism in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia. You can find his work in Anthropological Forum and in the 2017 book Global Africa edited by Dorothy Hodgson and Judith Byfield. Some links: https://www.siaddarwish.com https://drexel.edu/coas/faculty-research/faculty-directory/kenner-alison/ https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/breathtaking