The second guest of Foraging is anthropologist Kwame Edwin Otu, associate Professor in the African Studies Program of Georgetown University. His doctoral research on the Sasso, a community of self-identified effeminate men living in the Jamestown district of Accra, served as the groundwork for his first monograph, Amphibious Subjects, published by the University of California Press in 2022. In this episode, Kwame delved on his ongoing research project, an ethnography of the pickers toiling in one of the world’s largest e-waste dumps. He also reflected on how his previous research on queerness informed and shaped his trajectory in environmental anthropology. We further discussed the notion of waste, and how to approach non-human entities in anthropology.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify and Apple Podcasts as well as on our website.
Photo credits: ‘Exposing Copper’, picture by Kwame Edwin Otu