Choi Auditorium, Occidental College Campus
This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP required.
Join the Media Arts and Culture Department and Oxy Arts for a panel discussion with Dr. Kwame Edwin Otu, Jaden Morales and Kai Knight ('17). This event is part of the MAC Cinematheque program season Analog@Oxy: Race, Sex, Technological Obsolescence.
The 4-part event series runs in conjunction with the Oxy Arts/Getty PST ART exhibition Invisibility: Powers & Perils.
It takes 400 to 1,000 years for a single toner cartridge to decompose. Although electronic waste (e-waste) refers to a discarded product at the end of its useful life, the conundrum underpinning electronic devices—both digital and analog—like the toner cartridge is that their toxic imprint on the environment extends long after their stated usefulness. Anthropologist Dr. Kwame Edwin Otu, environmental studies scholar Jaden Morales, and chemist Kai Knight will share their respective work on the social and sexual logics of e-waste across Ghana and Puerto Rico, and discuss why plastic does not degrade. Bringing together humanistic and scientific approaches to e-waste, this panel foregrounds the quandary that what many love and miss—analog technology—also inaugurated irreparable forms of toxicity and waste.
Speaker Bios
Kwame Edwin Otu is an Associate Professor and cultural anthropologist in the African Studies Program at the Edmund Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. His first book monograph, Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana (2022) is an ethnography on queer self-fashioning among a community of self-identified effeminate men, known in local parlance as sasso. Otu’s current/ongoing project, entitled The Salvage Slot: Technology and the Ecologies of the After-Afterlife, is an ethnography on waste workers on an e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, that investigates Africa’s paradoxical location as a site of extraction and deposition.
An Oxy alum, Kai Knight is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in the Chemistry Department at USC. In Professor Megan Fieser's lab, Knight works on the development of sustainable plastics and plastic depolymerization for a more circular plastics economy. Most recently, she earned the Anton B. Burg Foundation Predoctoral Teaching award, an award that enables graduate students considering careers in undergraduate teaching the opportunity to participate in mentored teaching at USC.
Jaden Morales
Jaden Morales (they/them) is a Puerto Rican environmental humanities scholar and 4th year Ph.D. candidate in American Studies & Ethnicity at USC. Tentatively entitled “Petro-Plantations,” Jaden’s dissertation is a political ecology and environmental history of energy and non/sovereign statecraft in Puerto Rico. From the boom of the sugar plantation to the bust of the hydrocarbon processing industry, Jaden offers an archival and visual account of how energy and energy infrastructure have long been instrumentalized to consolidate racial and class hegemony
in the captive colony.
The 2024-25 Cinematheque series is organized by the Media Arts & Culture Department and Oxy Arts in conjunction with the Center for Community-Based Learning and American Studies Department, with generous support from the Remsen Bird Fund and Mellon Foundation. This event is made possible with additional support from A4Oxy (API Alumni and Allies for Oxy), American Studies Department, BAO (Black Alumni Organization), Biochemistry Program, Biology Department’s Environmental Science Concentration, Black Studies Department, Chemistry Department, Center for Community-Based Learning, Computer Science Department, John Parke Young Initiative on the Global Political Economy, Latinx and Latin American Studies Program, Politics Department, Public Health Program, Sustainability Office, Urban and Environmental Policy Department.
This is a Core 99 event.
This event is taking place at Choi Auditorium, located on the second floor of Johnson Hall, on Occidental College's campus. There is free street parking on Campus Road along all entrances to the college. You can find directions to Choi Auditorium here.
