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Guest Lecture: Tracing the Chinese Crayfish Trade in Kenya

Crayfish

Thursday, December 8, 2022 at 12:00pm to 1:00pm  153 Uris Hall

https://events.cornell.edu/event/tracing_the_chinese_crayfish_trade_in_kenya

In this talk, Amanda Kaminsky will present a paper that untangles the supply chain of Kenya's crayfish industry, to explore how multispecies landscapes come to manifest and shape our social and cultural norms. Amanda draws from one year of ethnographic fieldwork to analyze the historical political ecology of crayfish in Kenya and its contemporary meaning among Chinese consumers. As a nonnative species feeding a primarily Chinese market, crayfish highlight the ambiguity of foreign and native categories, as well as the ambiguous position occupied by China in the Kenyan imagination.

Amanda Kaminsky is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Michigan. Amanda earned an M.S. in Environmental Policy at the University of Michigan School of Environment and Sustainability, and a B.A. in Chinese from Middlebury College.