Seminar with Else Vogel  on Wednesday, March 13

The Department of Ecological Anthropology invites you to the second seminar of the new seminar series. Our next talk, by Else Vogel, is entitled "'Good Digestion': The Metabolic Politics of Dutch Dairy Farming" (see the abstract below). The event will take place in Prague on Wednesday, March 13, 2024, commencing at 14:00 (CET). You are invited to attend in person at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences, or online via Microsoft Teams. To register for the seminar, please click here.

Abstract: In the Netherlands, one of the largest exporters of agricultural products in the world today, what dairy cows eat, produce, and excrete is meticulously recorded and controlled. While farmers optimize cows’ diets with the aim of increasing production, the side-effects of such industrial bovine metabolism have recently become problematized in new and strikingly public ways. Else Vogel highlights the dilemmas of more-than-human eating, feeding, and excreting implicated in the Dutch ‘nitrogen crisis’ – an ecological and legal crisis posed by an excess of nitrogen in Dutch air, soil, and waters. Her research on dairy farms reveals struggles over the forms of life that deserve protection; clashing ways of valuing the health of organisms and ecosystems; and diverging styles of governing multispecies collectives.

Else Vogel is an assistant professor in Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She is also the co-editor of The Imposter as Social Theory – Thinking with Gatecrashers, Cheats, and Charlatans (Bristol University Press) and serves on the editorial board of the anthropological journal Etnofoor.

We hope to see you in Prague or online!