LAURIE DENYER WILLIS

Stackable Life

This work is part of a collaborative project with anthropologists in Kampala, Uganda and Bangkok, Thailand, through the project Antimicrobials In Society (AMIS) at LSHTM. In the suburbs of Kampala, chicken farming is being transformed through the logics of stacking and scalability. These practices are then interwoven with new commercial agrarian families in the suburbs, and their concerns about zoonotic disease, climate sustainability, economic futures, and the life and death of animals, microbes, plants and humans on their suburban lands. Our work attends to the logics of consumption and protein in the context of flexible industrialism in the post-colony, with an emphasis on how bodies - and what they consume - are racialised and made political through the policing of enmeshed life. We approach bodies, their consumables, and their environments as interstiched; bodies sieve foods and microbes, as much as they sieve postcolonial environments premised in surveillance and captivity.