Waste Worlds
Inhabiting Kampala's Infrastructures of Disposability
1st Edition
Published on 14. December 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-0-520-38095-0 (ISBN)
Description
Uganda's capital, Kampala, is undergoing dramatic urban transformations as its new technocratic government seeks to clean and green the city. Waste Worlds tracks the dynamics of development and disposability unfolding amid struggles over who and what belong in the new Kampala. Garbage materializes these struggles. In the densely inhabited social infrastructures in and around the city's waste streams, people, places, and things become disposable but conditions of disposability are also challenged and undone. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Jacob Doherty illustrates how waste makes worlds, offering the key intervention that disposability is best understood not existentially, as a condition of social exclusion, but infrastructurally, as a form of injurious social inclusion.
Reviews / Votes
"By means of the book's rich ethnographic accounts, Doherty. . . .makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the work that underlies the infrastructures that are so vital to contemporary societies." * Exertions * "An expansive rendering of urban sanitation policies and problems in Kampala. . . . would certainly work well in an undergraduate course." * American Anthropologist * "Evocative with a skilful poetic style. . . . Waste Worlds offers a way to think about waste that humanises waste workers and renders the complicated experience of waste for non-elite urban residents." * LSE Review of Books * ". . . It engages timely anthropological conversations about the spatialization of inequity and the embodied experiences of what it means to keep on living amid conditions of systemic disposability." * American Ethnologist *More details
Series
Edition
First Edition
Language
English
Place of publication
Berkerley
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
8 b-w photographs
Dimensions
Height: 230 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
380 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-520-38095-0 (9780520380950)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
12/2021
1st Edition
Naval Institute Press
€28.99
Available for download
Person
Jacob Doherty is Lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh.
Content
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface: "Don't You Have Garbage in Your Country?"
Introduction
Disposability's Infrastructure
Part I The Authority of Garbage
1. Accumulations of Authority
2. Tear Gas and Trash Trucks
3. Destructive Creation
4. Selfies of the State
Part II Away
5. Para-Sites
6. Legalizing Waste
7. Sink and Spill
8. Assembling the Waste Stream
9. Embodied Displacement
Part III Racializing Disposability
10. From Natives to Locals
11. Infrastructures of Feeling
12. Developmental Respectability
13. Waste in Time
14. Clean Hearts, Dirty Hands
Conclusion
Surplus, Embodiment, Displacement, and Contestation
Notes
Bibliography
Index
List of Illustrations
Preface: "Don't You Have Garbage in Your Country?"
Introduction
Disposability's Infrastructure
Part I The Authority of Garbage
1. Accumulations of Authority
2. Tear Gas and Trash Trucks
3. Destructive Creation
4. Selfies of the State
Part II Away
5. Para-Sites
6. Legalizing Waste
7. Sink and Spill
8. Assembling the Waste Stream
9. Embodied Displacement
Part III Racializing Disposability
10. From Natives to Locals
11. Infrastructures of Feeling
12. Developmental Respectability
13. Waste in Time
14. Clean Hearts, Dirty Hands
Conclusion
Surplus, Embodiment, Displacement, and Contestation
Notes
Bibliography
Index