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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.
List of contents
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
About the author
Jacob Doherty is Lecturer in Anthropology of Development at the University of Edinburgh.
Summary
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.
