Stanford University doctoral candidate Jacob Doherty, supervised by Dr. James Ferguson, will investigate the environmental and economic implications of sanitation in the urban setting of Kampala, Uganda. Doherty will conduct 13 months of field research in the city of Kampala, Uganda, focusing on the challenges of managing a safe and hygienic urban environment. This issue occupies a contentious position in contemporary Kampala and many other urban areas around the world because of the need for economic development and urban renewal projects to incorporate effective waste management strategies into their planning processes.
Through a study involving multiple social science methods such as participant-observation, informal and semi-structured interviews, a photo elicitation project, and archival research, Doherty will gather information that will shed light on how residents and government officials of Kampala handle sanitation challenges, and how environmental and economic practices intersect.
Findings from this study will contribute to social science understandings of sanitation and pollution in everyday practices. This research takes an innovative look at this important area of anthropological study in a way that brings together different bodies of theoretical literature, promising to contribute to environmental anthropology and studies of global sustainability more generally, as well as to economic and urban anthropology and the anthropology of Africa. This research is also important because it will deepen understandings of the relationship between poverty, health, and environmental degradation in urban settings. Funding for this research also supports the training of a social scientist.
This project is an anthropological study of urban transformation and environmental politics in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. Focusing on waste and cleanliness, the project explores ongoing processes of social and spatial displacement and the emergence of new forms of urban citizenship. The Co-PI spent the period September 2012 through June 2014 conducting fieldwork in Kampala. Using ethnographic research methods (in-depth interviews, focus groups and group interviews, participant observation, media analysis, photo-elicitation) the Co-PI gathered data in a variety of sites that make visible connections between waste infrastructures and broader changes in the urban environment. These sites included work with municipal employees in the waste management sector, private waste collection companies, elite NGOs' public cleaning campaigns, the informal recycling sector, and community based 'waste-to-wealth' initiatives. The project yielded a number of significant results. Contrary to the expectation that work with waste would make certain populations more vulnerable to displacement, as the categorization of filth transfered from their work materials to their persons, the research revealed that the waste stream actually provides myriad opportunities for the urban poor to demonstrate their citizenship and claim a more secure place in the city. For example, working closely with municipal waste workers to ensure trucks arrived on schedule was an important activity for some local politicians. One councilor proudly earned the nickname 'Kasasiro' (garbage) because of the extremely hands on role he played in weekly collection in his parish. Rather than a form of displacement, this involvement with waste was a means to serve his constituents and to further his political ambitions. Similarly, for community groups involved in the production of bio-fuels from organic wastes in low income areas, working with waste was a means to enact a particular version of environmental urban citizenship, to concretize 'community', and to present an alternative vision of their frequently demonized neighborhood. These findings signal the theoretical importance of distinguishing between 'brown' (focusing on waste/sanitation) and 'green' (oriented towards 'nature') environmentalisms in urban African contexts. While many of the green campaigns I explored did indeed classify the urban poor as a polluting presence to be cleaned up and removed from the city, brown activism provided a means for marginalized people to not only earn incomes that sustained their lives in the city, but allowed them to imagine and enact more expansive notions of urban citizenship. The project extends a long running engagement in anthropological theory with the social and cultural categories of dirt and cleanliness. It builds on the understanding that 'dirt' is a culturally specific effect of particular moral and cosmological systems; the impure is always defined relationally in conjunction with the pure. Drawing on the insights of environmental and political anthropology, however, this research develops an approach to these issues that emphasizes the materialities of dirt and so social effects of cleanliness. In light of widespread conditions of environmental degradation in many contemporary cities, it is important to understand pollution as a material process as well as a cultural construction, a process that has uneven and asymetrical effects on different populations. Along these lines, this research has also generated important questions for the anthropology of violence: how do injuries that take place over extended durations and with multiple and often invisible causes become a cause for activism? without a clearly defined 'violator' how do responses to structural, environmental, and 'slow' violence take shape? My findings affirm the importance of the concept of infra-structural violence in theorizing contemporary social inequalities. Infra-structural violence identifies the forms of injury that emerge from unequal access to services, and as a result, to the substantial elements of urban citizenship. This research also engages with the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. Current debates in urban geography, planning theory, and urban political ecology center on the question of how to de-centre the privileged epistemic position granted to cities in the global north as models for all urban development. Findings from this anthropological research project in Uganda reveal the limitations of normative distinctions like formal/informal, order/disorder, developed/undeveloped. Research findings illuminate the centrality of marginal and infra-structural sites like slums, municipal waste dumps, drainage channels, and trash heaps to the development of novel visions of urban citizenship and to the quiet negotiation of compromises between municipal order and the informal economy that sustain urban life in much of the world.
