Waste is not only temporally and logically before liberal property regimes and the formation of c... more Waste is not only temporally and logically before liberal property regimes and the formation of capital, but also after them, a result of the capitalist production of commodities. Waste is thus contradictory , both prior to and after property, at once a pre condition and a result of enclosure, production and accumulation. This chapter examines that contradiction by developing an understanding of waste frontiers: liminal zones in which people, places and things are cast out of and re-incorporated into processes of capitalist accumulation. It draws on the growing body of work in environmental and economic anthropology on wastelands and waste economies to explore how the expansion of capitalism constantly produces and captures an outside.
This article examines the everyday mobilities of mothers in Yopougon, Côte d'Ivoire to analytical... more This article examines the everyday mobilities of mothers in Yopougon, Côte d'Ivoire to analytically center mobility in the study of social reproduction. Yopougon, Abidjan's largest commune, is on the cusp of a major overhaul of its transportation network intended to better integrate it into the city. Planned through a conventional vision of economic productivity that privileges commuting over other forms of travel, this restructuring risks deepening gendered exclusions in urban mobility. Mothers of young children, a sub-category of passengers who perform the bulk of the work of social reproduction and who experience multiple competing demands on their time that structure their mobilities in particularly illustrative ways, have been overlooked in transport planning. Drawing on mobility diaries and visual research methods, I illustrate how urban transport systems are implicated in the everyday practices of intergenerational care and social reproduction and how, in turn, these practices themselves become forms of urban infrastructure. These mobile practices of social reproduction disclose critical affordances and barriers in existing popular transport systems and reveal the breadth of gendered practices, relations, and materialities that are constitutive of mobility infrastructures but marginalized by a narrow policy focus on the transport sector.
Popular transport is the most significant form of urban mobility in the majority urban world and ... more Popular transport is the most significant form of urban mobility in the majority urban world and will continue to play an important role even as cities around the world overhaul and upgrade their transport systems. Since January 2019 a new type of popular transport, taxi-tricycles locally named "salonis," has taken root at the peripheries of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. This article offers an initial description of this new mode of mobility, the service it offers, the labor force it draws on, the forms of regulation that govern it, the spatial practices it has engendered, and its implications for sustainable urban mobility. We show that this new transport option has evolved from within the existing norms and practices of the city's existing popular transport sector. Arguing that salonis have emerged at the intersection of multiple overlapping marginality-spatial, infrastructural, socioeconomic , legal, and regulatory-we contribute to multidisciplinary conceptualization of urban margins as a site of infrastructural creation and the production of space. Based on our analysis, we posit three possible future trajectories for salonis: illegality, expulsion, and experimentation.
How are moral values involved in the production of urban mobilities? Through an ethnographic anal... more How are moral values involved in the production of urban mobilities? Through an ethnographic analysis of the boda boda motorcycle taxi industry in Kampala, Uganda, this paper describes the norms, institutions, and social practices through which multiple form of ethical personhood are realized and spatialized. Focusing on how digital ride-hailing platforms and municipal registration efforts have interacted with the city's existing transport infrastructures, the paper examines the competing moral logics of personhood, the historically and culturally variable conception of what constitutes a full ethical person, that these projects embody. Motorcycle taxi drivers have developed intensive moral economies, with corresponding spatial institutions, that mediate the harsh competition of the industry. Rather than simply displacing existing norms, digital platforms build on and supplement the long-standing embedded institutions and moral economies of the boda boda industry. By contrast, municipal reforms were rejected, however, because they failed to recognize the moral norms and practices at the heart of the boda boda industry and thus negated drivers' personhood.
International Labor and Working Class History, 2019
Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor... more Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.
Thousands of Marabou Storks occupy Kampala, nesting in the city’s green spaces and eating up to 2... more Thousands of Marabou Storks occupy Kampala, nesting in the city’s green spaces and eating up to 2kgs of organic matter daily, mostly rotting garbage found in the city’s open dumps. Weedy birds, they flourish amidst Kampala’s garbage crisis. Storks are both waste infrastructure and waste themselves, rendered disposable by the same state-centric views of infrastructure that make informal waste pickers precarious, and cast out from the imaginary of a clean green urban future. Theorizing animal and informal infrastructures together as para-sites, this paper follows Marabou Storks through Kampala’s ever-shifting waste frontier: the post-consumer equivalent to the extractive frontier that subtends the capitalist fantasy of endless growth. Kampala’s topography, hydrology, and class structure ensure that trash flows downhill, accumulating in slums where it leads to flooding and outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other water-borne illnesses as well as to endemic malaria. Waste with wings, Marabou Storks remake the urban waste landscape, undermining efforts to stabilize the city’s ultimate sinks in landfills, slums, and wetlands as they flourish in filth and defecate in the heart of greenness.
International Labor and Working Class History, 2019
Biomass briquettes have emerged as a development silver bullet, supposedly converting waste to we... more Biomass briquettes have emerged as a development silver bullet, supposedly converting waste to wealth and tackling crises of unemployment, urban waste management, and rural deforestation. Briquettes have captured the imagination of international environmental NGOs operating in many African cities who promote briquette production, partnering with local Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) to improve urban livelihoods and sanitation. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Kampala, Uganda, this article examines the entanglement of material and immaterial labor in the production of briquettes. The outcome of these production processes is to capitalize Community, transforming everyday socio-spatial relations into an agential entrepreneurial subject fit to receive aid and carry out development. This has the additional effect of exacerbating differences of gender and education within the CBO, alienating the CBO from the rest of Bwaise, and reproducing the racial hierarchies of the development economy.
There is power in garbage. As an object of governanceproblematic matter to be managed by public a... more There is power in garbage. As an object of governanceproblematic matter to be managed by public authorities-it discloses changing modes of statecraft. As a symbolically charged and striking sensorial substance, it is a potent resource capable of disrupting urban order and manifesting the power of waste workers. Waste sits messily at the juncture of multiple points of empirical and conceptual concern in anthropology, including global urbanization and extreme inequalities, the infrastructural basis of social reproduction, the politics of the Anthropocene, the materiality of meanings, and the meanings of matter. Rosalind Fredericks's ethnography of municipal waste infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, dives into the mess to examine how, and to what ends, garbage accrues power. The book details how the mundane remains of everyday life have become a political terrain upon which struggles over urban belonging both take place and make place. It situates waste infrastructure within the changing contours of urban belonging, gender, spirituality, and embodiment in a structurally adjusted, postcolonial city.
In the name of cleaning up Kampala’s political institutions and public space, a new municipal bod... more In the name of cleaning up Kampala’s political institutions and public space, a new municipal body, the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), was established in 2010, replacing an elected city council with a presidentially appointed executive director. To legitimize its highly contested and explicitly antipolitical authority, the KCCA made garbage collection and beautification its top priority, promising to deliver routine urban repair and mundane maintenance work in exchange for suspending the norms of electoral democracy in Uganda’s capital city. This article argues that the exceptional space of the repair site is paradigmatic of municipal power over the city as a whole. Based on an ethnography of municipal waste management infrastructure and an analysis of the KCCA’s visual account of itself, it elaborates the concept of maintenance space to theorize how the entanglement of sovereign and governmental power produces the city as a particular kind of territory. Because the work of maintenance and repair is continuous and ongoing, maintenance space endures. Far from a short-lived inconvenience, its exception becomes the foundational norm of technocratic authority. Not limited to Kampala, the enduring exception of maintenance space, I conclude, identifies a widespread mode of urban spatial production and depoliticization.
Motorcycle taxis, dubbed boda bodas, constitute a vital aspect of Kampala’s transportation infras... more Motorcycle taxis, dubbed boda bodas, constitute a vital aspect of Kampala’s transportation infrastructure, yet the industry is perpetually precarious, threatened with wholesale eviction. Moreover, drivers’ lives and bodies are continually put at risk by the city’s traffic. Through a relational approach to ontology, this article asks how the boda boda industry comes into being and endures, what forms of vulnerability it entails, and what experiences, relations, and forms of urban life it produces. It argues that three forms disposability structure and arise from the industry – structural unemployment, embodied vulnerability, and infrastructural displacement. Infrastructural violence, it is argued, must be considered when describing and theorizing people as infrastructure. The article examines how boda boda drivers’ shared condition of insecurity and disposability generates intense forms of sociality, solidarity, mutual obligation, recognition, and urban vitality.
be more of a liability than an asset-at best, a superficial distraction from the complex work of ... more be more of a liability than an asset-at best, a superficial distraction from the complex work of public politics; at worst, an ugly reminder of a violent and raucous (recent) past. Lions of the North is, in many ways, a study of an anti-music culture, one of several aspects of this text likely to give card-carrying ethnomusicologists pause.
Waste is not only temporally and logically before liberal property regimes and the formation of c... more Waste is not only temporally and logically before liberal property regimes and the formation of capital, but also after them, a result of the capitalist production of commodities. Waste is thus contradictory , both prior to and after property, at once a pre condition and a result of enclosure, production and accumulation. This chapter examines that contradiction by developing an understanding of waste frontiers: liminal zones in which people, places and things are cast out of and re-incorporated into processes of capitalist accumulation. It draws on the growing body of work in environmental and economic anthropology on wastelands and waste economies to explore how the expansion of capitalism constantly produces and captures an outside.
This article examines the everyday mobilities of mothers in Yopougon, Côte d'Ivoire to analytical... more This article examines the everyday mobilities of mothers in Yopougon, Côte d'Ivoire to analytically center mobility in the study of social reproduction. Yopougon, Abidjan's largest commune, is on the cusp of a major overhaul of its transportation network intended to better integrate it into the city. Planned through a conventional vision of economic productivity that privileges commuting over other forms of travel, this restructuring risks deepening gendered exclusions in urban mobility. Mothers of young children, a sub-category of passengers who perform the bulk of the work of social reproduction and who experience multiple competing demands on their time that structure their mobilities in particularly illustrative ways, have been overlooked in transport planning. Drawing on mobility diaries and visual research methods, I illustrate how urban transport systems are implicated in the everyday practices of intergenerational care and social reproduction and how, in turn, these practices themselves become forms of urban infrastructure. These mobile practices of social reproduction disclose critical affordances and barriers in existing popular transport systems and reveal the breadth of gendered practices, relations, and materialities that are constitutive of mobility infrastructures but marginalized by a narrow policy focus on the transport sector.
Popular transport is the most significant form of urban mobility in the majority urban world and ... more Popular transport is the most significant form of urban mobility in the majority urban world and will continue to play an important role even as cities around the world overhaul and upgrade their transport systems. Since January 2019 a new type of popular transport, taxi-tricycles locally named "salonis," has taken root at the peripheries of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire. This article offers an initial description of this new mode of mobility, the service it offers, the labor force it draws on, the forms of regulation that govern it, the spatial practices it has engendered, and its implications for sustainable urban mobility. We show that this new transport option has evolved from within the existing norms and practices of the city's existing popular transport sector. Arguing that salonis have emerged at the intersection of multiple overlapping marginality-spatial, infrastructural, socioeconomic , legal, and regulatory-we contribute to multidisciplinary conceptualization of urban margins as a site of infrastructural creation and the production of space. Based on our analysis, we posit three possible future trajectories for salonis: illegality, expulsion, and experimentation.
How are moral values involved in the production of urban mobilities? Through an ethnographic anal... more How are moral values involved in the production of urban mobilities? Through an ethnographic analysis of the boda boda motorcycle taxi industry in Kampala, Uganda, this paper describes the norms, institutions, and social practices through which multiple form of ethical personhood are realized and spatialized. Focusing on how digital ride-hailing platforms and municipal registration efforts have interacted with the city's existing transport infrastructures, the paper examines the competing moral logics of personhood, the historically and culturally variable conception of what constitutes a full ethical person, that these projects embody. Motorcycle taxi drivers have developed intensive moral economies, with corresponding spatial institutions, that mediate the harsh competition of the industry. Rather than simply displacing existing norms, digital platforms build on and supplement the long-standing embedded institutions and moral economies of the boda boda industry. By contrast, municipal reforms were rejected, however, because they failed to recognize the moral norms and practices at the heart of the boda boda industry and thus negated drivers' personhood.
International Labor and Working Class History, 2019
Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor... more Waste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.
Thousands of Marabou Storks occupy Kampala, nesting in the city’s green spaces and eating up to 2... more Thousands of Marabou Storks occupy Kampala, nesting in the city’s green spaces and eating up to 2kgs of organic matter daily, mostly rotting garbage found in the city’s open dumps. Weedy birds, they flourish amidst Kampala’s garbage crisis. Storks are both waste infrastructure and waste themselves, rendered disposable by the same state-centric views of infrastructure that make informal waste pickers precarious, and cast out from the imaginary of a clean green urban future. Theorizing animal and informal infrastructures together as para-sites, this paper follows Marabou Storks through Kampala’s ever-shifting waste frontier: the post-consumer equivalent to the extractive frontier that subtends the capitalist fantasy of endless growth. Kampala’s topography, hydrology, and class structure ensure that trash flows downhill, accumulating in slums where it leads to flooding and outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and other water-borne illnesses as well as to endemic malaria. Waste with wings, Marabou Storks remake the urban waste landscape, undermining efforts to stabilize the city’s ultimate sinks in landfills, slums, and wetlands as they flourish in filth and defecate in the heart of greenness.
International Labor and Working Class History, 2019
Biomass briquettes have emerged as a development silver bullet, supposedly converting waste to we... more Biomass briquettes have emerged as a development silver bullet, supposedly converting waste to wealth and tackling crises of unemployment, urban waste management, and rural deforestation. Briquettes have captured the imagination of international environmental NGOs operating in many African cities who promote briquette production, partnering with local Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) to improve urban livelihoods and sanitation. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Kampala, Uganda, this article examines the entanglement of material and immaterial labor in the production of briquettes. The outcome of these production processes is to capitalize Community, transforming everyday socio-spatial relations into an agential entrepreneurial subject fit to receive aid and carry out development. This has the additional effect of exacerbating differences of gender and education within the CBO, alienating the CBO from the rest of Bwaise, and reproducing the racial hierarchies of the development economy.
There is power in garbage. As an object of governanceproblematic matter to be managed by public a... more There is power in garbage. As an object of governanceproblematic matter to be managed by public authorities-it discloses changing modes of statecraft. As a symbolically charged and striking sensorial substance, it is a potent resource capable of disrupting urban order and manifesting the power of waste workers. Waste sits messily at the juncture of multiple points of empirical and conceptual concern in anthropology, including global urbanization and extreme inequalities, the infrastructural basis of social reproduction, the politics of the Anthropocene, the materiality of meanings, and the meanings of matter. Rosalind Fredericks's ethnography of municipal waste infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, dives into the mess to examine how, and to what ends, garbage accrues power. The book details how the mundane remains of everyday life have become a political terrain upon which struggles over urban belonging both take place and make place. It situates waste infrastructure within the changing contours of urban belonging, gender, spirituality, and embodiment in a structurally adjusted, postcolonial city.
In the name of cleaning up Kampala’s political institutions and public space, a new municipal bod... more In the name of cleaning up Kampala’s political institutions and public space, a new municipal body, the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), was established in 2010, replacing an elected city council with a presidentially appointed executive director. To legitimize its highly contested and explicitly antipolitical authority, the KCCA made garbage collection and beautification its top priority, promising to deliver routine urban repair and mundane maintenance work in exchange for suspending the norms of electoral democracy in Uganda’s capital city. This article argues that the exceptional space of the repair site is paradigmatic of municipal power over the city as a whole. Based on an ethnography of municipal waste management infrastructure and an analysis of the KCCA’s visual account of itself, it elaborates the concept of maintenance space to theorize how the entanglement of sovereign and governmental power produces the city as a particular kind of territory. Because the work of maintenance and repair is continuous and ongoing, maintenance space endures. Far from a short-lived inconvenience, its exception becomes the foundational norm of technocratic authority. Not limited to Kampala, the enduring exception of maintenance space, I conclude, identifies a widespread mode of urban spatial production and depoliticization.
Motorcycle taxis, dubbed boda bodas, constitute a vital aspect of Kampala’s transportation infras... more Motorcycle taxis, dubbed boda bodas, constitute a vital aspect of Kampala’s transportation infrastructure, yet the industry is perpetually precarious, threatened with wholesale eviction. Moreover, drivers’ lives and bodies are continually put at risk by the city’s traffic. Through a relational approach to ontology, this article asks how the boda boda industry comes into being and endures, what forms of vulnerability it entails, and what experiences, relations, and forms of urban life it produces. It argues that three forms disposability structure and arise from the industry – structural unemployment, embodied vulnerability, and infrastructural displacement. Infrastructural violence, it is argued, must be considered when describing and theorizing people as infrastructure. The article examines how boda boda drivers’ shared condition of insecurity and disposability generates intense forms of sociality, solidarity, mutual obligation, recognition, and urban vitality.
be more of a liability than an asset-at best, a superficial distraction from the complex work of ... more be more of a liability than an asset-at best, a superficial distraction from the complex work of public politics; at worst, an ugly reminder of a violent and raucous (recent) past. Lions of the North is, in many ways, a study of an anti-music culture, one of several aspects of this text likely to give card-carrying ethnomusicologists pause.
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Papers by Jacob Doherty
and after property, at once a pre condition and a result of enclosure, production and accumulation. This chapter examines that contradiction by developing an understanding of waste frontiers: liminal zones in which people, places and things are cast out of and re-incorporated into processes of capitalist accumulation. It draws on the growing body of
work in environmental and economic anthropology on wastelands and waste economies to explore how the expansion of capitalism constantly produces and captures an outside.
concept of maintenance space to theorize how the entanglement of sovereign and governmental power produces the city as a particular kind of territory. Because the work of maintenance and repair is continuous and ongoing, maintenance space endures. Far from a short-lived inconvenience, its exception becomes the foundational norm of technocratic authority. Not limited to Kampala, the enduring exception of maintenance space, I conclude, identifies a widespread mode of urban spatial production and depoliticization.
and after property, at once a pre condition and a result of enclosure, production and accumulation. This chapter examines that contradiction by developing an understanding of waste frontiers: liminal zones in which people, places and things are cast out of and re-incorporated into processes of capitalist accumulation. It draws on the growing body of
work in environmental and economic anthropology on wastelands and waste economies to explore how the expansion of capitalism constantly produces and captures an outside.
concept of maintenance space to theorize how the entanglement of sovereign and governmental power produces the city as a particular kind of territory. Because the work of maintenance and repair is continuous and ongoing, maintenance space endures. Far from a short-lived inconvenience, its exception becomes the foundational norm of technocratic authority. Not limited to Kampala, the enduring exception of maintenance space, I conclude, identifies a widespread mode of urban spatial production and depoliticization.