Dissertation Research: Ingenuity, Infrastructure, and Energy Use in Postsocialist Tanzania

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Yale University doctoral candidate Michael Degani, supervised by Dr. Michael McGovern, will undertake research on how urban residents in rapidly growing cities in developing nations access basic services from unreliable state institutions, and fashion daily life within material infrastructures defined by shortage and instability. He will conduct a case study of the social and technical arrangements of electricity access in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's major urban center. As cellphones, lights, and electronic media come to characterize properly modern life in Dar es Salaam, the electricity needed to power these technologies has become ever more expensive and unreliable. Two decades of protracted neoliberal reform have weakened the national power utility, and consumers suffer increased tariffs, aging physical infrastructure and extended rationing. Though some contemplate solar power or other off-grid solutions, others risk theft, piracy, or meter-tampering, often through collaborations with part-time or retrenched state technicians, colloquially known as 'hatchets.' Degani will collect data from two sources: income-generating activities of technicians and electricity consumption in three urban neighborhoods. Technician activities will comprise financial logs contextualized by life histories, participant-observation and in-depth case studies of specific transactions. Data on electricity consumption will comprise month long energy diaries, interviews and participant-observation among 10 households in three neighborhoods with high, medium and low levels of electrical infrastructure. These two types of data will allow him to analyze the strategies, meanings and experience of electrification in both its distribution and use.This research will contribute to theorizing the relationship between infrastructure systems, unregulated economies and the production of urban space and time in a postsocialist setting. It will also contribute to understanding how energy use is invested with cultural and political meanings in a global context increasingly dominated by market models of delivery. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student