Doctoral Dissertation Research: Disposability, Sanitation, and the Environment of Waste Management in Urban Uganda

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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.