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

斯坦福大学博士候选人Jacob Doherty将在James Ferguson博士的指导下，调查乌干达坎帕拉城市环境卫生对环境和经济的影响。Doherty将在乌干达坎帕拉市进行为期13个月的实地研究，重点关注管理安全和卫生的城市环境所面临的挑战。这个问题在当今坎帕拉和世界上许多其他城市地区都是一个有争议的问题，因为经济发展和城市更新项目需要将有效的废物管理战略纳入其规划过程。通过一项涉及多种社会科学方法的研究，如参与者观察、非正式和半结构化访谈、照片收集项目和档案研究，Doherty将收集信息，揭示坎帕拉居民和政府官员如何应对卫生挑战，以及环境和经济实践如何交叉。这项研究的结果将有助于社会科学对日常实践中的卫生和污染的理解。本研究以一种结合不同理论文献的方式，对这一重要的人类学研究领域进行了创新的审视，有望为环境人类学和更广泛的全球可持续性研究，以及经济、城市人类学和非洲人类学做出贡献。这项研究也很重要，因为它将加深对城市环境中贫困、健康和环境退化之间关系的理解。这项研究的资金也支持社会科学家的培训。

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.