Waste Worlds – Inhabiting Kampala′s Infrastructures of Disposability: Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century

"Doherty's masterful book works through waste and waste management to examine the dynamics of development and disposability in contemporary Kampala, Uganda. It asks how people, places, and things become disposable and how conditions of disposability are challenged and undone. But in my view it does much more than that. It complicates prevailing ideas about maintenance, in relation to the scale of the city, to political authority, to infrastructures, and to experiences of belonging and the body. And it offers an updated critical reading of twenty-first-century development (and postcoloniality) that is profoundly materialist in its consideration of waste, but that also makes space for affective and linguistic registers in its analysis. Doherty's narrative voice is its own source of pleasure: it is rich with vivid, low-to-the-ground descriptions that organically yield the analyses he offers us."--Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, author of Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine