Name: Waste Works: The Vital Politics of Waste in Urban Ghana
Start: 2026-03-11T16:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-03-11T17:30:00+00:00
Location: Seminar Room 1, Chrystal Macmillan Building, The University of Edinburgh

Waste Works: The Vital Politics of Waste in Urban Ghana - with Professor Brenda Chalfin (University of Florida)
About this Event

The Centre of African Studies is delighted to invite you to the following seminar:

'Waste Works: The Vital Politics of Waste in Urban Ghana'

Speaker: Brenda Chalfin, Professor of Anthropology and African Studies, University of Florida

Chair: Dr Jacob Doherty, Lecturer in Anthropology of Development, Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh

Attendance in person only.

Abstract:

An ethnography of infrastructure, WASTE WORKS examines the founding designs and afterlives of Ghana's planned city of Tema to address the formative role of bodily waste in urban politics and public life. Comparing infrastructural innovations across the city, Chalfin excavates how popularly devised waste infrastructures operate as arenas to make claims, build coalitions and cultivate status, ultimately reordering the public realm, domesticity and state accountability.

Biography:

Brenda Chalfin is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Florida. At the intersection of political and economic anthropology, her research examines state processes, border regions, infrastructure, public life and the governance of material flows, from waste and water to plastic, off-shore oil finds, and indigenous commodities. She is the author of 3 books: Waste Works: Vital Politics in Urban Ghana (Duke, 2023); Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa (Chicago 2010) and Shea Butter Republic: State Power, Global Markets and the Making of an Indigenous Commodity (Routledge 2004). Chalfin’s current research addresses the revival of artisanal work in the context of the Anthropocene.