Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0007
P. Little
This chapter engages the looming politics of uncertainty and optimism surrounding Ghana’s e-waste management and infrastructural future. Beyond a discardscape of toxic risk, Agbogbloshie can also be understood as an intervention environment in the urban margins where uncertainty and neoliberal techno-optimism thrive. The ethnographic findings explored expose how efforts to address e-waste “crisis” in Agbogbloshie are conditioned by sociotechnical renderings of pollution control, risk mitigation, and e-waste economization efforts that tend to perpetuate green developmentalist agendas, projects, and discourses of hope centered on cleaning up Agbogbloshie. As explored in this chapter, other, more radical, perspectives, ways of knowing, and methods of intervention might be needed to address Ghana’s e-waste challenges, especially environmental health interventions and e-waste policies directly informed by emerging “just transition” and decolonization debates.
{"title":"Looming Uncertainties of Neoliberal Techno-optimism","authors":"P. Little","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter engages the looming politics of uncertainty and optimism surrounding Ghana’s e-waste management and infrastructural future. Beyond a discardscape of toxic risk, Agbogbloshie can also be understood as an intervention environment in the urban margins where uncertainty and neoliberal techno-optimism thrive. The ethnographic findings explored expose how efforts to address e-waste “crisis” in Agbogbloshie are conditioned by sociotechnical renderings of pollution control, risk mitigation, and e-waste economization efforts that tend to perpetuate green developmentalist agendas, projects, and discourses of hope centered on cleaning up Agbogbloshie. As explored in this chapter, other, more radical, perspectives, ways of knowing, and methods of intervention might be needed to address Ghana’s e-waste challenges, especially environmental health interventions and e-waste policies directly informed by emerging “just transition” and decolonization debates.","PeriodicalId":331037,"journal":{"name":"Burning Matters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125928626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0006
P. Little
Chapter 5 engages a critical discussion of the visual economy of e-waste ruination in Agbogbloshie. It explores how, through ethnographic research in general and participatory photography in particular, images make meaning and shape e-waste imaginations. Circulating e-waste images of Agbogbloshie, the author argues, expose the power and utility of e-pyropolitical imagery to make, tell, and even distort and mystify life in Ghana’s e-wasteland. The chapter interrogates the e-pyropolitical gaze conditioning how digital rubble and toxic colonialism are seen. Countering the e-waste “crisis of representation” in Agbogbloshie, the author considers the possible role of participatory photography as an alternative technique of e-waste visualization, in addition to considering the ways in which these worker-based forms of witnessing e-waste can help justify and provide a methodological grounding for the very decolonization of e-waste studies in Ghana in particular.
{"title":"Visualizing Agbogbloshie and Re-envisioning E-Waste Anthropology","authors":"P. Little","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter 5 engages a critical discussion of the visual economy of e-waste ruination in Agbogbloshie. It explores how, through ethnographic research in general and participatory photography in particular, images make meaning and shape e-waste imaginations. Circulating e-waste images of Agbogbloshie, the author argues, expose the power and utility of e-pyropolitical imagery to make, tell, and even distort and mystify life in Ghana’s e-wasteland. The chapter interrogates the e-pyropolitical gaze conditioning how digital rubble and toxic colonialism are seen. Countering the e-waste “crisis of representation” in Agbogbloshie, the author considers the possible role of participatory photography as an alternative technique of e-waste visualization, in addition to considering the ways in which these worker-based forms of witnessing e-waste can help justify and provide a methodological grounding for the very decolonization of e-waste studies in Ghana in particular.","PeriodicalId":331037,"journal":{"name":"Burning Matters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124273607","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0002
P. Little
This chapter provides contextual background on global e-waste policy and politics and emerging “green” neoliberal interventions in Ghana. It explores nongovernmental organization interest in e-waste, with a particular focus on e-waste intervention in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. The chapter unearths the ways in which e-waste interventions, especially those aimed at mitigating air pollution and finding solutions to the environmental health crisis, are taking shape in Ghana. The chapter explores how e-waste intervention intersects with broader “green” urban development goals emerging in Ghana and how neoliberal efforts and infrastructures are endorsed and activated to modernize Ghana’s rapidly growing e-waste recycling and tech metal extraction economy.
{"title":"Amidst Global E-Waste Trades and Green Neoliberalization","authors":"P. Little","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter provides contextual background on global e-waste policy and politics and emerging “green” neoliberal interventions in Ghana. It explores nongovernmental organization interest in e-waste, with a particular focus on e-waste intervention in Agbogbloshie, Ghana. The chapter unearths the ways in which e-waste interventions, especially those aimed at mitigating air pollution and finding solutions to the environmental health crisis, are taking shape in Ghana. The chapter explores how e-waste intervention intersects with broader “green” urban development goals emerging in Ghana and how neoliberal efforts and infrastructures are endorsed and activated to modernize Ghana’s rapidly growing e-waste recycling and tech metal extraction economy.","PeriodicalId":331037,"journal":{"name":"Burning Matters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122720148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0008
P. Little
To conclude the book, it will be argued that a pyropolitical ecology of e-waste informed by ethnography, while imperfect, constitutes a possible route for renewing and rethinking e-waste management and intervention. Engaging a situated anthropology and political ecology of e-waste shows that certain toxic truths and struggles drift and link to truths and justice struggles beyond Agbogbloshie and Ghana. Despite the hyper-negativity and toxic colonialism that fuel Ghana’s e-wasteland narrative, the author concludes the book with a challenging exploratory question: how can a pyropolitical ecology of e-waste provide a new starting point to develop a global e-waste perspective attuned to possibilities and sparks of hope informed by ethnographic attention and evidence?
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"P. Little","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"To conclude the book, it will be argued that a pyropolitical ecology of e-waste informed by ethnography, while imperfect, constitutes a possible route for renewing and rethinking e-waste management and intervention. Engaging a situated anthropology and political ecology of e-waste shows that certain toxic truths and struggles drift and link to truths and justice struggles beyond Agbogbloshie and Ghana. Despite the hyper-negativity and toxic colonialism that fuel Ghana’s e-wasteland narrative, the author concludes the book with a challenging exploratory question: how can a pyropolitical ecology of e-waste provide a new starting point to develop a global e-waste perspective attuned to possibilities and sparks of hope informed by ethnographic attention and evidence?","PeriodicalId":331037,"journal":{"name":"Burning Matters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114903258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0004
P. Little
This chapter explores the lived experiences and politics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence logics in Agbogbloshie. The author highlights how the migrant laborers who make up the majority of workers in Agbogbloshie have faced repeated rounds of eviction and forced displacement. The author shows how e-workers struggle to negotiate state-based forms of violent erasure fueled by demolition and flood control logics that paradoxically redirect and reorient the focus and politics of environmental health in Agbogbloshie. The experience of displacement and eviction in Agbogbloshie exposes intersecting logics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence. The chapter explores how e-waste workers experience “slow violence” in the form of toxic exposures, bodily distress, and displacement. But Agbogbloshie is not simply a precarious space of destruction or an impossible place to live. As this chapter shows, e-waste workers sustain cultural life amidst dire lived experiences of erasure in Ghana’s urban margins.
{"title":"Erasure, Demolition, and Violent Obsolescence in the Urban Margins","authors":"P. Little","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores the lived experiences and politics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence logics in Agbogbloshie. The author highlights how the migrant laborers who make up the majority of workers in Agbogbloshie have faced repeated rounds of eviction and forced displacement. The author shows how e-workers struggle to negotiate state-based forms of violent erasure fueled by demolition and flood control logics that paradoxically redirect and reorient the focus and politics of environmental health in Agbogbloshie. The experience of displacement and eviction in Agbogbloshie exposes intersecting logics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence. The chapter explores how e-waste workers experience “slow violence” in the form of toxic exposures, bodily distress, and displacement. But Agbogbloshie is not simply a precarious space of destruction or an impossible place to live. As this chapter shows, e-waste workers sustain cultural life amidst dire lived experiences of erasure in Ghana’s urban margins.","PeriodicalId":331037,"journal":{"name":"Burning Matters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122464822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0005
P. Little
This chapter introduces the ways in which e-pyropolitics are embodied by exploring the illness narratives and bodily distress experiences of several copper burners. The author draws on ethnographic narratives to explore how Agbogbloshie workers narrate, understand, and refer to their own bodily distress to make sense of the toxic exposures and environmental health risks they face. In addition to exploring how toxic embodiment and experience break down or reconfigure demarcations of body and environment, the author highlights the ways in which toxicity and corporality become the site of laudable environmental health risk mitigation efforts that ironically fail to transform or reduce toxic corporality in an enduring postcolonial context. In this way, the author explores how a solutions-based intervention in Agbogbloshie overlooks the complexity and diversity of eco-corporeal relations in a tech metal extraction zone where bodies, toxins, and economies intersect.
{"title":"Embodied Burning, E-Waste Epidemiology, and Toxic Postcolonial Corporality","authors":"P. Little","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter introduces the ways in which e-pyropolitics are embodied by exploring the illness narratives and bodily distress experiences of several copper burners. The author draws on ethnographic narratives to explore how Agbogbloshie workers narrate, understand, and refer to their own bodily distress to make sense of the toxic exposures and environmental health risks they face. In addition to exploring how toxic embodiment and experience break down or reconfigure demarcations of body and environment, the author highlights the ways in which toxicity and corporality become the site of laudable environmental health risk mitigation efforts that ironically fail to transform or reduce toxic corporality in an enduring postcolonial context. In this way, the author explores how a solutions-based intervention in Agbogbloshie overlooks the complexity and diversity of eco-corporeal relations in a tech metal extraction zone where bodies, toxins, and economies intersect.","PeriodicalId":331037,"journal":{"name":"Burning Matters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120820485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-11-18DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0003
P. Little
This chapter explores e-waste burning work through the lens of labor migration, city–hinterland connections, and chieftaincy relations and politics. In particular, the chapter focuses on the story of one worker’s lived experience as a migrant e-waste laborer, husband, father, drummer, and member of a dominant regional chiefdom in northern Ghana. The chapter highlights how this worker and other e-waste workers navigate urban labor and marginalization in Accra, while at the same time sustaining social ties in northern Ghana where Dagomba chiefdoms hold local and regional political power. The chapter shows how narratives of migration and rural–urban livelihood can expose the integral role of social mobility and movement in e-waste ethnography in Ghana more generally.
{"title":"“We Are All North Here”","authors":"P. Little","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190934545.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter explores e-waste burning work through the lens of labor migration, city–hinterland connections, and chieftaincy relations and politics. In particular, the chapter focuses on the story of one worker’s lived experience as a migrant e-waste laborer, husband, father, drummer, and member of a dominant regional chiefdom in northern Ghana. The chapter highlights how this worker and other e-waste workers navigate urban labor and marginalization in Accra, while at the same time sustaining social ties in northern Ghana where Dagomba chiefdoms hold local and regional political power. The chapter shows how narratives of migration and rural–urban livelihood can expose the integral role of social mobility and movement in e-waste ethnography in Ghana more generally.","PeriodicalId":331037,"journal":{"name":"Burning Matters","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114626120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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