Title | Between expulsions and environmental degradation: landscapes of the urban poor in Accra, Ghana |
Author | Dagna RAMS (DRZAZDZEWSKA) |
Director of thesis | Prof. Mark Goodale |
Co-director of thesis | |
Summary of thesis | My research traces the difficult emergence of environmental degradation as a political issue in Ghana and the expulsions of people blamed for it as a preferred solution to the problem. I approach expulsions as a symptom of fiscal tightening, media and spectacle, land speculation, and pressures of international development agendas.
Positioning my research in the biggest slum in Ghana (Old Fadama/Agbogbloshie), which is a host to an electronic waste and plastic waste dump, I try to depict landscapes of the urban poor paying attention to their complexity. I am interested in how budgets work in government institutions and with what results for slum communities, how environment becomes a political concern, how waste economies function, how urban land is il-legalised and legalised, commodified and grabbed, and how all this circumscribes and destabilises spaces of the urban poor in Ghana and African contexts more generally. |
Status | |
Administrative delay for the defence | |
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