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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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