Public Defense
"Powering Improvisation: Unstable Electrification in Rural Northern Uganda"
Time: 12.15-15.00
Adjudication committee
- Dr Sophie Haines, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh.
- Associate Professor Sverker Finnström, Department of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, Uppsala Universitet.
- Dr Michael Degani, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Chair of defence
Supervisors
- Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo
- Dr Andrew Bowman, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
- Professor Susan Reynolds Whyte, Department of Anthropology, Copenhagen University
Abstract
Electrification is a key focus in the development strategies of countries in Sub Saharan Africa, where large parts of the population still live beyond the reach of the central grid. Most people without access to electricity live in rural areas. In national and international development policies, rural electrification is anticipated to contribute to poverty reduction and to the general improvement of people’s lives. However, power sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa struggle to supply their growing customer base with stable electricity in the aftermath of neoliberal restructuring policies. In the newly electrified village in northern Uganda where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork for eleven months in 2019, power cuts happened often and could last up to several weeks, creating rhythms of progress and setback. Electricity’s instability affected how people perceived the power provider, and by extension the state. It also led to a plethora of improvisational practices as people attempted to secure access to electricity and stable income through electrified work, relying on their own knowledge and skills, and the market of distributed electricity sources.
Following the approaches of previous anthropological scholarship on energy,
electricity, and infrastructures, this dissertation asks: how does unstable
electrification restructure social relations at different scales? I focus on two
categories of relations – those between people and the state, and the local, personal
relations between kin, friends, and neighbors. I show how grid instability and
irregularities in the payment system led to mistrust in the power cooperative and by
extension the state, complicating and at times even negating the sense of citizenship
understood as a relation of trust and reciprocity. People’s references to customer
service furthermore exemplifies how grid connection in Lalogi has contributed to
producing a kind of neoliberal subjectivity where the state is no longer seen as
providing social services to its citizens but rather commodities that can be accessed
through market-like relations. At a local scale, I show how improvisational
approaches to securing access to electricity that rely on technical knowledge,
embodied skills, and calculative capabilities create new lines of social differentiation,
but at the same time map onto and enhance existing inequalities, since they are
closely tied to people’s material resources. Counteracting the increased inequalities
resulting from unstable electrification, I show how the moral obligation to share
resources with kin, friends, and neighbors that underscores social life in the region
contributes to a more equal distribution of electricity.
Through the study of unstable electrification in northern Uganda, this dissertation
generates new insights into the effects of electrification and connectivity in the global
south. More specifically, it contributes new insights into how infrastructures
restructure social relations in a context where grid electricity is unstable and people
thus combine it with other power sources. While infrastructural instability has been
actively theorized in anthropological scholarship about urban infrastructures, this is
less evident in the scholarship on rural infrastructures and infrastructural
development. This dissertation also makes a contribution to the regional literature on
northern Uganda by providing new perspectives on history and contemporary life
beyond the war.
Additional information
If you wish to receive a digital version of the dissertation, you may send a request to the candidate. The candidate can be reached at: k.m.t.nielsen@sai.uio.no.