About the project
This doctoral research examines an overlooked extractive supply chain central to urban development: building materials and their dusty byproducts. It focuses on Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as a case study where urban mining for building materials occurs within city boundaries — referred to as the extraction-urban development nexus.
Since independence, the chain of limestone quarrying for producing building materials, such as gravel and cement, for concrete infrastructure has helped expand the city at the expense of surrounding communities and environments that are impacted by particulate matter buildup. Hence, this project studies the social and ecological impacts of dust pollution from small-scale limestone quarrying for gravel production, large-scale cement production, and infrastructure development, and how this pollution is experienced, monitored, and governed in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
This research looks beyond dust as simply particulate matter, it considers dust a political matter that circulates and contaminates in ways that connect bodies, communities, countries, and the global political economy. Furthermore, given the importance of gender and care in managing pollution and its health consequences, this research involves a gender lens to make sense of how pollution is entangled with gendered care structures at the level of the body and community.
Objectives
Through a multi-sited ethnography of communities impacted by dust pollution and the stakeholders involved in the building materials extractive chain in Dar es Salaam, this project examines how evidence of dust pollution and exposure is produced, circulated, contested, embodied and employed to protect human and environmental health. It questions when dust pollution becomes toxic and harmful, how pollution-related harm is treated in different (health)care contexts, how this harm becomes measurable and legible, whose knowledge of pollution is considered legitimate, and what happens when different forms of evidence of pollution conflict. In responding to this question, this doctoral research explores the political economy of dust pollution at the bodily, local, national, and global scales and how these structures interact with environmental monitoring and the uneven distribution of toxic harm and care. In doing so, it compares scientific, regulatory, corporate, and community-based forms of knowledge of pollution. Through participatory and community-based modes of research, this project questions how various forms of evidence-making can make experiences of toxic harm more visible and contribute to environmental governance and civic protection.
Methods
This project draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Dar es Salaam, involving methods such as participant observation, informal and semi-structured interviews, oral histories, and collaborative citizen science methods, together with inhabitants impacted by dust pollution or stakeholders working in formal and informal limestone quarrying, building materials production, construction, environmental pollution monitoring, and healthcare institutions. In terms of the latter, an important methodological component of this research involves pollution monitoring laboratories, hospitals, pharmacies, local healers, and gendered care systems that tend to pollution-related illnesses in the region.
Funding
HEALENAE Health and Environment in Africa and Europe, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctotal Network
