About the event

Samwel Moses Ntapanta, Postdoctoral Research at AU Anthropology, will be introducing his new book Gathering Electronic Waste in Tanzania: Labour, Value, and Toxicity. The event will also feature commentary by AIAS Fellow Pierre du Plessis, who will also facilitate a dialogue with Samwel. We will round off the gathering with a toast to celebrate the book’s publication. 

Abstract

While acknowledging exposure to toxic chemicals embedded in e-waste, Gathering Electronic Waste in Tanzania pays attention to quotidian lifeworlds of waste labour and their encounter with toxic chemicals. Samwel refocuses the attention on skills, knowledge, and ingenuity of informal recycling labour and material circulation as they move between value regimes.  Throughout the book, Samwel engages with the concept of gathering. Ursula Le Guin proposes investigating the gatherer’s bag or container in the Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction to understand the collector, the collectives, the labour and the relationships that materials have with the landscape  (Le Guin et al., 2019).

The book extends Le Guin’s gathering concept to electronic waste as they travel and undergo valuation, devaluation and valorisation in Dar es Salaam cityscapes. As the title suggests, Gathering E-waste, the book adopts gathering as an analytical concept in two ways: First, how informal electronic waste workers locate, collect, and transform the value. The book follows collectors through the city as they valorise and collect defunct electronics, to the workshop where devices and dismantled, chopped and burnt. It further follows materials as they acquire new value by salvaging materials like metals, e.g. copper and iron, as they go back to export and manufacturing, and aluminium is salvaged at workshops to produce charcoal cookstoves. Second, how electronics and e-waste enact new collectivities, at the downstream of techno capitalism, that gather social-material assemblages that extend globally through the circulation of technology, waste, and toxicity. Living downstream means living at the bottom end of the capitalist system. Places that are at the receiving end of capitalism’s violence and where surplus and disposable populations live. These communities live in the peripheries where consumerism sends its tides, and, in late capitalism, they are often the recipients of e-waste from the metropoles. At the same time, downstream is a resources frontier of techno-capitalism. To reveal the life at the downstream, the book follows importation and the demand for second-hand electronics, repairing, the labour to collect and salvage e-waste and exposure to toxic chemicals. The book describes and analyse life at the downstream of capitalism through the lens of e-waste workers labour.

Registration

The event is free and open to all interested. Please sign up here.

Contact

Heather Anne Swanson, ikshswanson@cas.au.dk