The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

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Description:

Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography are proud to arrange the Annual Jan Monk Distinguished Lecture at AAG 2023

The lecture will be given by Caroline Faria, Associate Professor, Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Texas at Austin

TITLE OF THE LECTURE: Manufacturing Zones, Marinas, and “Order from above”: The marshes of state-private land development around Kampala, Uganda

Abstract
The shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda are a rich and delicate ecological area. It is host to creeks
and springs, swamps and wetlands that sustain life in and far beyond the region. In this talk, I
draw on ongoing research with collaborators at UT Austin and Makerere University, Uganda. We
center one key site where land, water, and the political-economies of Ugandan neoliberalism
mingle: the Ntabo/ Garuga peninsula and the development of Pearl Marina. This luxury
residential development encroaches on and degrades the silted spaces of the marsh, dispossessing local communities, damaging plant, insect, and animal life, and foreclosing opportunities to glean medicinal herbs, collect water, and catch and trade in fish. A central irony of racio-colonial capitalism and neoliberalism, these publicly-accessible resources are all-the-more vital now, given the privatisation of health, water, and other public goods in the last forty years. Via archival research on these areas, and interviews with urban planners, district politicians, developers, and community-members, we trace how other forms of mingling makes this theft possible: that between faith in foreign investment, elite wealth-capture, “order from above”, and residues of colonially-grounded ideals of progress and improvement. Part of a larger collaborative project on the feminist political-ecologies of global retail capital, we examine the machinations of contemporary development in and around urban space, the stakes for local communities - particularly low-income women, and the socio-environmental impacts on wetland ecologies in Uganda.

Non-Presenting Participants