Recovering Sociology from the Trash Heap

Of Waste Politics and the Spatialization of Local Representation in Lagos

Bibliographic Data

ID7819464
AuthorsCôme Salvaire (0000-0002-8440-9246, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume43
Issue2
Pages354-376
Publication date2019-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of Urban and Regional Research (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0309-1317 • E-ISSN: 1468-2427
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1468-2427.12727
OpenAlexW2911123961
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited47

This article excavates the debate that unfolded during the 1980s between Jacques Rancière and Pierre Bourdieu to shed light on the theoretical divide that still cuts across the field of urban studies today. Looking at contemporary Rancièrian scholarship through a Bourdieusian lens, it points to their main theoretical shortcomings and reasserts the value of relational, field‐based and empirically grounded approaches to urban politics. At the same time, this article engages seriously Rancière's critique of Bourdieu's failure to account for space in order to question the territoriality inherent to the notion of field. We put this theoretical discussion to the test of Lagos's garbage. Drawing on an ethnographic study conducted in Lagos from 2015 to 2016, we propose analyzing the process of spatialization of the field of local representation by looking at the ways solid waste—here conceived as a political opportunity—is mobilized by different actors. We argue that the deployment of a waste infrastructure in Lagos is congruent with a relative disinvestment in practices of territorial control that reshapes the structure of local representation, reconfiguring the ‘stage’ on which politics is played out in the Nigerian metropolis

Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Spatialization · Urban politics · Anthropology · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · South African History and Culture · Urban Planning and Governance

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