Thematic course: Troubled waters: new directions in water research from Africa (15 ECTS)

What norms and practices shape water flows and water access in urban Africa? How do people access water and how is that regulated institutionally, politically and historically?

This course explores the complex ways in which water in urban Africa is planned, governed, produced, accessed, used and experienced at various levels. It looks, for example, into the adaptive processes urban citizens use in their everyday lives when getting access to and using water. To analytically navigate this complexity, we are guided by an urban waterscapes approach that allow to recognize the differentiated, fragmented and uneven provision of water that does not match modern infrastructural ideas of the planned, networked and engineered city that guides current policy frameworks. We are interested in infrastructure as a way to focus on the socio-technical, as well as on mediating institutions such as community groups, water user associations, religious groups and institutions, traditional authority etc.

The focus will be on overall conceptual debates as well as ethnographic waterscapes perspectives that take seriously the significance of everyday street-level practices (action, knowledge and norms) and the way social identities explain wider patterns of access.

The teaching team is part of the Multiple Waterscapes in Urban Ghana research project that is a collaboration between University of Copenhagen, Denmark and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana.

A comprehensive reading list will be provided on Absalon before the course starts.