Burning Matters Life, Labor, and E-Waste Pyropolitics in Ghana

Global trade in electronic waste (e-waste) has led to various waste management challenges and many regions of the Global South have suffered the toxic consequences. In Burning Matters, Peter C. Little explores the complex cultural, economic, and environmental health politics of e-waste work in Ghana. He brings to light the lived experiences of Ghana's e-waste workers, as they navigate the health, social, and economic challenges of highly toxic e-waste labor. In particular, Little engages the experiences of e-waste workers who burn bundles of electrical cables to extract copper, a practice that contaminates bodies and the urban environment and which has attracted international organizations seeking to mitigate risk and find quick tech solutions to this highly toxic e-waste work. A nuanced perspective on e-waste burning and environmental politics in Africa at a time when global e-waste generation and trade is at an all-time high, Burning Matters contends that e-waste interventions devoid of ethnographic perspective and knowledge risk downplaying the vibrant complexities of e-waste itself and the matters of social life and labor that matter most to Ghana's e-waste workers.

Peter C. Little is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College. He is author of Toxic Town: IBM, Pollution, and Industrial Risks (2014).

Preface
Acknowledgments
List of Figures and Tables
Introduction: From E-Waste Ashes to Ethnographic Intervention
1. Amidst Global E-Waste Trades and Green Neoliberalization
2. "We Are All North Here": Dagomba Migrations and Meanings
3. Erasure, Demolition, and Violent Obsolescence in the Urban Margins
4. Embodied Burning, E-Waste Epidemiology, and Toxic Postcolonial Corporality
5. Visualizing Agbogbloshie and Re-Envisioning E-Waste Anthropology
6. Looming Uncertainties and Neoliberal Techno-Optimism
Conclusion: New Openings, Relations, and Burning Matters
Notes
References
Index