Uganda's capital, Kampala, is undergoing dramatic urban transformations as its new technocratic government seeks to clean and green the city. Waste Worlds tracks the dynamics of development and disposability unfolding amid struggles over who and what belong in the new Kampala. Garbage materializes these struggles. In the densely inhabited social infrastructures in and around the city's waste streams, people, places, and things become disposable but conditions of disposability are also challenged and undone. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Jacob Doherty illustrates how waste makes worlds, offering the key intervention that disposability is best understood not existentially, as a condition of social exclusion, but infrastructurally, as a form of injurious social inclusion.

"By means of the book’s rich ethnographic accounts, Doherty. . . .makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the work that underlies the infrastructures that are so vital to contemporary societies." - Exertions

"An expansive rendering of urban sanitation policies and problems in Kampala. . . . would certainly work well in an undergraduate course." - American Anthropologist

"Evocative with a skilful poetic style. . . . Waste Worlds offers a way to think about waste that humanises waste workers and renders the complicated experience of waste for non-elite urban residents." - LSE Review of Books