CUSAS Brown bag lunch with Dr Mike Degani (University of Cambridge)

This is a conversation centered around infrastructure as both an ethnographic object and style of analysis. Drawing on long-term research on Tanzania’s national power grid, and a range of other exciting scholarship, we will discuss how infrastructures relate to concepts such as structure, event, network, ecology, and style. Students are invited to share their own infrastructure-related topics and questions.

Michael Degani is an anthropologist of infrastructure and energy in Africa and beyond. He received his PhD from Yale University and taught in the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of Cambridge in 2023. He has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Tanzania since 2009, supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright-Hayes Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies. His first book, The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania(Duke University Press 2022) is an ethnography of national power grid, and explores infrastructural networks as key sites for urban Tanzanians to enact, experience, and debate their social contract with the state. Related work has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Limn, Signs and Society, and Critical Times, among others, and explores the aesthetics of improvisation, Piercean semiotics and exchange theory, and the anthropology of capture in the context of energy transition.

For more information, contact cusas@socanth.cam.ac.uk