"The Whole of Kampala is a Wetland": Sacred Citizenship, Belonging, and Dispossession in Urban Uganda

Please join us on Tuesday, October 20th from 5:30-7:00 pm in the CESTA space (Wallenberg Hall, Building 160, Room 433a) where we will workshop Adele Stock's article-in-progress "The Whole of Kampala is a Wetland": Sacred Citizenship, Belonging, and Dispossession in Urban Uganda." Madeline Turner (Anthropology, Stanford) will act as a discussant. The paper will be circulated to all that RSVP and dinner will be provided. We look forward to seeing you there!

Paper abstract: At least 60 percent of residents of Kampala, Uganda, live in informal settlements, many of which are located in the city's expansive wetland ecosystems. For the past thirty years, a protracted struggle between the state and wetland residents has ensued. As government entities seek to evict working class Ugandans in the name of wetland conservation, residents push back through a diverse array of material and spiritual strategies. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, oral histories, and archival materials documenting the development and implementation of wetland policy, this paper turns towards a group of residents I term "sacred citizens" to make sense of the politics of emplacement and belonging on this contested semi-aquatic urban terrain. Sacred citizens make claim to belonging outside of the bounds of the state, using historically rooted spiritual practices and idioms to secure otherwise inaccessible tools for social and material reproduction. Devotion to wetland spirits affords sacred citizens land, housing, food, fertility, and bodily and spiritual healing. Pushing beyond infrastructure and auto-construction as merely material categories, I argue for the salience of spirits and ancestors in understanding the networks that make urban worlds viable.

Speaker Bio: Adele is a Ph.D. candidate in the History Department with a Ph.D. minor in Anthropology. Stock's research employs a diverse set of methods to explore the intersections of environments, infrastructure, and religious life in nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century African cities. Adele is the co-coordinator of Stanford Humanities Workshop Spirits and Science, Sacred and Secular: Rethinking Knowledge in African Worlds and is a 2026-2027 Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation Africa Fellow. Adele holds a B.A. (summa cum laude) in History from Mount Holyoke College and an M.A. in History from Stanford University.

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