Ebenezer Olamiposi Adeyemi

Current anthropological scholarship on infrastructure frames it as material objects, like roads, waste disposal systems, healthcare facilities, to name a few, that are provided predominately by the state. Additionally, debates in critical medical anthropology have highlighted how social factors, like inadequate infrastructure, interact with biological pathogens, such as mosquitos, to make marginalized populations susceptible to infectious diseases. However, my research seeks to advance debates within the foregoing areas of anthropological literature by exploring what community-developed infrastructure can tell us about citizenship and the management of infectious diseases. Consequently, through eleven months of ethnographic research, involving participant observation, and informal and semi-structured interviews in Makoko, this project explores the role of community-developed infrastructure in the management of malaria in Makoko, Lagos State, Nigeria. Makoko is a large informal settlement characterized by government marginalization and a lack of state-funded infrastructure. This research also involves one month of archival research in Lagos and Ibadan, Nigeria. The archival research will focus on the analysis of archival documents on the post-colonial Nigerian government’s urban policies and the distribution of infrastructural projects (1960-present) in Lagos. This is aimed at ascertaining inequality in both post-colonial Lagos and Federal government funding and distribution of infrastructural projects in Lagos.