Afra Foli is a PhD candidate in Urban Geography at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research. She studied Human Geography and Planning (BSc) at the University of Utrecht and the University of Toronto, and Urban Studies (MSc) at the University of Amsterdam and University of Pretoria. Following her master’s she worked for a social impact studio in Amsterdam and Accra.

Her PhD research studies the everyday geographies of waste and drainage infrastructure. The project is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) through a VIDI grant obtained by Prof. Dr. Justus Uitermark, focusing on amenities in rapidly urbanizing cities. 

In 2020 she was selected as one of KNAW & NEMO Kennislink's Faces of Science.

PhD title: "The material politics of drainage in Accra" 
Supervisors: Prof. dr. Justus Uitermark and Prof. dr. Rivke Jaffe

This PhD project aims to shed light on the social and political relations embedded in the infrastructure, flows and practices of drainage in Accra. It focuses on the everyday geographies of waste and drainage infrastructure, approaching urbanization as a subjective, socio-ecological process and combining urban ethnography with geospatial analysis.

The dissertation research builds on work on the politics of infrastructure and in urban political ecology, understanding urban infrastructure as a site where socio-ecological inequalities are produced and negotiated. Understanding Accra’s “gutters” not only as drainage channels but as an infrastructure for waste disposal and removal, it studies this circulation of material through the city as a metabolic process. Here, by focusing on the everyday practices surrounding this infrastructure, the dissertation draws attention to the ambiguities inherent in this metabolic process – the meaning of the gutters and the risks or resources associated with their flows connect directly to divergent sources and dynamics of urban power. The material construction and maintenance of infrastructure ties to the formation of authority in and beyond the state, while the strong affective responses residents have to regarding the uses of gutters also feed into everyday struggles over urban belonging. Engaging with scholarship on post-networked infrastructure that challenges colonially derived modernist spatial imaginaries and urban ideals, the project highlights the political work that such ideals continue to do in everyday urban life, legitimating the status of some residents as modern urban citizens and delegitimating that of others.

Some of Afra’s recent teaching activities include:

• Assistant lecturer of MA course ‘Urban Debates’ 
• Tutorial teacher of BSc course  ‘Geographies of Inequality’
• Lecturer and tutorial teacher of Bsc course Stadsgeografie II and Stadsgeografie in-depth module