PhD student Nura Ali successfully defends thesis on The Hydro-Social Production of Health in Lagos

Image credit: Nura Ali

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Nura Ali has successfully defended her doctoral thesis that the flow of water through a city tells a story about the priorities of power, and specifically for Nura that this is a story that manifests in the everyday infrastructures and health of urban citizens. Her research thus traces such hydro-social relations and their production of urban health in the metropolis of Lagos, Nigeria.

In Lagos, existing vocabularies of city-ness cease to explain the realities of most urban dwellers and therefore her thesis contributes to the growing efforts to democratise theories about what the urban is. Nura engages with this by folding conceptualisations of the hydrosocial cycle into prevalent understandings of social and political determinants of health and finds that epistemic determinants of health are central to the understanding of the urban water-health nexus.

As part of her research, she worked from the standpoint of Makoko, a contested low income residential neighbourhood of Lagos where water and health entanglements produce a unique form of what she terms hydropolitan urbanisation, predetermining the ways in which residents are in the city. She finds that Lagos’ urban water insecurity manifests along sociospatial health gradients while private, local water systems emerge as a counter narrative to public service absenteeism, thereby both mitigating and producing water-borne diseases in low income neighbourhoods along Lagos lagoon.

Nura applied a Grounded Theory Method rooted in pragmatist epistemology that understands the research question as a problem space rather than a fixed container. She traces how the different stakeholders involved in Makoko’s water supply system shape access to water, which implications this holds for sociospatial health inequalities, and how these health inequalities are mitigated by local, nonstate actors through decolonial, yet formalised health practices.

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