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In this paper we develop a feminist political ecology of disaster colonialism. To do so, we focus on a series of fires that devastated Park Yard Market in Kampala, Uganda, one of the largest retail spaces in East Africa. Officially accidental, rumours suggest the fires were deliberately set to displace traders and make way for the lucrative (re)development of the city‐centre land. Concerned less with the veracity of these rumours and more with their political ecologies, we show how narratives of Park Yard forwarded by the state and private interests indeed readied it for disaster. Here, we trace how colonial narratives of urban planning in the city, driven by technocratic imperatives of improvement, modernisation, and safety echo in the contemporary devaluation of Park Yard and its women traders. Against this, we show how the caring labour and investment by those traders was central to the formation and maintenance of the market. Over time they created an economically viable space, even as their work was devalued and legally unrecognised. Our analysis interrogates the colonial past‐presents and the gendered‐racialised logics of neoliberal urban development. This framing understands spectacular disaster, a series of highly destructive fires, as inextricably connected to historically produced systems of precarious urban marginality. It demonstrates the uneven impacts, and in particular the deeply deleterious impacts for low‐income Ugandan women; the relationship between fire disaster, vulnerability, and the labour of social reproduction; and the varied ways female traders resisted, adapted, and struggled to defend their economic space in the city. Specifically, a feminist political ecology also helps us understand the embodied nature of this relationship. That is, it is always produced through emotion‐laden, material, and corporeal gendered, racialised and classed power and both relies on and violates particular kinds of idealised or disposable urban subjectivities.
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This content will become publicly available on February 17, 2026
‘Land is men’: oil, secondary wives, and the extractive intimacies of dispossession by compensation in Albertine Graben, Uganda
Feminist political ecologies of land have long traced how land dispossession impacts women and exacerbates gender inequalities. However, there remains limited work on land compensation in extractive economies. In this article, we take this up via a focus on oil development in Uganda. We examine how compensation is bound up with, and reinforces, power inequalities of gender, marital status, ethnicity, and class. In particular, we focus on women positioned as non-favored or ‘secondary’ wives, highlighting their particular vulnerabilities to dispossession during compensation and resettlement. Our research is based on interviews, participant observation, and focus groups with secondary wives conducted in 2015, 2018 and 2024 in Kabaale Parish in the Albertine Graben region of Western Uganda. We trace the legal and socio-cultural norms that enable women’s dispossession, as well as their resilience following land loss. We trace the ways that intimacies of family, marriage, and interpersonal relationships are tightly interwoven with state policy, land wealth, access to compensation, and control of resources. We show that the land dispossession of secondary wives is not only a fall-out of oil extraction, but also facilitates it, making the process more lucrative for companies, the Ugandan state and, to a lesser extent, for resettled husbands. Our work makes important contributions to feminist political ecologies of land, marriage, and oil and gas industrial development in Global South settings. Given the centrality of patriarchy to extractive theft, we assert that analyses of this industry must consider the intimate and intersectional politics of compensation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1951585
- PAR ID:
- 10592128
- Editor(s):
- NA
- Publisher / Repository:
- Taylor and Francis
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Gender, Place & Culture
- Edition / Version:
- 1
- Volume:
- 1
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 0966-369X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 23
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Land, Marriage, Oil, Resettlement compensation, Uganda
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: 1 Other: 1
- Size(s):
- 1
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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