OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Access to ‘formal’ electricity networks remains a key challenge in many African urban areas. Significant attention has been paid to how access to an electricity connection should be provided and by whom. Much less attention has been paid to the endless, pragmatic, situated everyday practices of maintenance and repair that keep infrastructures going, not always successfully. This talk explores the usefulness in conceptualizing electricity service provision as a precarious achievement, a process always-in-the-making. To this end, the talk will draw on ongoing fieldwork in Maputo, Mozambique with the national electricity company, EDM (Electricidade de Moçambique, E.P.) and its transition to an electricity network mediated by prepayment technologies. The talk will draw on an article recently published in the journal Urban Studies (journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098018776921).