This paper describes a collaborative effort to reimagine bricks as instruments of disease prevention. The world’s most common building material, the earthen brick offers an entry point into rethinking the ecologies of disease under conditions of material precarity. In Dar es Salaam, where rapid urbanisation collides with fragile infrastructures and proliferating mosquitoes, housing is largely self-built, incrementally extended with modest resources and unfinished surfaces. These textures of dwelling shape both comfort and vulnerability, entangling aspirations for permanence with the circulations of air, heat, and insect life. I present a collaborative project that seeks to re-engineer bricks not only to block mosquito entry but also to channel airflow and regulate temperature, reframing vector borne disease control as part of the wider practices through which homes are made habitable. To take the brick seriously is to situate it within a more-than-human urbanism, where soil, water, and mosquito life are inseparable from the politics of building and the practices of belonging – a shift from technocratic fixes toward the incremental, collective labour of making the planetary city liveable.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2025
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Paul Basu and Elizabeth Hallam.
