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Paper short abstract:

This paper challenges a dichotomous framing of conversations on growth that tend to be either for it or against it. Thinking from a range of sites in Uganda where a phenomenon that we call “bundling” comes into view, we outline a way to imagine growth otherwise.

Paper long abstract:

While economic expansion is still presumed to be a fundamental requirement for nation-states, in recent years, calls to abandon growth entirely and to degrow have multiplied. This paper challenges a dichotomous framing of many conversations on growth that tend to be either for it or against it. Thinking from a range of sites in Uganda where a phenomenon that we call “bundling” comes into view, we reflect on whether it is possible to think growth otherwise. Analyzing a number of examples of bundling from present-day Kampala as well as its historical and linguistic scaffolding, we take the phenomenon seriously as an alternative way of imagining growth. Bundling, we argue, is the result of an aesthetics wherein both material value and social relationships are imagined to arise through thickenings of like persons and things, assembled and ordered in spatial proximity and symmetry. The paper suggests that bundling offers conceptual resources to imagine growth otherwise, as processes unfolding in ways that complicate both too facile liberal and neoliberal imaginaries of unfettered flows of goods, people, things and services. It also suggests that the Euro-American degrowth arguments may be less persuasive and urgent in places like Uganda. Instead of being for or against growth, bundling draws attention to the need to cultivate other ways of growing together.