ConflictNET: Internet and conflict
I designed and conducted research into the discourses, practices, and impact of efforts to extend internet access to the most remote regions in East Africa, as well as policies (like government-ordered internet shutdown) that restrict or censor the internet. I am particularly interested how the polices and practices that shape internet access and its use by vulnerable populations, like refugees and IDPs, are made and implemented.
This research was part of the ConflictNET project, a multi-year ERC grant-funded study run by Dr Nicole Stremlau to examine the implications of increasing access to the internet in delicate conflict-prone contexts. As part of this study, we held a workshop on internet shutdowns in Africa in Johannesburg in May 2018 with participants from across the continent, and published the results of this conference in a special section of the International Journal of Communication in 2020. To learn more about the ConflictNET project, please visit the website of the Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy.
Technology innovation in Kenya
For my doctoral work, I conducted a multi-year ethnography of the lived experiences of those at the forefront of shaping the modern technological landscape in East Africa. After two years of preliminary research, I spent 12 months as an embedded anthropologist in the communications department of one of the most well-known technology hubs in Africa, Nairobi’s iHub. Operating since 2010, the iHub has acted as a gateway for many international investors and entrepreneurs interested in engaging with Kenyan techies, and built up its reputation for this through the ability of its members to construct a globally persuasive narrative about Kenya as the “tech hub of Africa”, and the iHub as the gateway to that hub. Drawing from the deep data I collected over the previous three years, I argue in the dissertation that while actors like the iHub were working to shape such narratives, those same narratives, as well as other powerful technological and cultural narratives (like Africa Rising or techno-optimism) also acted to shape, and at times, inhibit, the work that the iHub and other members of Kenya technology community could do.