Profile
I am an Associate Professor of History at The and Eugene Lang College, where I teach courses on modern Africa, science and technology, global histories of capitalism, and the history of 鈥渄evelopment.鈥 My current research uses infrastructure development projects听to explore transformations in capitalism and state-craft. I mobilize an ethnographically-informed reading of the cultural politics of infrastructures and work from the twentieth-century through to the present.听
Historians of infrastructures have long argued that infrastructures form the invisible and unremarked background of social life. They are the networks of communication and exchange upon which society depends and the seemingly apolitical material substrate along which state authority extends, binding citizens both to one another and to their state. I challenge this common assertion in my book, . Through an exploration of three infrastructures 鈥榠n the making鈥 鈥攔oads, radio, and Kenya鈥檚 now-famed telephonic banking service, M-PESA鈥擨 argue that Kenya鈥檚 infrastructural history has been shaped policies of austerity鈥攁 discretionary logic that ensures the enrichment and provisioning of the few at the expense of the many. Given this dispensation, projects of infrastructural expansion, and thus the projects of state-building in whose name they were constructed, have always been entangled with projects of marketization.
If enacting the infrastructural state has relied on state-corporate entanglements, it has also crucially depended on the exploitation and expropriation of Africans鈥 infrastructural work. While this work has critically enabled infrastructural expansion and maintenance, the centrality of these contributions has been systematically effaced by metropolitan observers and recognized 鈥渆xperts.鈥 In foregrounding these workers and their work, I interrogate how Kenyans鈥 knowledge and expertise has been rescaled and subsumed, quietly underwriting the development of global infrastructural expertise, the circuits of finance upon which (post)colonial infrastructural expansion has been premised, and the forms of profit-making it has enabled.听
I am also in the process of completing a co-authored monograph with Kevin P. Donovan, provisionally titled Parastatal: Intimacy & Value in Digital Kenya. It uses Kenya鈥檚 largest corporation, Safaricom, as a lens through which to explore how the confluence of information technology and finance is remaking the nature of markets and property, citizenship and the state. I have also begun research for my second single-authored book project, Money Matters: Monetary Regimes, Race, and the Politics of Differentiation in Kenya. This project will chart a cultural history of fiscal life in Kenya from the nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on tax regimes, the post-office savings bank, and contemporary efforts to draw people and their money into global circuits of finance, this book will explore the long history of efforts to 鈥渂ank the unbanked,鈥 while attending to the popular politics, cultural commentary, and social critique to which these efforts have given rise.听
Degrees Held
PhD 2017, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
MA 2014, Concordia University
BA 2007, Concordia University听
Professional Affiliation
African Studies Association
4S
British Institute of East Africa听
Recent Publications
Publication(s)
Book: 听[Duke University Press, November 2024]
Article: 听鈥淓nacting Radio: Expertise and the Politics of Scale in Colonial Kenya,鈥 罢别肠丑苍辞濒辞驳测听and Culture, [under review]
Article: 鈥 鈥楬uman ATMs鈥: M-PESA and the Expropriation of Affective Work in Safaricom鈥檚 Kenya,鈥 Africa 90 (5) 2020.听听
Article: 鈥淚ntimacy and Estrangement: Safaricom, Divisibility, and the Making of the Corporate Nation-State鈥 Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa,
and the Middle East 41 (3) 2021.
Article: 鈥淚ntellectual and Cultural Work in Times of Austerity,鈥 Introduction to a special issue on austerity. Co-authored: Emma Park, Derek R. Peterson, Anne Pitcher, Keith Breckenridge. Africa 91 (4) 2021.
Article: 鈥淜nowledge/Seizure: Data, Debt & Rent in Kenya,鈥 (co-authored with Kevin P. Donovan, shared authorship) Antipode 54 (4): 2022.
Article: 鈥淎lgorithmic Intimacy: The Data Economy of Predatory Inclusion in Kenya,鈥 (co-authored with Kevin P. Donovan, with Kevin P. Donovan as first Author) Special Issue on 鈥淐urious Utopias: Large and Small Blueprints for Human Society,鈥 Social Anthropology 30 (2) 2022.
Chapter: 鈥淭he Right to Sovereign Seizure?: Taxation and the Imperial British East Africa Company鈥 [forthcoming in Gurminder Bhambra and Julia McClure, eds. Imperial Inequalities: Taxation and Welfare Across European Empires]
Chapter: 鈥淧rivacy, Privation, and Person: Data, Debt, and the Infrastructured Self鈥 (co-authored with Kevin P. Donovan, with Emma Park as first author) [forthcoming, in Richard Rottenburg, ed. Translating Technologies in Africa, Johannesburg: WiTS University Press]
鈥溾 - co-authored with Kevin P. Donovan.听LIMN.听(2016) Issue 7听
听
听
Performances and Appearances
听
2021-22, Mellon-Funded Sawyer Seminar, 鈥淐urrency and Empire: Monetary Policy, Race, and Power鈥 (co-PI with Gustav Peebles. Other conveners: Aaron Jakes, Sanjay Reddy, Paulo dos Santos). 麻豆传媒色情片, New York
2022-23, Faculty Fellow, Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, 麻豆传媒色情片, NYC.
2020, Faculty Fellow, Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, 麻豆传媒色情片, NYC.
2020, Faculty Fellow, Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, & Social Thought (GIDEST). For a Project Titled: 鈥淒igital Debt and the Corporate State in Kenya, Africa鈥檚 鈥淪ilicon Savannah鈥 麻豆传媒色情片, NYC.
2019, Nominated for Outstanding Achievements in Social Justice Teaching, Eugene Lang College, 麻豆传媒色情片.
2018, Faculty Fellow, Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, 麻豆传媒色情片.
2017, Earl Lewis Award. University of Michigan.
2016, Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Award. Rackham Graduate School. University of Michigan.
2016, Sidney Fine Prize for Outstanding听Graduate Student Instructor in History. University of Michigan.
2016, Sweetland Writing Fellowship. University of Michigan.
2015, Rackham Humanities Research Fellowship. University of Michigan.听 听 听 听 听 听
2014, African Initiatives Grant. African Studies Center (ASC). University of Michigan
2012-13, Eisenberg Fellow. Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies (EIHS). University of Michigan.
2010-13, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Graduate Fellowship. Canada.
Research Interests
Modern Africa, Science and Technology Studies, Social Studies of Finance, Histories of Capitalism, Colonialism and Empire, Economic Anthropology听