HUMA Guest Lecture

Speaker: Marco Di Nunzio (University of Birmingham, UK)

Abstract: Examining the long history of experts' engagements with the African continent and the Global South, critical scholarship has explored how "international experts" have made realities commensurable with rationalities of government and contributed to design programs and policy that willingly or unwillingly have reinforced regimes of authoritarian politics under the neutral language of technocracy. This scholarship has provided a powerful critique of the politics of expertise. Yet it has tended to reproduce an image of "international experts" as competent, knowledgeable and effective. This paper goes beyond a portrayal of experts as scient figures to focus on how urban experts based in the Euro-America build their careers and status through a purposeful epistemic of cluelessness. By narrating how these urban experts engage with and narrate the development of Addis Ababa, I explore how and why they could claim their work to be impactful despite limited empirical knowledge of local urban realities and independently on whether the formulas and recipes for urban development they proposed in their reports and high-profile meetings with government stakeholders were actualised and implemented.

Marco Di Nunzio

About the speaker: Marco Di Nunzio is an Assistant Professor in Urban Anthropology at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. He is the author of The Act of Living (Cornell University Press, 2019) and the director of the award-winning documentary A Day in Arada. Since 2020, he is the founding editor of OtherwiseMag, a magazine of ethnographic storytelling. He is a Leverhulme Research Fellow, writing a book on Addis Ababa's construction boom, provisionally entitlement Conspiracies to Build.