Wangui Kimari: Research encounters with and for 'outlaw' Nairobi

HUMA Doctoral Seminar Series

Speaker: Wangui Kimari (HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa, South Africa)

In this presentation, I reflect on my experiences doing research in Nairobi's poor urban settlements, what I term 'outlaw' spaces since they endure constant criminalisation and are unable to use the law to seek redress for the state-sanctioned violations particular to these geographies. I speak of encounters and not research methods so as to foreground relationships in any research process, as well as the inevitable, but often off-staged, co-learning and co- shaping that takes place between researchers and their interlocutors.

About the speaker: Wangui Kimari is an anthropologist. Her work draws on many local histories and theoretical approaches – including oral narratives, assemblage theory, urban political ecology, the black radical tradition, the anthropology of empire, the anthropology of violence and the anthropology of subjectivity – in order to think through urban spatial management in Nairobi from the vantage point of its most marginalized residents. Wangui is also the participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), a community-based organization in Mathare, a poor urban settlement in Nairobi, Kenya and an editorial board member of the online publication Africa Is a Country (AIAC).