Mo-Faya: Socio-ecological survivals in Nairobi’s outlaw settlement
Funding period: 1 September 2018 – 31 May 2019
Type of funding:
International Fellowship
Wangui Kimari is a Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town. Building on her interest in urban political ecology for African cities, Wangui’s International Fellowship will be under the mentorship of both Dr Henrik Ernstson and Professor Erik Swyngedouw at the University of Manchester. With their guidance, over nine months she will be writing a monograph titled: Mo-Faya: Socio-ecological survivals in Nairobi’s outlaw settlement. This proposed ethnographic book aims to elucidate the layered socio-ecological strategies, survivals and memories of residents in Mathare, a ‘slum’ in Nairobi, and will draw attention to how an increasingly militarized urban governance (re)produces what she calls “ecologies of exclusion.” This research project makes arguments shaped by local oral narratives, assemblage theory, urban political ecology, the black radical tradition, the anthropology of empire, the anthropology of violence and the anthropology of subjectivity.