Suchergebnisse

Considering the ultimate limitations of instructing Kenya's children in 'civilised' acts like eating a banana with a knife and fork at the expense of an education true to the nation's history, Wangui Kimari wonders whether the current educational system simply upholds students' self-effacement. When my sister was in primary school (the school where we all were had a supposedly pious nature that was the talk of town), like all of the students within this institution she had to take a mandatory 'ethics' class. The title of this class appeared to us ambivalent, big and intimidating, but from what we could garner, 'ethics' were simply tacit rules that we needed to embody in order to live (or pretend to live) in religious harmony with each other.

Heeding the 2013 CODESRIA / CLASCO call to attend to the localized entanglements of democracy and neoliberalism, this research is oriented by the bid to see what other political spaces have been established by young people in Kenya and Brazil, and what this says about how they fit in to normative political fora with their hegemonic discourses of democracy and neoliberalism; ideologies which often seek to impose on youth particular kinds of political practices and subjectivities. Overwhelmingly, it is also an attempt to share strategies and political imaginations that have emerged from poor urban youth in both countries; approaches, I argue, that also gesture towards the futures for these youth, their urban settings, and of the 'democratic' and 'neoliberal' political processes that have been entrenched in their national spaces.

Abstract
This paper seeks to address the connection between economic opportunities and violence prevention, through an in-depth study of the National Youth Service (NYS) Community Cohorts Programme – the biggest youth empowerment programme in Kenya's recent history. Using field data, it seeks to answer the following question: To what extent did the National Youth Service Community Cohorts Programme in Kenya contribute to violence prevention in the low-income neighborhoods of Mathare and Kibera? Empirically, using the NYS as a case study, the paper will provide new data on the impact of youth programs that simultaneously seek to promote livelihoods and economic opportunities towards dealing with the challenges of violence and exclusion. It will also explore the impact of such projects in reducing violence at the local level. Theoretically, the study will contribute to broader scholarly discussions on youth and violence in Africa, as well as the economic incentives and motivations argument in preventing and reducing violence. Redesigned in 2013, the NYS programme sought to reach thousands of youth in poor urban areas, and by offering them jobs to improve their neighborhoods, the goal was to provide them with a new sense of purpose in their life, and potentially, steer them away from deviant behavior. The NYS initiative is the most ambitious jobs and economic opportunities project for urban and rural youth in Kenya. Given its scale and the resource commitment from the Kenya government, the NYS initiative will continue to be a reference for other youth-focused initiatives and, thus, provides a useful case for the study of the economic opportunities-violence nexus.

From the beginning of its colonial settlement in Kenya, the British administration criminalized Kenyans. Even now, colonial modes of punishment, incarceration, closure, interrogation, curfew, confiscation, separation, displacement, and detention without trial are deeply embedded in the spatial and ideological arrangements of post-colonial Kenya. Initially assumed to herald a rupture from colonial modes of criminalization and punishment, the post-colonial period instead normalized them. Through ethnographic, scholarly, and visual encounters, the paper engages five interconnecting structures that engendered the legacy of a seamless system of control, containment, and punishment evident in the 'afterlives' of empire. These are settler colonialism, violence, racism, colonial corporeality, and capitalism. The paper attends to the violence and brutality that endures in the very geographies that were the urban targets of colonial siege and links the carceral practices of settler colonialism and the everyday post-colonial governance of Nairobi's poor neighbourhoods, encounters with the debris and ruination of empire found in the material and spatial fabric of Mathare. We take up a critical encounter with colonial files to both discern the continuity and lineage of carceral practices and to disrupt the authorial totality and continuity the colonial archive files assembled. The paper includes archival and authored photographs:

This paper introduce the Special collection 'Youth, the Kenyan State and a Politics of Contestation'. It focuses on youth and the heterogenous ways this social category responds to inordinate state action. Specifically, we foreground the various roles the Kenyan state has played in the construction and politicization of Kenyan youth across time and space. The introduction frames the papers in the Special Collection within a three-pronged argument: First, while we present youth as heterogeneous social category, we argue that their similar experiences of state surveillance and violence warrant analyzing them through a comparative lens. Secondly, we reject ahistorical renderings of youth politics often presented in youth bulge studies, arguing that such analyses have served to disregard and delegitimize the political grievances of Kenyan youth and flatten the diversity of their political activities. Finally we call for an approach to the study of youth politics, which seeks to expand 'the parameters of the political', taking oft-neglected informal spaces of youth political activity as important discursive and material sites of investigation. Taking these spaces seriously as objects of analysis, the papers provide a nuanced assessment of youth as political actors, which problematize reductive dichotomous narratives of youth politics that pit resistance against co-optation.

Chao, Sophie, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey, eds. 2022. The Promise of Multispecies Justice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 284 pp. ISBN 978-1478018896.
Ranganathan, Malini, David L. Pike, and Sapana Doshi. 2023. Corruption Plots: Stories, Ethics, and Publics of the Late Capitalist City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-1501768750.
Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 196 pp. ISBN: 978-1478014133.
Hoag, Colin. 2022. The Fluvial Imagination on Lesotho's Water-Export Economy. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 9780520386358 ebook.
King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 284 pp. ISBN 978-1478005681.
Ameli, Katharina. 2022. Multispecies Ethnography: Methodology of a Holistic Research Approach of Humans, Animals, Nature and Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 149 pp. ISBN 978-1666911923.
Zee, Jerry C. 2021. Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System. Oakland, California: University of California Press. 311 pp. ISBN 9780520384088.
Ferdinand, Malcolm. 2021. Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-509-54624-4.
Ogden, Laura. 2021. Loss and Wonder at the World's End. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 200 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1456-0.
Hathaway, Michael J. 2022. What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 270 pp. ISBN 978-0691225883.
Harrison, Jill Lindsey. 2019. From the Inside Out: The Fight for Environmental Justice within Government Agencies. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Stoetzer, Bettina. 2022. Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Nature in Berlin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 328 pp. ISBN 9781478018605.
Turner, James Morton, 2022. Charged: A History of Batteries and Lessons for a Clean Energy Future. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 234 pp. ISBN 9780295750248.

Since its emergence in the 1990s, the field of Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has focused on unsettling traditional understandings of the 'city' as entirely distinct from nature, showing instead how cities are metabolically linked with ecological processes and the flow of resources. More recently, a new generation of scholars has turned the focus towards the climate emergency. Turning up the heat seeks to turn UPE's critical energies towards a politically engaged debate over the role of extensive urbanisation in addressing socio-environmental equality in the context of climate change.The collection brings together theoretical discussions and rigorous empirical analysis by key scholars spanning three generations, engaging UPE in current debates about urbanisation and climate change. Engaging with cutting edge approaches including feminist political ecology, circular economies, and the Anthropocene, case studies in the book range from Singapore and Amsterdam to Nairobi and Vancouver. Contributors make the case for a UPE better informed by situated knowledges: an embodied UPE that pays equal attention to the role of postcolonial processes and more-than-human ontologies of capital accumulation within the context of the climate emergency. Acknowledging UPE's rich intellectual history and aiming to enrich rather than split the field, Turning up the heat reveals how UPE is ideally positioned to address contemporary environmental issues in theory and practice

Tensions between the US and China have escalated as both powers seek to draw countries into their respective political and economic orbits by financing and constructing infrastructure. Wide-ranging and even-handed, this book offers a fresh interpretation of the territorial logic of US–China rivalry, and explores what it means for countries across Eurasia, Africa, and Latin America. The chapters demonstrate that many countries navigate the global infrastructure boom by articulating novel spatial objectives and implementing political and economic reforms. By focusing on people and places worldwide, this book broadens perspectives on the US–China rivalry beyond bipolarity. It is an essential guide to 21st century politics