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Project

Redistribution, subjectivity, and the virtual: A view from the south

Africa is increasingly perceived as the site of an unprecedented digital revolution, alternately described as either propelling the continent into a new era of growth and prosperity or drawing it into new frontiers of exploitation and neo-colonial domination. Bringing into conversation and contributing to recent debates in economic anthropology on sharing and redistribution with the emerging scholarship in African digital anthropology on communication technologies, kinship and intimacy, this interdisciplinary project develops an alternative, bottom-up approach to the study of Africa’s digital revolution. It examines how new technologies are being incorporated into pre-existing, indigenous mechanisms of sharing, redistribution, mutual support, and “informal” social protection among peri-urban migrants of an East African agro-pastoralist society. The research focuses, as its key case study, on South Sudanese Nuer refugees in Uganda – peri-urban migrants in one of the most neoliberalised countries in Africa. Combining ethnographic and historical methodologies, and drawing on archival research and an extended period of fieldwork in Uganda, this research will advance the fields of economic and digital anthropology while making an important contribution to Nuer, South Sudanese and East African anthropology and history. 

Date:1 Oct 2022 →  Today
Keywords:Digitalisation, Personhood, Mobility
Disciplines:Ethnicity and migration studies, Social and cultural anthropology, Urban anthropology, African history, Socio-economic history