Speaker: Emma Park
Time: 12:00 pm- 1:00 pm
Venue: 206 Ingraham Hall
Bio:
Emma Park is an Assistant Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, where she teaches courses on modern Africa, science and technology, global histories of capitalism, and the history of “development.” Her research uses infrastructure development projects to explore transformations in capitalism and state-craft. Her first book, Infrastructural Attachments: Austerity, Sovereignty, and the Politics of Expertise in Kenya (Duke), is an ethnographically-informed reading of the cultural politics of infrastructures and work from the nineteenth-century through to the present. Through an exploration of three infrastructures ‘in the making’ —roads, radio, and Kenya’s now-famed telephonic banking service, M-PESA—she argues that infrastructures in Kenya have been deeply charged cultural, political, and economic objects. By contrast to the global north, infrastructures in Kenya did not seamlessly produce a ‘state-space.’ A combination of durable policies of colonial austerity and Kenya’s unique material environment has meant that infrastructures were uneven in their reach. This has had implications for both the politics of belonging and the status of infrastructural work. She is working on a second project with Kevin P. Donovan tentatively titled: Parastatal: Intimacy & Value in Digital Kenya, which explores the entangled relationship between Kenya’s largest corporation, Safaricom (once a state-held entity) and the Kenyan state. She has also begun work on a single-authored book tentatively titled: Money Matters: Monetary Regimes, Race, and the Politics of Differentiation in Kenya.