About Me

Prince Guma is an urban imaginer, rural optimist and a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. His current research is at the intersection of Urban African Studies, and Science, Technology and Society (STS). His project focuses on the centrality of mobile technologies in Nairobi and how these shape interactions between infrastructural systems, between systems and society, and thereby, the city as a sphere, nexus and junction of and for innovation. Prior work has questioned how forces of urbanity, rurality, postcoloniality and contemporaneity elucidate, obscure, affect or are affected by everyday processes, practices and materialities. He is a research fellow of Harry Frank Guggeinhaim (HFG) Foundation's “Young African Scholars” programme; and IASSCS–Ford Foundation's Emerging Scholars International Research Fellowship Program.

On the precarity of the global present and its implications for the African city
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On the precarity of the global present and its implications for the African city

The last couple of decades have witnessed a series of regional events that have threatened to shift the tides of global politics. For instance, it was not long ago that the notion of ‘Africa rising’ became such a hot story amidst optimistic accounts of a growing middle class, inclusive technologies, sprawling cities, and budding economies. […]

Imaginaries on researching and inhabiting a city of sprawling ‘mobile’ infrastructures – Nairobi
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Imaginaries on researching and inhabiting a city of sprawling ‘mobile’ infrastructures – Nairobi

Imagine that you just alighted at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, only 25 minutes from Nairobi’s Central Business District. Obviously, the first thing that you will want to do is get connected. At the airport, there are often a handful of enthusiastic mobile telecommunications agents and personnel that are readily on standby, more than willing to […]