A collective study lab

Wangui KIMARI

Junior Research Fellow at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA) at the University of Cape Town

Wangui Kimari is an anthropologist. Her work draws on many local histories and theoretical approaches – including oral narratives, assemblage theory, urban political ecology, the black radical tradition, the anthropology of empire, the anthropology of violence and the anthropology of subjectivity – in order to think through urban spatial management in Nairobi from the vantage point of its most marginalized residents. Wangui is also the participatory action research coordinator for the Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC), a community-based organization in Mathare, a poor urban settlement in Nairobi, Kenya, and an editorial board member of the online publication Africa Is a Country (AIAC).

Selected publications

Kimari, Wangui. “The story of a pump: life, death and afterlives within an urban planning of “divide and rule” in Nairobi, Kenya.”Urban Geography 42, no. 2 (2021): 141-160.

Kimari, Wangui. “War-talk: an urban youth language of siege in Nairobi.”Journal of Eastern African Studies 14, no. 4 (2020): 707-723.

Kimari, Wangui, and Henrik Ernstson. “Imperial remains and imperial invitations: Centering race within the contemporary large‐scale infrastructures of East Africa.”Antipode52, no. 3 (2020): 825-846.