Bulletin n. 1/2017
June 2017
INDICE
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Poggiali Lisa
    Digital futures and analogue pasts?: Citizenship and ethnicity in techno-utopian Kenya
    in Africa: The Journal of the International African Institute , Volume 87, Number 2, May ,  2017 ,  253-277
    In this article, I explore how digital technologies in Kenya emerged as a site through which questions of citizenship were posed – if not resolved – at a moment of national crisis. I draw attention, specifically, to the ways in which developers, bloggers and state actors mobilized techno-utopian narratives about Kenya's 'Silicon Savannah' to advocate for what I call 'digital citizenship', an ethical blueprint for how best to belong to the nation. While social scientists writing about ICT in Africa have focused primarily on Africans' novel uses of objects such as mobile phones, I contribute to this conversation by interrogating how digital technologies have been mobilized as an idiom to both challenge and perpetuate social cleavages of ethnicity and class. 'Digital citizenship', I suggest, compels us to revisit debates about (post)colonial history, ideologies that undergird digitality, and the formation of local, national and transnational scales of belonging.
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