Searching for a New Kenya

Stephanie Diepeveen is a Researcher at the University of Cambridge. She is co-editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies special issue on 'Publics in Africa in a Digital Age'. Stephanie was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Darwin College, Cambridge (2017-2020). She has been researching everyday expression of politics in Kenya since 2008, both individually and through interdisciplinary collaborations, supported, among others, by UKRI-GCRF, the Alborada Research Fund and the Centre of Governance and Human Rights, Cambridge.

• Part I. Re-thinking Publics from Kenya: 1. Introduction; 2. The history of publics in Mombasa: people, media and the state; Part II. Characterising Publics: 3. Publics in the streets: Mombasa's street parliaments; 4. Publics in civil society and online: Mombasa's youth parliaments; Part III. Situating Publics in Time and Space: 5. Our turn to starve: material insecurity, idleness and publics; 6. Publics and the contested state of land in Kenya; 7. The obfuscation of spatial constraints on Facebook; Part IV. The Power of Publics: 8. Popular politics and publics during the 2013 general elections; 9. In the presence of fear: violence and publics in Kenya; 10. The individual spectator and the role of imagination in publics; 11. Conclusion.

'The focus on publics, at a time when scholars are revisiting the concept with fresh lenses, locates this book at the centre of one of the most important debates in African politics. Diepeveen demonstrates how social media and street parliaments in Kenya prompts us to rethink popular politics, across physical and digital spaces in Africa.' Duncan Omanga, Social Science Research Council, Brooklyn