Welcome! I am a historian and ethnographer of Kenya. I study capitalism and the environment, as well as a science, technology, and infrastructure. I am a research affiliate at the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and was previously an Associate Professor (with tenure) at the New School for Social Research.
My first book, Infrastructural Attachments: Austerity, Sovereignty, and Expertise in Kenya (Duke University Press 2024), used an exploration of Kenya’s infrastructural history—focusing on roads, radio, and mobile money—to offer a novel account of state-capital relations over the long twentieth century. In it, I argue that austerity has been a defining feature in Kenya since the earliest days of colonial occupation, and for-profit infrastructural provisioning has been a feature rather than a bug, seeing Kenya and Kenyans dominated by various iterations of corporate rule. African infrastructural experts are also key to this story—their expertise and skill offering an unacknowledged subsidy to the austere infrastructural state.
I am also working on a second book project with Kevin P. Donovan (University of Edinburgh) that focuses on East Africa’s largest corporation, telecommunications and financial services provider, Safaricom. We’re interested in the entanglements of the corporate and the state, the unwieldy and unexpected forms of politics this generates, and the types of para-ethnographic work done to stabilize the situation. Rather than the firm standing at a distance from Kenyan society, we explore how relations of intimacy sit at the heart of Safaricom’s business model, particularly in its formation of markets for data and debt.
More recently, I have started working on a project thinking about the relationship between anthropogenic climate change and regimes of debt. Tentatively titled: Dispossession and Ecologies of Debt: An Environmental History of the Fiscal State in Kenya, this research will cover a range of topics: Kenya’s construction of a debt-funded and coal-fueled railway (called the “Lunatic Express” by critics) at the turn of the cecntury; racialized debates over monocrop maize production and soil degradation in the 1920s; mass protests over petrol tax hikes in the 2020s. I have a piece forthcoming on these topics in Comparative Studies in Society and History.
Emma Park 