Emma Park

Dispossession and Ecologies of Debt: An Environmental History of the Fiscal State in Kenya

This book project traces the connections among regimes of debt and ecological transformation in Kenya over the long-twentieth century. In it, I explore the dynamic interplay among ecology, racialized and classed processes of expropriation, and the changing contours of the state’s revenue regime. Conjoining archival research, interviews, and ethnographic methods, Dispossession and Ecologies of Debt will offer a long-angle view that uses debt—both as concept and as material technology—to explore the history of (post)colonial capitalism as a history of the production of “second nature”—or a history of racial capitalism (Alexander 2023; Robinson 1983) as world ecology (Moore 2015)—over the long twentieth century.

Parastatal: Technopolitics, Intimacy & Value in Digital Kenya (co-authored with Kevin P. Donovan)

Kevin P. Donovan and I are writing a book about 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.