Nairobi-scapes

Annie Pfingst applies an interdisciplinary visual, archival, and discursive practice to encounters with the materiality and spatiality of carceral and colonizing geographies, emergency landscapes, geographies of resistance, and the legacy of settler colonial violence. She has exhibited and presented photographic, installation, and multi-media works at galleries, conferences, and symposia in London, Sydney, Nairobi, Berlin, and Java. In 2021, Annie created Haunting, a visual walk through the carceral landscapes of empire across Palestine and Kenya.

James Muriuki is a Nairobi-based artist specializing in photography and lens-based media. He is interested in transitioning societies in the Global South, the different knowledge systems occurring within the visual arts environments of those societies, and how these systems are enmeshed within the social fabric.

Joost Fontein is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Johannesburg. Between 2014 and 2018 he was Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi, on secondment from the University of Edinburgh. He published The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage (UCL Press, 2006), Remaking Mutirikwi: Landscape, Water and Belonging (James Currey, 2015), and The Politics of the Dead in Zimbabwe, 2000–2020: Bones, Rumours and Spirits (James Currey, 2022). He is currently editor of Africa, the journal of the International Africa Institute.

Constance Smith is Lecturer and UKRI Future Leader Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research explores landscapes of architecture, time, and urban change with a particular interest in participatory and practice-led research in collaboration with artists, communities, and urban practitioners. Her work has been widely published and has featured in several exhibitions, including at the National Museums of Kenya.

Elias Mung’ora is a visual artist. His work is mostly inspired by life in the urban space of Nairobi with paintings, drawings, photography, and woodcut prints being his principal media. His practice appears to share glimpses into everyday Nairobi’s life by capturing significant moments such as a wedding or a portrait session. He is a member of Brush-Tu Artist Collective, a Nairobi-based artists’ collective and the winner of the Manjano Art Competition in 2016 in Nairobi.

Peris Jones works at the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights, Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. His most recent publications are Human Rights and Development (Routledge, 2023), “Decolonising Human Rights: The Rise of Nairobi’s Social Justice Centres,” in The Urban Politics of Human Rights, eds. Janne Nijman et al. (Routledge, 2022), and “Economic and Social Rights and the City,” in The Oxford Handbook of Economic and Social Rights, eds. Malcolm Langford and Katharine G. Young (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Teresa Mbatia is as a Lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, where she teaches Urban Geography, Sustainable Urban Development, Urban Geo-Politics courses. Mbatia’s main research interests are on citizen participation in the management of public urban greenspaces and implications thereof on spatial (in)justice and (in)equality in the use, management, and access of the nature reserves.

Bengt (Beppe) G. Karlsson is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He is mainly working on issues relating indigenous peoples and the society-environment interface, with particular focus on the politics of ethnicity and nature in India. Karlsson is the author of Contested Belonging: An Indigenous People’s Struggle for Forest and Identity in Sub-Himalayan Bengal (Routledge, 2000), Unruly Hills: A Political Ecology of India’s Northeast (Berghahn Books, 2011), Leaving the Land: Indigenous Migration and Affective Labour in India (Cambridge University Press, 2019, co-authored with Dolly Kikon), and the edited volumes Indigeneity in India (Kegan Paul 2006, with Tanka B. Subba), Geographies of Difference: Explorations in Northeast Indian Studies (Routledge, 2017, with M. Vandenhelsken and M. Barkataki-Ruscheweyh), and Seedways: The Circulation, Care and Control of Plants in a Warming World (Vitterhetsakademien, 2021, with Annika Rabo).