Emma Park

She is an Assistant Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, where she teaches courses on modern Africa, science and technology, global histories of capitalism, and the history of “development.” Her current research uses infrastructure development projects to explore transformations in capitalism and state-craft. She mobilizes an ethnographically-informed reading of the cultural politics of infrastructures and work from the twentieth-century through to the present.

Historians of infrastructures have long argued that infrastructures form the invisible and unremarked background of social life. They are the networks of communication and exchange upon which society depends and the seemingly apolitical material substrate along which state authority extends, binding citizens both to one another and to their state. She challenges this common assertion in her dissertation, which she is currently revising into a book manuscript tentatively entitled: Infrastructural Attachments: Technologies, Mobility, and the Tensions of Home in Colonial and Postcolonial Kenya. Through an exploration of three infrastructures ‘in the making’ —roads, radio, and Kenya’s now-famed telephonic banking service, M-PESA—she argues that infrastructures in Kenya have been deeply charged cultural, political, and economic objects. By contrast to the global north, infrastructures in Kenya did not seamlessly produce a ‘state-space.’ A combination of durable policies of colonial austerity and Kenya’s unique material environment has meant that infrastructures were uneven in their reach. This has had implications for the politics of belonging as the absense of infrastrcutures as much as their presence has shaped popular experiences of the state.

Histories of technology that take as their point of departure this corner of Eastern Africa must, she argues, reckon with a different genealogy of technology: one that considers longer histories of austerity and places the work of enacting infrastructures at its core. In doing so, she challenges a durable and pernicious vision of Africa as place without technologies or technological expertise. Focusing on how infrastructures were made to ‘work’ she argues that, far from being peripheral to the lives of these technological things, African knowledge workers and experts of both technics and culture have been central innovators and maintainers.

She is also working on another project with her colleague Kevin Donovan tentatively entitled The Digital Nation: Politics, Value, and Aspiration in Contemporary Kenya, which explores the entangled relationship between Kenya’s largest corporation, Safaricom (once a state-held entity) and the Kenyan state. As across much of the global south, the 1970s-2000s has seen a retraction in state spending in public services, with private capital operating in an “altruistic register” to fill the gap. By contrast to conventional narratives of neoliberalism, they argue that this must not be seen as a simple story of state withdrawal but that attention must be directed to the changing balance of power between public and private both within the state and the corporation.