#12341. Infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in urban Africa: vignettes from Buru Buru, Nairobi

August 2026publication date
Proposal available till 30-05-2025
4 total number of authors per manuscript0 $

The title of the journal is available only for the authors who have already paid for
Journal’s subject area:
History;
Cultural Studies;
Anthropology;
Political Science and International Relations;
Sociology and Political Science;
Places in the authors’ list:
place 1place 2place 3place 4
FreeFreeFreeFree
2350 $1200 $1050 $900 $
Contract №12341.1 Contract №12341.2 Contract №12341.3 Contract №12341.4
1 place - free (for sale)
2 place - free (for sale)
3 place - free (for sale)
4 place - free (for sale)

Abstract:
Since its inception in the 1990s, mobile telephony in Africa has evolved, reflecting varied advances in technology. These advances have become particularly reminiscent of the role of mobile technologies in everyday facets of life. In this paper, we examine infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony in an urban African context. We demonstrate how urban Africa is being instrumented through the incoming of mobile telephony, but also how the convergence of the digital and the physical is materializing through the everyday use and appropriation of mobile phone-based technologies. We make this contribution through illustrations and vignettes–including Mkokoteni handcart operations, electricity “token” meter connections, and mobile phone kiosk processes–from Buru Buru, an estate in Nairobi. Thus, we place our analysis within recent area studies scholarship, drawing perspectives from science, technology and society studies, infrastructure studies and urban studies. We contend that the variegated infrastructural configurations of mobile telephony challenge ingrained accounts of technological determinism.
Keywords:
area studies; Buru Buru; Infrastructure; Kenya; mobile telephony; technology; urban Africa

Contacts :
0