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- Convenors:
-
Silas Udenze
(University of Toronto)
Kennedy Opande (University of Nairobi)
Emmanuel Uchenna Chidozie (Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium (KU Leuven) and Grae Matta Foundation, London)
Faith Halima Kirigha (Falmouth University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel interrogates how people, in the African context, live, feel, and bridge division across digital infrastructures and offline worlds, tracing how technologies of connection become both tools of fracture and possibilities for repair.
Long Abstract
Across Africa, media technologies, algorithmic logics, and AI are reshaping socio-political belonging and moral discourse. They amplify some voices while muting others, transforming digital participation into acts of alignment, withdrawal, and contestation. Yet polarisation exceeds the digital: it is entangled with material histories of inequality, kinship, religion, and language that long predate social media but are now refracted through it. Anthropological scholarship invites us to see these dynamics through infrastructures, the material, moral, and affective systems that underpin connection and exclusion (Larkin, 2013; Simone, 2004). Digital infrastructures in the Africa context are not neutral; they are moral technologies (Mazzarella, 2017) that inherit colonial architectures of displacement visibility and control even as they promise new forms of togetherness. In this panel, we attempt to understand contestations where media, politics, and morality intersect, ranging for instance, the media publics of electoral politics in Kenya and Nigeria to faith-based broadcasting in post-Boko Haram Nigeria and even beyond. Further, we seek to answer questions such as: How do infrastructures of rumour, humour, prayer, or silence traverse digital and physical spaces, producing intimacy, mistrust, or resistance? What new political and moral subjectivities emerge when individuals inhabit parallel media worlds shaped by misinformation, prophetic vision, or activist hope? How do African digital infrastructures re-inscribe or subvert colonial and religious hierarchies of voice and power? Can AI-driven governance reproduce ethnic and class boundaries even as it claims neutrality, among others? By interrogating how African publics forge relational ethics across fractured networks, this panel asks what it means to bridge polarization when both connection and division are technologically and historically co-produced.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines the activities of the Kenyan 'Gen Z' youth movement on X (formerly Twitter), which have transformed the rules of political accountability and also served as a space of organizing and sustaining collective memory of state repression.
Paper long abstract
The 2024 Kenyan Generation Z, often called ‘Gen Z’, continues to shape the nation’s debates on political leadership. The youth-led digital movement, which surfaced on X (formerly Twitter) under the hashtags #RejectFinanceBill2024, #RutoMustGo, and #OccupyParliament, emerged to protest the unpopular Finance Bill 2024. These generational protests by young people disrupted the country’s activities and key state institutions like Parliament, the Supreme Court, and other significant public bodies. In response, the government reacted with harsh police measures, including live ammunition, tear gas, and abductions, resulting in numerous fatalities. Despite this, the group’s persistence demonstrated that it is possible to pressure the government and demand accountability from it. Whilst the country’s leadership appears to have quelled its street demonstrations by discouraging some youths from participating, the movement remains active under the hashtag #RutoMustGo. It continues to be a platform for demanding political accountability and remembering the rebellion and state repression that occurred. Using the qualitative method of thematic analysis of the hashtag #RutoMustGo, this paper examines how the digital youth movement has changed the rules of political accountability in Kenya—something past civil society groups and political opposition have struggled to achieve—and how the movement’s actions are becoming increasingly difficult for the government to control amid crackdowns and repression.
Paper short abstract
this paper examines the Everyday life, Digital Media, and Social Boundaries in Polarised Groups in Kaduna State, Nigeria
Paper long abstract
Polarisation of multi-ethnic and religious groups in Kaduna State, Northern Nigeria is a phenomenon that lives and felt through the ordinary routines, encounters, and struggles that shapes everyday life of the people. Studies on Kaduna State have focused on the eruption of cycles of violence, political contestation, and ethno-religious conflict, with less attention on the subtle, routine practices through which various groups live, negotiate, or subvert these boundaries. This attention on macro-level explanations, creates gap in understanding how polarisation is reproduced, interpreted, and contested in daily encounters through the employment of digital infrastructures. Recent transformations in mobile communications, social media, digital surveillance systems, have introduced new layers of visibility, vulnerability, and negotiation in polarisation. Digital tools such GPS, mobile technologies, proliferation of digital images, voice notes, and algorithmically amplified content has contributed to new form of public discourse in which identities are framed. This study creates a nuance that identify the challenges and address gaps by homogenizing narratives of northern and southern Kaduna societies as inherently conflict prone. It explores how digital infrastructures simultaneously transform social connection, share information and coordinate livelihood, interrogating dual roles of digital infrastructures as mediators of peace and catalyst of tension in the region. Ethnographic approach is employed and spatial mapping across selected communities to understanding of lived realities of digital communication systems and the transformation of social boundaries.
Paper short abstract
Based on theoretical perspectives such as the power of networking and the concept of a network society, the paper highlights social media’s potential to foster informal political expression, promote participatory democracy, drive social change, and empower youth in the Global South context
Paper long abstract
This paper explores how Global South youth redefine political activism and resist traditional forms of politics through a new wave of social movements. Recently, youth movements have combined online and offline strategies to challenge mainstream political culture. It also examines how youth protests pursue social change and address pervasive social inequality while moving fluidly between digital and street-based activism (the shift from streets to screens and vice versa). Through digital networking, Global South youth organise local protests and confront dominant political discourses using grassroots strategies for social justice amid political polarisation and partisan fragmentation. The paper considers how digital mobilisation enables youth to contest institutional practices through discourses of resistance and contestation, and how their subcultural practices challenge conventional political norms and forms of expression. Moreover, the paper demonstrates how youth in semi-democratic contexts, by leveraging horizontal networking, forums, and coalition-building, subvert hierarchical political structures, blur the boundaries between discourse and practice, and create innovative digital forms of political activism. By tracing the interplay between youth, digital media, and politics, this paper shows how online communication shapes offline political action in the light of youth political styles and experiences with political activism. Drawing on theoretical perspectives such as the power of networking and the network society, the paper underscores social media’s potential to foster informal political expression, boost participatory democracy, advance social change, and empower youth in the Global South context
Paper short abstract
This paper interrogates #Ozoemena (May It Not Happen Again) on X as a digital practice of memory linking the Nigeria–Biafra War to contemporary political challenges. It indicates how the hashtag circulates affect—grief, vigilance, hope, to sustain remembrance, activism, and even polarisation.
Paper long abstract
The Nigeria–Biafra Civil War (1967–1970) remains a traumatic event whose memory continues to shape political identities and claims to belonging in Nigeria. While state narratives have long suppressed public engagement with the war, digital platforms increasingly function as spaces for mnemonic expression and contestation. This paper examines #Ozoemena, an Igbo phrase meaning “may it not happen again”, as a digital practice of memory and affect on X (formerly Twitter). Drawing on affect theory and digital memory studies, I argue that #Ozoemena operates as an affective infrastructure that links historical trauma to contemporary experiences of insecurity, marginalization, and political exclusion. Rather than simply transmitting information, the hashtag organizes emotions, grief, anger, vigilance, and hope into what Ahmed conceptualizes as affective economies, binding dispersed users into networked publics oriented toward remembrance and resistance. Methodologically, the study employs qualitative thematic analysis of posts collected through repeated weekly searches on X between January and October 2025. Analysis focuses on multimodal expressions that connect memories of Biafra to present-day crises in Nigeria. Preliminary results suggest that #Ozoemena enables collective mourning while functioning as a moral injunction against the recurrence of mass violence. At the same time, the hashtag reveals the ambivalence of digital affect: it sustains solidarity and everyday activism, yet can also be mobilized to intensify ethnic polarization and misinformation. The paper contributes to digital anthropology by showing how African mnemonic practices are reconfigured through platformed communication, transforming an indigenous ethical expression into a networked archive of affect, polarisation and political imagination.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines artistic expression in Kenya as a media infrastructure through which political polarisation is lived, contested, and bridged. Tracing analogue and digital practices, it shows how humour, satire, and creative activism mediate repression, hope, and belonging across publics.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines artistic expression in Kenya as a media infrastructure through which political polarisation is lived, contested, and occasionally bridged. Tracing a historical arc from the Moi era’s analogue censorship to contemporary digital creativity under the Ruto administration, it explores how theatre, music, satire, graffiti, and memes circulate across intertwined offline and digital worlds. Drawing on archival research and digital ethnography, the paper shows how artists operate within fragmented media environments shaped by colonial-era laws, platform algorithms, and moral discourses of nationalism, youthhood, and threat. Rather than framing art solely as resistance to state repression, the paper foregrounds how creative practices mediate affective and moral relations among polarised publics. Youth and Gen Z creatives mobilise humour, irony, and AI-generated content to critique authority while cultivating spaces of shared recognition and hope amid surveillance and censorship. By analysing moments of repression—such as the banning of school plays and digital crackdowns—alongside everyday acts of creative circulation, the paper argues that artistic expression functions as a moral technology that both exposes fractures and imagines forms of repair. In doing so, it contributes to anthropological debates on media infrastructures, polarisation, and the ethical possibilities of connection in contemporary Africa.