Paper short abstract:

In our increasingly digitized life worlds, online learning (‘YouTube University’) is often imagined as an alternative to formal education systems. However, I argue that place is crucial to understanding how seemingly neutral, placeless educational content lands in non-elite contexts such as Kibera.

Paper long abstract:

In the past few years, our lives have become fully digitized. This new reality offers opportunities, but new barriers arise as well. Based on nineteen months of fieldwork in Nairobi, Kenya, and especially in Kibera, one of its large low-income neighborhoods, this paper looks at the impact of place on online digital learning practices, sometimes locally referred to as ‘YouTube University’. I argue that place is of utmost importance to understand the place of (online) learning in aspirational trajectories, as these trajectories are always embedded in situated realities, both socially and materially. Moreover, countering the common belief that online content is neutral and placeless, I further argue that to understand the place of ‘YouTube University’ in the aspired labor trajectories of the young ICT professionals I worked with, we should also look at how borders are crossed between different worlds, physically and mentally: the situated realities of Kibera, the Silicon-Valley influenced Nairobi tech ecosystem and the global worlds of practice that exist – both online and offline.