Event

‘Appointment with God’: Facebook, Digital-Deathworlds, and Extra Judicial Killings of Criminal Gangs in Eastlands Nairobi

Join us for a Q&A with Dr. Duncan Omanga, British Academy Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Governance and Human Rights (2018/9); Senior Lecturer of Media Studies in Moi University, Kenya. This talk centres on Nairobi’s Eastlands culture of police extra-judicial killings of suspected gangsters that are foretold, announced and published on Community Policing Facebook groups. In particular, the talk explains how urban geocorpographies (how bodies acquire specific meanings in space) in the Eastlands neighbourhoods of Kayole, Dandora and Mathare, where the routine killing of suspected gang members already profiled on Facebook, reveal policing practices that are both a product of history and the state’s everyday performance of security.