Lena Kroeker - “Your Network is your Net Worth”: (In)Security of the Kenyan Middle Classes

Lecture abstract

“Your Network is your Net Worth”: (In)Security of the Kenyan Middle Classes
A common notion is that the middle class is a social group of urban higher-earning consumers who consume certain products associated with a lifestyle of a global consumer culture. Advertisements in the streets of African cities compete for middle-income consumers, with a surprising number promoting household cleaners, electronic devices, international fast-food franchises and take-away sold at supermarkets in bustling shopping malls. 

This paper shifts attention away from short-term consumer culture and towards the underlying cultivation of social relationships in the Kenyan middle class, demonstrating that the value of the middle class lies in social relationships. Belonging to and maintaining networks can be compared to a credit system in which long-term savings deposits and debts can be accessed.

These networks and their resource flows have adapted to the demands of the neoliberal economic system and digitalisation, so that they could partly be perceived as a product of self-making and a marker of class.

About the lecturer

Lena L. Kroeker currently holds the Chair of Social Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth. She serves as principal investigator and project leader of “(In)Security of the Kenyan Middle Classes: Social Mobility and the Fear of Falling”, based at Bayreuth. Within this framework, she completed her Habilitation thesis, which forms the basis of her presentation in the Anthropological Lecture Series.

From 2013 to 2018, she was a research fellow at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, where she contributed to the program “Future Africa and Beyond – Visions in Time”, focusing on the rise of African middle classes. Kroeker is co-author of Middle Classes in Africa: Changing Lives and Conceptual Challenges (Palgrave, 2018) and has published widely in leading academic journals and edited volumes. Her writings explore issues such as access to social security and health insurance, as well as the role of kinship and care networks in contexts marked by both opportunity and insecurity.