Dr. Prince Guma - Resisting Authoritarian Surfeit: Digital Scapes Beyond Capture
Lecture abstract
Resisting Authoritarian Surfeit: Digital Scapes Beyond Capture
It explores digital scapes as crucial spaces for anti-establishment politics, examining how publics appropriate data and AI tools and applications to challenge authoritarian surfeit and political excess. It focuses on the everyday use of embedded digital platforms to express dissent and forge solidarities beyond capture. The analysis foregrounds three key sites and actors of socio-technical appropriation: local tech firms, where code, software and platforms are repurposed for civic protest; grassroots movements and hacktivists, who channel data-driven tools for engagement, resistance and organising; and urban youth and majority populations, who deploy popular media and platforms for protest, defiance and solidarity. I examine these as techno-popular sites of algorithmic activism and resistance, offering a comparative analysis across two global Southern (or East African) movements: the Maandamano digital protests in Nairobi (Kenya), and the more subtle, everyday forms of nonconformist digital activism in Kampala (Uganda). I contend that these processes, while digitally mediated, propelled and intensified, are essentially rooted in and shaped by located philosophies and realities of urbanism.
About the lecturer
Prince Guma is an interdisciplinary social and political scientist whose work sits at the intersection of critical urban studies, infrastructure studies, and technology studies, with a focus on development, political economy, and social justice. He earned his PhD in 2021 from the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University, where his research explored the diffusion and adoption of new plans, ideas, and technologies in urban and infrastructure domains. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the British Institute in Eastern Africa, where he previously served as Assistant Country Director. From 2008, Prince spent three years working with regional institutions on programs aimed at building capacity and promoting justice. In 2012, he transitioned into academia, initially focusing on public-sector management and civic governance before shifting to the geographies of the built environment, the digital, and the urban. Driven by a commitment to addressing key social challenges through collaboration and the application of science in real-world contexts, his work seeks to open new avenues for exploration, contribute fresh insights from the global South, and expand possibilities for alternative theorization. He serves on the editorial boards of Urban Geography, Dialogues in Urban Research, Digital Geography and Society, Erdkunde, and UCL Press Urban Africa Book Series.