Emma Park – författare

Set against critiques of neoliberal capitalism in the present, Infrastructural Attachments argues that the technopolitics of austerity have been the organizing logic of statecraft in Kenya since the late nineteenth century, calling into question the novelty of austerity as a mode of governance and a lived experience. Using infrastructures as a lens to explore state formation over the long twentieth century-roads in the early colonial period, radio broadcasting from the interwar through the postwar periods, and mobile phones and digital financial services in the present-historian Emma Park reveals that as the state drew on private capital to make up for limited budgets, it inaugurated a peculiar political-economic form: the corporate-state. For more than a century-in pursuit of minimizing costs and maximizing profits-the corporate-state crucially relied on the exploitation and expropriation of its subject-citizens. By foregrounding these workers, Park interrogates how Kenyans’ knowledge and expertise has been rescaled and subsumed, quietly underwriting the development of infrastructural expertise, the circuits of finance upon which (post)colonial infrastructural expansion has been premised, and the forms of profit-making it has enabled.

Set against critiques of neoliberal capitalism in the present, Infrastructural Attachments argues that the technopolitics of austerity have been the organizing logic of statecraft in Kenya since the late nineteenth century, calling into question the novelty of austerity as a mode of governance and a lived experience. Using infrastructures as a lens to explore state formation over the long twentieth century-roads in the early colonial period, radio broadcasting from the interwar through the postwar periods, and mobile phones and digital financial services in the present-historian Emma Park reveals that as the state drew on private capital to make up for limited budgets, it inaugurated a peculiar political-economic form: the corporate-state. For more than a century-in pursuit of minimizing costs and maximizing profits-the corporate-state crucially relied on the exploitation and expropriation of its subject-citizens. By foregrounding these workers, Park interrogates how Kenyans’ knowledge and expertise has been rescaled and subsumed, quietly underwriting the development of infrastructural expertise, the circuits of finance upon which (post)colonial infrastructural expansion has been premised, and the forms of profit-making it has enabled.

I "Min snabba Farmor" händer det många knasiga saker i den lilla stugan på landet. Vi får lära oss att det är okej att man råkar trampa i klaveret och att det faktiskt kan glädja andra till på köpet! Ofta lägger barn märke till saker vi vuxna inte ser som något märkvärdigt. När barnen vet att det är okej att skratta om det råkar bli fel, blir de heller inte rädda för att våga testa nya saker. Välkommen med hem till min Farmor!

I "Min barnsliga Morfar" får vi träffa en morfar som aldrig vill bli vuxen. Det är härligt att få vara med vuxna som inte är så allvarliga hela tiden. Livet blir på något sätt mycket trevligare och roligare! Det är viktigt att vi lär oss av barnen och vågar ha barnasinnet kvar, så att barnen får vara barn. Välkommen att hänga med Morfar på roliga barnsligheter!