Emma Park is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and co-director of the minor in Capitalism Studies at The New School. Her work examines the relationships among technologies, (neo)imperial forms of extraction, and the constitution of political and social subjectivities. Her book project, titled A Partible Sovereignty: Infrastructural Attachments, Austerity, and the Politics of Expertise in Kenya, charts the dynamic interplay among infrastructural development, state-building, capital accumulation, and the politics of expertise in Eastern Africa from the nineteenth century to the present.

With the support of GIDEST, Emma will explore the rise of platform capitalism in Kenya, using Safaricom—Kenya’s largest corporation, and telecommunications and financial service provider—as her point of entry. In preliminary work on the topic, Emma and Kevin Donovan explored how fintech (or financial technology) firms, drawing on Safaricom’s user data, are creating a new debt market, offering loans that are equally accessible, expensive, and short-term. Over the course of the 2020-2021 academic year they will build on these early findings to explore how the confluence of information technology and finance is remaking the relationship among markets, citizenship, and the state.