AFRICA SEMINAR: Cyberfutures and tech imaginations of "the good life" - Reimagining sociality in Africa

Processes of digitalization are often accompanied by discourses about more efficiency, solvability, and better futures. These discourses are socially situated, and generate a wide variety of tech communities, and tech products, even if these are limited to the demo stage. In Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, tech entrepreneurs, the Congolese state, and humanitarian actors, all produce visions of cyberfutures. Imaginations about digitally mediated lives do not necessarily project images of material futures, but they are very much centered around future social formations. Discourses about cyberfutures express ideas about relatedness, how people should connect and interact with each other and with institutions. The tech imagination of the “good life” thus provides first and foremost a scenario for sociality. Studying the narratives about and expectations of tech connectivity fundamentally informs us about social life, and bears relevance beyond the subfield of “digital anthropology”.

The lecture will be given by Katrien Pype, Associate Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of KU Leuven University. 

Professor Katrien Pype is an associate professor (BOF) with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (KU Leuven University) and honorary research fellow at the Department of African Studies & Anthropology at the University of Birmingham (UK). She obtained a PhD in social and cultural anthropology at the Institute for Anthropology in Africa (now Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology) with a dissertation on the production of TV serials in Kinshasa (2008). Pype’s work centers on popular culture and technology with a specific focus on Africa. Recent projects include smart city development in Africa, focusing on the ways in which digital media is embedded in the prefiguration of urban futures, and explorations of the decolonisation of social sciences. 

Recent work includes Coding the city: mapping eco-systems and zones of opportunity in Kinshasa’s emerging tech scene (in the Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture; 2022; pp. 323 - 345: Routledge), and an upcoming book called Crytopolitics: exposure, concealment and digital media (2023: Berghahn Books, with Victoria Bernal and Daivi Rodima-Taylor).