‘Youth are redrawing the map’: temporalities and terrains of the hustle economy in Mathare, Nairobi

This article examines the temporalities and terrains of the home-grown hustle economy of Mathare, one of the oldest and largest informal settlements in Nairobi. It builds on my previous work mobilizing the notion of ‘hustle’ to ground the narratives of struggle, opportunity and place-making expressed by youth whose livelihood strategies have centred around neighbourhood-based informal waste labour in order to assert claims to their local environment. Drawing on three ethnographic portraits and over a decade of longitudinal ethnographic research, the article shows how hustling connects to and evolves with particular generational and gendered identities, revealing the shifting demands on ‘older’ versus ‘younger’ youth. As everyday lives are mired in constant uncertainty, youth occupy a ‘precarious present’, caught in a state of suspension but also well versed in adapting to adversity and shaping local politics of provisioning in the absence of formal structures of support. The article sheds light on local logics of wealth redistribution among youth who belong to the same neighbourhood but whose claims to particular resources shift over time. The article demonstrates how hustling in Mathare sits at the nexus of agentive economic, environmental, political and social struggles, as youth on the urban periphery manage waste in their neighbourhoods to negotiate their place but also their time in the city.

Possessing Christianity in Northeast India: Kelkang, 1937

In 1937, a spirit moved in the mountains of Northeast India. It presented local villagers with a visceral anticolonial vision, laicized religious practices, and offered alternative definitions of expertise and literacy that sidelined colonial and missionary authorities. Its message pulled together a complex range of clans, pilgrims, and roadworkers, and reconciled them according to contemporary local logics. This article uses the ‘Kelkang incident’ of the Lushai Hills District (today: Mizoram) to reverse the polarity of conventional writings on prophetic rebellion in two ways. First, it asks not how the colonial state dealt with a prophetic rebellion, but how a prophetic rebellion dealt with the state. Second, it asks not what the moving spirit of Kelkang symbolized, but what it did and how people interacted with it. Placing upland spirits, humans, terminology, and concepts at the centre of the analysis, the article argues that a more open-minded approach to the history of religion can better reveal processes of mediumship and rapidly indigenizing Christianities as well as the much broader malleability of concepts like ‘conversion’, ‘revival’, and ‘Christianity’.

Situating World Englishes into a History of English Course

This chapter will address the teaching of “post-colonial Englishes,” focusing on the sociopolitical and cultural conditions that enabled changes in English as it was used during, and after, the colonial encounter. To capture the complexity of linguistic hybridities associated with plural identities, our disciplinary discourses of the global use and acquisition of English must (i) liberate the field of World Englishes from the orthodoxies of the past and instead connect it to a more general theory of the sociolinguistics of globalization, and, especially (ii) bring into focus local forms shaped by the local logics of practice. This chapter discusses specific examples of the practice of creativity in grammar, discourse, and sociolinguistic use of World English varieties.

French Connections: The Reception of French Sociologists in the USA (1970-2012)

This paper examines the appropriation of French sociologists by US sociologists over the last four decades. Taking cues from scientometrics and from developments in the sociology of reception, it proposes a blueprint for the study of reception in times of mass digital data. Through this approach, the paper reveals two salient traits. First, out of the 200 authors of the sample, a small minority received considerable attention, while the others are virtually invisible. Second, when cited in the US, French authors are mobilized almost only as social theorists. The article then accounts for this peculiar reception by considering three levels: the intellectual structures of both fields, the local logics at play in the receiving field, and the “multiple lives” of a cited author.

Local Logics for Traces

A mu-calculus over dependence graph representation of traces<br />is considered. It is shown that the mu-calculus cannot express all<br />monadic second order (MSO) properties of dependence graphs.<br />Several extensions of the mu-calculus are presented and it is proved<br />that these extensions are equivalent in expressive power to MSO<br />logic. The satisfiability problem for these extensions is PSPACE<br />complete.