Police killings and the vicissitudes of borders and bounding orders in Mathare, Nairobi

This article sets out to explore the ways in which local divisions contribute to and contest “permissive spaces” for police killings in an urban settlement in Nairobi called Mathare. Taking police killings as part of local bordering and bounding draws attention to the underlying social divisions that are implicated in policing these neighborhoods and which enable and contest such killings. As such, it opens up a view on the way police violence is entrenched in local tensions and conflict, which adds to analyses of police killings that explore public concerns over crime, political mechanization, and individual motivations. Hence, the focus on police killings as a bordering practice highlights the interaction between police work and the local vicissitudes of bordering and bounding and how these pertain to the production of city- and ghettoscapes

'We are not Kenyans': Extra-judicial Killings, Manhood and Citizenship'.

This article focuses on the systematic police killings of young, male crime suspects by local police officers in Mathare since 2002. It explores the relationship between executions of young ghetto men by police and notions of citizenship. It firstexmaines the impact of such killings on positions of manhood among these men and the different roles of ‘gangs’ in popular processes of becoming men. My aim is to move away from the current association of young ghetto men with violence and ethnic politics—i.e. as ‘thugs for hire’. One of my main discoveries was that work and manhood are at least as important to grasp processes of group formation among them. After this, the article delves into the question of how to understand the narratives that legitimise and perpetuate this particular form of state violence. It concludes by discussing how processes of subjectivation that constitute, and are constituted by, the dominant discourse on citizenship produce positions of non-citizenship ascribed to ghetto residents, and in particular to young ghetto men

‘When the Numbers Stop Adding’: Imagining Futures in Perilous Presents Among Youth in Nairobi Ghettos

Studying the aspirations of young men, in Mathare, Nairobi, highlights their social becoming in contexts in which they incessantly risk social and physical death. Taking aspiration as a relational concept brings into view the temporal and spatial interactions between different aspirations and how these connect to emerging and future pathways of these young men. The ensuing relationalities at play are analysed through their context-bound negotiations of dominant gender norms to elucidate how these inform their social navigation towards male respectability, now and in the future. Adding the dimension of positionality here is useful to bring out how individual negotiations of gender norms in space and over time allows a nuanced view on situated entanglements of aspirations, pathways and dominant discourses and how these convolute and intensify in particular decision-making processes. The analyses are based on longitudinal ethnographic research with youth gangs in Nairobi for four months annually on average since 2005

Inclusive education: undoing authority to transform

Inclusief onderwijs staat hoog op de agenda van De Haagse Hogeschool. Sinds januari 2021 is Naomi van Stapele lector Inclusive Education bij het kenniscentrum Global & Inclusive Learning. In deze intreerede van september 2022 wordt o.a. ingegaan op onzekerheid, de drie leidende beginselen van inclusief onderwijs, de ethische politiek van inclusiviteit, etc

Towards the new exclusive in internationalisation: perspective from the Netherlands

Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) is considered an inclusive form of internationalisation because it would be accessible to all students. The authors challenge this assumption by exploring three exclusion mechanisms and make a plea for research into inclusion mechanisms that make COIL truly collaborative