Research project
The politics of religious infrastructure: Christian and Muslim urban worlds in Africa
- Start date: 1 September 2018
- End date: 01/09/21
- Funder: The British Academy
- Primary investigator: Dr Benjamin Kirby
Description
This project seeks to provide an original account of Muslim mobilisation and religious politics in Kenya and Tanzania. It does so by foregrounding the everyday lives of Christians and Muslims who share urban habitats in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, and more specifically the concrete entanglements that exist between their lives and the urban worlds that they interact with.
To this end, I seek to develop an explanatory frame which illuminates how different forms of Muslim activism and religious politics in these settings operate as part of particular urban-religious dynamics.
This project marks an explicit development of my doctoral project insofar as it introduces a second urban setting and speaks to a regional frame.
It aims to make an original contribution to efforts to reinvigorate conversations about African cities, religious politics, and Christian-Muslim relations, all of which too often rely on tired categories indebted to colonial paradigms and problematic metanarratives.