Keren Weitzberg
I am a researcher and educator with extensive, on-the-ground expertise in East Africa. Working at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS), migration studies, and critical race studies , I examine problematics related to mobility, border-crossing, race-making, and biometrics. I have over a decade of experience carrying out archival research, fieldwork, and interviews in East Africa and collaborating with African scholars and practitioners. Over the years, I have honed a deep expertise based, in large part, upon listening to people.
My first book, 'We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya', provides unique inroads into debates over globalization, refugee movements, and urban-rural migration and offers timely insights into the ways in which transnational populations navigate state borders. It draws from extensive archival research and over one hundred interviews in Kenya and the Kenya/Somali borderlands. 'We Do Not Have Borders' has been featured in The Washington Post, was named one of Quartz Africa’s favorite books of 2017, and was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s 2018 Melville J. Herskovits Prize (ASA book prize) for best scholarly work on Africa published in English.
I am now expanding upon many of the questions posed in my first book through new research on biometric registration in East Africa. My current project, tentatively entitled 'Biometrics from the Margins,' has already been awarded multiple competitive grants from US and UK funding bodies. This project asks: How have East Africans harnessed, transformed, and subverted biometric technologies since they were first introduced in the early twentieth century? Can an identification and registration technique long associated with colonial extraction be a means of accelerating political and financial inclusion for the world’s poor, as many proponents suggest? 'Biometrics from the Margins' examines how those at the physical and metaphorical margins of the nation (including migrants, nomadic populations, refugees, & border communities, who have historically struggled to access identity documents) are navigating the new world of digital identity.
Address: London, UK
My first book, 'We Do Not Have Borders: Greater Somalia and the Predicaments of Belonging in Kenya', provides unique inroads into debates over globalization, refugee movements, and urban-rural migration and offers timely insights into the ways in which transnational populations navigate state borders. It draws from extensive archival research and over one hundred interviews in Kenya and the Kenya/Somali borderlands. 'We Do Not Have Borders' has been featured in The Washington Post, was named one of Quartz Africa’s favorite books of 2017, and was a finalist for the African Studies Association’s 2018 Melville J. Herskovits Prize (ASA book prize) for best scholarly work on Africa published in English.
I am now expanding upon many of the questions posed in my first book through new research on biometric registration in East Africa. My current project, tentatively entitled 'Biometrics from the Margins,' has already been awarded multiple competitive grants from US and UK funding bodies. This project asks: How have East Africans harnessed, transformed, and subverted biometric technologies since they were first introduced in the early twentieth century? Can an identification and registration technique long associated with colonial extraction be a means of accelerating political and financial inclusion for the world’s poor, as many proponents suggest? 'Biometrics from the Margins' examines how those at the physical and metaphorical margins of the nation (including migrants, nomadic populations, refugees, & border communities, who have historically struggled to access identity documents) are navigating the new world of digital identity.
Address: London, UK
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Books by Keren Weitzberg
In We Do Not Have Borders, Keren Weitzberg examines the historical factors that led to this state of affairs. In the process, she challenges many of the most fundamental analytical categories, such as “tribe,” “race,” and “nation,” that have traditionally shaped African historiography. Her interest in the ways in which Somali representations of the past and the present inform one another places her research at the intersection of the disciplines of history, political science, and anthropology.
Given tragic events in Kenya and the controversy surrounding al-Shabaab, We Do Not Have Borders has enormous historical and contemporary significance, and provides unique inroads into debates over globalization, African sovereignty, the resurgence of religion, and the multiple meanings of being African.
http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/We+Do+Not+Have+Borders
Articles and Book Chapters by Keren Weitzberg
This year’s topic, “Walls, Borders, and Boundaries in World History,” has an obvious contemporary relevance, most dramatically in the calls to “Build That Wall” that were a shrill trope in the recent U.S. presidential campaign. Beyond this, the specter of building walls, defending borders, and reasserting boundaries haunts political life in many parts of the world, from the wall separating Israel and the Palestinian territories; to the potential redrawing of the boundaries of several nation-states, as regions—Kurdistan in Afghanistan, Catalonia in Spain—attempt to assert their independence; to the oft-heard pleas for borders to be policed or even closed in the face of what seems to be a worldwide refugee crisis. Contemporary public discourse on this subject is usually cast in moral terms: walls are seen as either good or bad; boundaries and borders are viewed either as regrettable obstacles to the virtues of openness and cosmopolitanism or as necessary to keep out things and people deemed undesirable. Our conversation will certainly attend to the contemporary aspects of our topic, but we want to add a historical perspective to thinking about “walls, borders, and boundaries,” while also remaining alert to the methodological and theoretical problems encountered in attempting to make sense of the many different phenomena and experiences evoked by our topic.
The participants in this conversation are certainly up to the task, bringing a wide range of scholarly expertise to our discussion. Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto; among other subjects, she has written on European representations of Islam and the Orient. Tamar Herzog, the Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs at Harvard University, works on Iberian societies, and most recently on the topic of frontiers in Portuguese and Spanish America. Daniel Jütte is Associate Professor of History at New York History; his interests lie in cultural history, urban history, material culture, the history of knowledge and science, and Jewish history. Carl Nightingale, Professor of Urban History and Global History at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, has written on segregation as a global phenomenon. The research of Bill Rankin, Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, focuses on the relationship between science and space, with a special interest in mapping. Keren Weitzberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies and the Department of History at University College London; she is a specialist in East African history, and especially Kenya and the Kenyan/Somali borderlands. This year’s AHR Conversation was moderated by Rob Schneider, AHR Editor from 2005 to 2015 and Interim Editor in 2016–2017.
Online Work by Keren Weitzberg
Book Reviews by Keren Weitzberg
Conference Presentations by Keren Weitzberg
Teaching Documents by Keren Weitzberg
In 1955, delegates from the Gold Coast, which would soon become the independent nation of Ghana, attended the first large-scale Afro-Asian conference alongside representatives from Indonesia, India, China, and other nations. The Bandung Conference is just one example of the importance of international linkages in the era of decolonization. This course will address decolonization in Africa within an international context and examine how African nationalism was forged in an interconnected world. Students will learn how African political thinkers engaged with, contributed to, and were shaped by intercontinental currents of thought, including Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, communism, socialism, and the Non-Aligned Movement.
In We Do Not Have Borders, Keren Weitzberg examines the historical factors that led to this state of affairs. In the process, she challenges many of the most fundamental analytical categories, such as “tribe,” “race,” and “nation,” that have traditionally shaped African historiography. Her interest in the ways in which Somali representations of the past and the present inform one another places her research at the intersection of the disciplines of history, political science, and anthropology.
Given tragic events in Kenya and the controversy surrounding al-Shabaab, We Do Not Have Borders has enormous historical and contemporary significance, and provides unique inroads into debates over globalization, African sovereignty, the resurgence of religion, and the multiple meanings of being African.
http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/We+Do+Not+Have+Borders
This year’s topic, “Walls, Borders, and Boundaries in World History,” has an obvious contemporary relevance, most dramatically in the calls to “Build That Wall” that were a shrill trope in the recent U.S. presidential campaign. Beyond this, the specter of building walls, defending borders, and reasserting boundaries haunts political life in many parts of the world, from the wall separating Israel and the Palestinian territories; to the potential redrawing of the boundaries of several nation-states, as regions—Kurdistan in Afghanistan, Catalonia in Spain—attempt to assert their independence; to the oft-heard pleas for borders to be policed or even closed in the face of what seems to be a worldwide refugee crisis. Contemporary public discourse on this subject is usually cast in moral terms: walls are seen as either good or bad; boundaries and borders are viewed either as regrettable obstacles to the virtues of openness and cosmopolitanism or as necessary to keep out things and people deemed undesirable. Our conversation will certainly attend to the contemporary aspects of our topic, but we want to add a historical perspective to thinking about “walls, borders, and boundaries,” while also remaining alert to the methodological and theoretical problems encountered in attempting to make sense of the many different phenomena and experiences evoked by our topic.
The participants in this conversation are certainly up to the task, bringing a wide range of scholarly expertise to our discussion. Suzanne Conklin Akbari is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto; among other subjects, she has written on European representations of Islam and the Orient. Tamar Herzog, the Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs at Harvard University, works on Iberian societies, and most recently on the topic of frontiers in Portuguese and Spanish America. Daniel Jütte is Associate Professor of History at New York History; his interests lie in cultural history, urban history, material culture, the history of knowledge and science, and Jewish history. Carl Nightingale, Professor of Urban History and Global History at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, has written on segregation as a global phenomenon. The research of Bill Rankin, Assistant Professor of History at Yale University, focuses on the relationship between science and space, with a special interest in mapping. Keren Weitzberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies and the Department of History at University College London; she is a specialist in East African history, and especially Kenya and the Kenyan/Somali borderlands. This year’s AHR Conversation was moderated by Rob Schneider, AHR Editor from 2005 to 2015 and Interim Editor in 2016–2017.
In 1955, delegates from the Gold Coast, which would soon become the independent nation of Ghana, attended the first large-scale Afro-Asian conference alongside representatives from Indonesia, India, China, and other nations. The Bandung Conference is just one example of the importance of international linkages in the era of decolonization. This course will address decolonization in Africa within an international context and examine how African nationalism was forged in an interconnected world. Students will learn how African political thinkers engaged with, contributed to, and were shaped by intercontinental currents of thought, including Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, communism, socialism, and the Non-Aligned Movement.