With forty-nine officially recognized ethnic groups, Kenya has long struggled with ethnic politics and tribalism. Ethnic tensions within the country often erupt and lead to violence during high political seasons, significantly impacting the economy and threatening national stability. In Kenya’s three major cities, where pluralism is more likely than in smaller towns, ethnic tensions exist submarinally as potential harm to social wellbeing and ever-present danger to communal flourishing. This study is a digitally conducted ethnographic study of city-living Kenyans investigating how they navigate citizenship and negotiate belonging and exclusion to make sense of the tribalism challenge in their daily existence.
Affirming Kenya as a national combination of indigenous communities, the study acknowledges the moral processes that contribute to public presence and performance between several active centers of belonging and exclusion, namely: indigeneity and cosmopolitanism, ethnicity and nationality, and ultimately, individual and community. Contemplating the impact of living in these liminalities for Kenyan city-dwellers, the study attends to the nature of kin-making and boundary-forming that transcend communal commitments and are navigated on social media and other online platforms. As argued in this research, the digitization of kinship temporarily lifts closed boundaries to allow for moral deliberation and negotiation over social challenges. The study thus affirms that communitarian formations and malfunctions in the public sphere make room for Kenyans to reclaim, rearticulate, and reassign both the ethnic and national aspects of their identity. Identifying social activism as an avenue, which supports the forbearance of kinship ties for social change, the research addresses the digital public sphere’s role in facilitating an arena for moral accountability, subjective morality, and communal reasoning towards moral transformation. / 2026-03-07T00:00:00Z
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/48359 |
| Date | 07 March 2024 |
| Creators | Otieno, Sheila A. |
| Contributors | Wariboko, Nimi, Olupona, Jacob K. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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