‘Don’t say “research”’: reducing bidirectional risk in Kibera slum

ABSTRACT

Kenya’s 2007 presidential elections led to what was widely termed ‘ethnic violence’, resulting in over 1000 deaths and 600,000 displacements. Kibera slum, in the country’s capital, is home to the opposition leader’s stronghold and was at the conflict’s epicentre. Conducting fieldwork in Kibera a decade later and months before the 2017 presidential election presented a multitude of methodological risks to both the research team and the Kibera community. This article explores what I call ‘bidirectional risks’ – risks to both research team and research participants – that were encountered and how these risks were minimised using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methodologies including a household survey, engaged ethnography and community research collaboration. These strategies increased the safety of both the research team and participants, allowed the research team to collect sensitive data and suggested possibilities for further democratising the anthropological research process.

KEYWORDS:

• Kenya
• risk
• ethnography
• collaboration
• survey

Acknowledgements

I extend heartfelt gratitude to my research collaborators – Doreen Odera, Joshua Ogure, Fredrick Onyino and Zachary Wambua – for their assistantship, enthusiasm and dedication to always guiding the research in more appropriate directions. Thank you to all the readers of this article at various stages of revision – Shanti Parikh, Bret Gustafson, Rebecca Lester, Susan Marren, Andrea Bolivar, Natalia Guzmán Solano, Carolyn Barnes, Lauren Crossland-Marr, Kate Harper and the anonymous reviewers who offered keen insights and valuable comments. Appreciation is extended to the editors of this Contemporary Social Science special issue and to the organisers and my fellow participants of the International KOSMOS Workshop at Humboldt University where this paper first began to take form. I am grateful for the support received from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad and National Geographic Young Explorers Program. Last, but never least, to the Kibera community: from my heart to yours, thank you for opening up your lives and homes to me time and time again.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

E. Ashley Wilson is a PhD candidate in the anthropology department at Washington University in St. Louis. She has conducted research and worked on various projects in Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya for the past eight years. Her dissertation focuses on non-normative forms of marriage and the informal economy in Kibera, and her research has received funding from Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Study Abroad and the National Geographic Young Explorers Grant Program.

Notes

1 Kibera was first established in 1904 as a Sudanese soldier settlement for recruits to guard the colonial railway. See Timothy Parsons (1997) for a history of Kibera’s development from the colonial period through Kenya’s independence in the 1960 and its eventual development into one of Africa’s largest slum settlements.

2 Kibera has long been known as one of the world’s largest slums with population estimates reaching nearly two million, but this undesired title is now in dispute, as more recent and accurate demographic data are published from grassroots research organisations and scholars (Desgroppes & Taupin, 2011; Hagen, 2011; Marras, 2008; Mikel, 2010).

3 Although my research partners are all from Kibera, they were living either on the outer neighborhoods of the slum or in other parts of Nairobi for the duration of this research project.

4 Ethnically heterogeneous before the presidential election of 2007, Kibera is now predominately home to Luo and Luhya peoples. However, ethnic tensions remain in Kibera even a decade later.

5 Various aspects of my identity (i.e. foreigner, female, unmarried and a youth by local definition) often dictated where I could go, with whom I could talk and what kind of data I could collect.

6 A form of informal intimate cohabitation called ‘come-we-stay’ marriage.

7 Swahili for ‘Little Kisumu’, referring to the urban counterpart of a large Western Kenyan city called Kisumu.

8 The teams also stayed within calling distance of one another and walked from one plot of houses to another after each completed survey. In addition to safety, this also helped to ensure that the two teams did not survey households in areas that had already been adequately surveyed, a difficult feat to achieve in such a densely settled area.

9 The mobile devices also aided in the comfort of the participant as nearly everyone is in possession of or is familiar with a smartphone and participants could hold or touch the device themselves as each question popped up. During the survey, the second member of the research team would fill out a separate collection form with questions about the material used to build the house as well as GPS points collected. My research partner also helped with translation when necessary. After each day’s work, a professional mapper would use the supplied GPS points to track our movements to let us know if we were overlapping with previous locations or making good progress in new directions. The survey data were then plotted onto maps for visual analysis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Geographic Society [Young Explorers Grant]; U.S. Department of Education [Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad].