I am an ethnographer of contemporary urbanism along the western Indian Ocean coast ( East Africa), particularly on coloniality, consumption and discarding, debris of late capitalism, repairing and recycling economies and the anthropology of money. Over the past nine years, I have extensively researched the intersection of science, technology, and society in East Africa. My fascination with this topic began during my MSc research project in Zanzibar. I completed a thesis titled “Let there be Light: Women’s Participation in Solar Light Technology and Its Agency to Women Empowerment and Social Change in Rural Zanzibar” at Arhus University.

After graduating from Aarhus, I joined the Department of Social Anthropology at Oslo University as a PhD fellow. My thesis, “Gathering the African Technosphere: An Ethnography of Informal Electronic Waste Recycling in Tanzania,” reflects my interest in the intersection and frictions between technology, society, and the environment in East Africa. After my doctoral fellowship, I joined the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, as a senior research associate. Apart from extensive teaching, I continued following global and local electronic waste (e-waste) flows and the influence of the electronics market on technospheres of repairing, reusing and repurposing and writing my book titled Gathering the African Technosphere: Informal e-waste recycling in Tanzania, which will be published by Lexington Books: An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield at the end of 2024.

In my new postdoc position in the project “The Social Life of Crypto” here at Aarhus University, I am extending my long interests between science and society to explore how new forms of money, crypto-currencies, emerge and gather networks in informal economies in Kenya, Cuba and The Philippines.

Contact:
Samwel Moses Ntapanta
School of Culture and Society
Moesgård Allé 20
8270 Højbjerg
ntapanta@cas.au.dk