Prince Guma

University of Cambridge, Politics and International Studies (POLIS), Faculty Member

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Prince Guma is an interdisciplinary social and political scientist specializing in human geography, with a focus on intersections of spatial, social, and political processes. His research spans urban studies, infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies, addressing critical questions of development, political economy, and social justice. At the heart of his work are concerns with knowledge production, epistemic justice, and what it means to theorize from, with, and beyond the South. Prince is currently a Smuts Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Centre of African Studies, and FRIAS Fellow at the University of Freiburg. Previously, he served as Assistant Country Director at the British Institute in Eastern Africa, where he later became an Honorary Research Fellow.

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Papers by Prince Guma

EVERYDAY INFRASTRUCTURES OF URBAN LIFE

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Infrastructure is commonly perceived through the interpretive monopoly of hegemonic frames of mod... more Infrastructure is commonly perceived through the interpretive monopoly of hegemonic frames of modernity, leading to the frequent oversight of everyday infrastructures. Extensive capital-intensive infrastructures that are fully integrated and have paled into the background of everyday life are commonly dismissed, criticized, or misconstrued as deteriorating, incongruous, and in need of repair and reinforcement to "measure up." Similarly, ordinary and hybrid techno-popular infrastructures are frequently demeaned as alternative, informal, secondary, less modern, and not belonging. In an era where preference and priority are given to shiny new things and innovations, everyday infrastructures are seldom acknowledged as substantive modes of operation in their own right. This article advocates a shift in perspective. Drawing illustrative cases from eastern Africa, I examine everyday infrastructures as critical sites of reference for analyzing, theorizing, and organizing the urban. Rather than starting from a preconceived notion of modernity, I examine everyday infrastructures on their own terms. I propose a series of registers-incomplete relationalities, mundane temporalities, and heterogeneous modernities-to stimulate a reappraisal of how we view, read, and think about infrastructure. Accordingly, I reiterate the need to reorient the foundational parameters of infrastructure, advocating for a decentered and heterodox perspective that emphasizes infrastructural plurality, multiplicity, and inherent incompleteness.

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Data, AI, and infrastructures of resistance under authoritarianism

Urban Geography, 2026

Existing studies across Geography and related fields have yet to develop a sustained account of h... more Existing studies across Geography and related fields have yet to develop a sustained account of how new and emergent digital technologies reconfigure popular resistance and dissent under authoritarianism. This article examines digital platforms as key sites of anti-establishment politics, focusing on how data-driven systems and artificial intelligence (AI) reshape the infrastructures through which protest is organized, coordinated, mediated, and governed. It argues that while datafied environments and AI tools operate as sites of power-facilitating state-, corporate-, and platform-mediated forms of control, surveillance, and repressionthey simultaneously open up possibilities for coordination, amplification, and transnational visibility, enabling resistance across both street-level and networked spaces. Drawing on two East African movements and modes of organizing-the popular Digital Maandamano protests in Kenya and more diffuse forms of nonconformist digital activism and resistance in Uganda-the article shows how, under conditions of heightened authoritarian pressure, populations carve out both virtual and embodied spaces to challenge entrenched power structures and expand the scope for political action. It advances an analytical agenda that treats digitalization as locally adapted, resisted, and reconfigured, foregrounding citizens, particularly youth, as active agents shaping alternative political trajectories.

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Where is the African urbanist? Decentering and pluralizing global urban thought

Urban Geography , 2025

Urban theory and geographic thought are, by nature, incomplete and continually evolving, yet they... more Urban theory and geographic thought are, by nature, incomplete and continually evolving, yet they remain heavily shaped by those who occupy, speak from, and reinforce the center. While past efforts to address planetary knowledge asymmetries had gained some momentum-particularly in response to racial disparities and exclusions in academia-such initiatives are now increasingly under attack, especially within Anglo-American contexts. In an era defined by the rise of AI and algorithmic bias in scholarly work-coupled with the impact of right-wing authoritarianism and geopolitical instability on the ecology of civic and critical spaces-domains that once fostered dissent, dialogue, and inclusion are steadily shrinking. Within this context, justice is no more a distant aspiration but an urgent and immediate imperative. It is this critical premise that grounds the inquiry of this paper. Rooted in a liberatory ethos, it begins with a provocation to move beyond the "epistemic center" and "metasteward" in Urban Studies. It then examines ambivalent entrapments experienced by Black and African urbanists, highlighting the need for pluralization as an epistemic act of redress. Finally, the paper calls for sustained self-reflection on our roles as scholars, whether or not we come from or occupy positions of power and privilege.

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Bibanda video halls in Uganda: between vernacular transcreation and cinematic reworlding

by Prince Guma and Joshua Ibanda

Journal of East African Studies, 2026

In Uganda, bibanda video halls have emerged as important vernacular spaces where foreign films th... more In Uganda, bibanda video halls have emerged as important vernacular spaces where foreign films that circulate globally are translated, interpreted, and reimagined for local audiences. This paper examines bibanda video halls as spaces highlighting cultural and performative dimensions of vernacular transcreation and cinematic reworlding in progress. Drawing on site visits and artistic visualisations, interviews with veejays (video jockeys), video hall operators and associates, and library research on representations of film translation in Uganda, we explore how residents mobilise narrative and aesthetic practices to reinterpret foreign films. We demonstrate how through localised practices, they invent and reinvent modes of operability that move beyond portrayals of deficiency, lack, and shortage in reference to urban life in informal contexts. The analysis focuses on localised dubbing in coded language and narratives that destabilise standard meanings and narratives. More broadly, the paper argues that these vernacular media spaces challenge Western perspectives on technology, highlighting the need to take seriously the ordinary, tangible, and intangible media infrastructures. It posits the importance of attending to local forms of meaning-making where residents in informal areas are proactive in constructing identity, vernacular meanings, and an ordinances.

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Transforming the smart city ideal from the margins: everyday regimes of labour and governance

This paper explores the interface between global circulations and local articulations of smart ci... more This paper explores the interface between global circulations and local articulations of smart city plans and technological ideals in emerging urban contexts. Drawing illustrative cases from Nairobi's urban margins, I examine everyday regimes of labour and governance where local actors translate, recreate and transform smart city initiatives based on embedded practices, processes and institutions. I argue that while smart city plans aim to impose techno-dreams on urban contexts, informal actors, often marginal to city planning, localise and adapt these plans, sometimes in unforeseen ways. This, I contend, highlights incompleteness as a key feature of urban technological systems in the making.

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Incompleteness of Urban Infrastructures in Transition: Scenarios from the Mobile Age in Nairobi

Social Studies of Science, 2020

In dealing with urban infrastructure, there is sometimes a tendency in policy and research circle... more In dealing with urban infrastructure, there is sometimes a tendency in policy and research circles to depict occurrences of infrastructural heterogeneity as synonymous with failure or brokenness. Inherent in this tendency is the often-subtle expectation that infrastructures should evolve the same way as their counterparts elsewhere or in a linear trajectory from less complete to more complete arrangements. This paper is a counteractive to such completist lures and inclinations. I recuperate the notion of incompleteness as a constitutive feature and explanatory category for urban infrastructures which while diverging from so-called norms and ideals, cannot be described as failed or broken, but as something else entirely. I argue that rather than devising universalizing solutions to processes of infrastructural heterogeneity, it is perhaps better to see infrastructures for what they really are: as emergent, shifting, and in that sense incomplete. I make this case drawing on three successive infrastructures in Nairobi, Kenya's capital that include the Simu ya Jamii kiosk, the M-Pesa stall, and the M-Pesa platform. I examine these infrastructures not simply as raw materials or empirical conduits, but as the very starting point in theorizing urban infrastructures from the South. Ultimately, this study is hoped to not only open up a vital frame for situated analysis and understanding of urban infrastructures in transition, but also add to and extend STS analytical frames into non-western contexts.

format_quoteSafaricom's introduction of community-based kiosks (Simu ya Jamii) created unique service models in Nairobi's mobile landscape.format_quote

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The Temporal Incompleteness of Infrastructure and the Urban

Urban Technology , 2022

This commentary advances "incompleteness" as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes... more This commentary advances "incompleteness" as an explanatory category for infrastructure processes that do not yield or conform to standard ideals, and a corrective to interventions that regard everything that does not appear to yield or conform as failed. Incompleteness offers a useful lens for approaching infrastructures through situated, contingent, and embodied dimensions. It permits a proper reading of infrastructure as transient, and infrastructure development as a process that is affected not solely by neoliberal interventions but also sociomaterial practices and inscriptions. As such, incompleteness transcends conventional and completist frames, and complements theorizations of infrastructure since Graham and Marvin's Splintering Urbanism.

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Smart city making? The spread of ICT-driven plans and infrastructures in Nairobi

Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi in Kenya has become a focal point of large-scale and am... more Since the late 2000s, the city of Nairobi in Kenya has become a focal point of large-scale and ambitious technology-driven city making processes and ambitions. In this study, we draw upon observations, interviews, and policy analysis to examine processes of city making and the spread of ICT-driven infrastructures, juxtaposing ambitious visions of emergent plans with ordinary realities of the African city. We demonstrate that while processes of smart city making have strongly been inclined toward technocratic approaches and deter-ministic appeals, this inclination is highly deceptive. We argue that rather than being deterministic, these processes are essentially politicized, highly contested, and shaped by the role and impact of local practices and context-specific realities. In making this argument , we draw from a social studies of technology perspective which engages with the notion of technological determinism to make this contribution to the academic field of critical urbanism. ARTICLE HISTORY

format_quoteDespite being technocratically inclined, smart city processes in Nairobi are contested, shaped by local politics and practices rather than deterministic ideals.format_quote

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Smart urbanism? ICTs for water and electricity supply in Nairobi

Urban Studies, 2019

I examine the degree to which ICT deployments for urban water and electricity supply shape and ar... more

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Hybrid Constellations of Water Access in the Digital Age: The Case of Jisomee Mita in Soweto-Kayole, Nairobi

Water Alternatives, 2019

The digital age has reshaped the supply of infrastructure services in African cities. Over the la... more The digital age has reshaped the supply of infrastructure services in African cities. Over the last decade, Nairobi's water sector has opened up to infrastructure investments enabled by the uptake and integration of digital technologies. These investments have focused on one particular group: the urban poor. This paper examines a new hybrid piped water supply project called Jisomee Mita (Read your Meter) in Soweto-Kayole, a low and average income neighbourhood in Nairobi. Jisomee Mita employs digital technologies to enable self meter reading, and mobile-phone-based billing, payment, and querying systems. In our study, we draw upon science and technology studies to show how as a globally promoted technological device, Jisomee Mita has become locally anchored and appropriated in variegated ways beyond its original design. Our study illustrates how hybrid and dynamic infrastructure constellations emerge through practices of remaking, upgrading, and expansion of centralised systems of water supply through the use of digital technologies by various actors. We argue that the ways in which actors continually modify Jisomee Mita beyond its original design reveal a tension between imaginations of active citizens as 'co-providers' of services inscribed to the project's technologies, and the users' own visions of citizenship. This vision, we contend, becomes apparent in the ways in which these such actors appropriate the project in unforeseen and partly subversive ways.

format_quoteJisomee Mita connected 2033 plots, fostering ownership among residents through self-meter reading.format_quote

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Forum I: Decolonising Academic Cooperation

Part of our network collaborations as co 2 libri: conceptual collaboration-living borderless rese... more Part of our network collaborations as co 2 libri: conceptual collaboration-living borderless research interaction were a series of fishbowl or workshop talks to enact conceptual collaboration as a foundational dialogical principle. These conversations were held digitally, due to pandemic circumstances, as part of monthly meetings of the working group "Thinkers and Theorising from the South" organised by Kai Kresse. Through such talks, as well as in other modes, we aim to: (1) rethink theory/-ies (in terms of alternative conceptual frameworks and baselines); (2) develop and cultivate visions of globally more fair and adequate research practices in light of southern perspectives or as Akello and Beisel argue, listening to the weaker side;1 and (3) explore the potentials of genuine conceptual collaboration across disciplines, locations and positionalities. Adding to this is our shared conviction that wide-ranging global north-centred knowledge productions and their underlying paradigms, and us as actors in a complex and multilayered matrix, have an obligation to reflect on our contributions to present-day academic hegemonies. This forum documents one of our many conversations. It took place in October 2021 via a videoconference with colleagues participating from MENA countries, South-and East Africa, South-and SouthEast Asia to Europe, and was moderated by Sandra Calkins, assistant professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University Berlin. The foundations for this rich and thought-provoking conversation were three discussion papers, in which the authors engage with African academia and their diverse, wide-ranging, complex positionings and interactions within wider regimes of (trans)regional geopolitics of knowledge-production and research cooperation: Prince K. Guma, a postdoctoral research associate at the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield, UK, who delves further into the material underpinnings, i.e., infrastructures, of academic cooperation and issues of incompleteness; Grace Akello, professor of medical anthropology at Gulu University, Uganda, who shares her experiences and dilemmas observed during various scientific collaborations; and Sabelo 1 Akello and Beisel 2019.

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