Through a Folklorist's Camera: Nairobi's Young Men in (Im)Possible Positions

Mbugua wa-Mungai received his PhD in Comparative Folklore at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and teaches at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. Currently, he is at OSU on a yearlong Fulbright grant. Dr. Mungai has published articles on Kenyan popular culture and conceptions of folklore, and is an activist in the Kenyan disability rights movement. While at OSU he'll be working on a book on masculinity and youth subcultures in Nairobi. He examines both the violent criminal Mungiki group and the creativity of matatu bus operators, whose performances fuse nationalist culture, traditional culture, and American hiphop, to elucidate the "crisis-prone" character of male identity in a period of rapid modernization.