Naomi Van Stapele
Biographic Data
| ID | 88086 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Naomi Van Stapele |
| GIVEN NAMES | Naomi |
| FAMILY NAME | Van Stapele |
| SIGNATURE | VAN STAPELE N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Erasmus University Rotterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1487-0325 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 100 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Unlearning Violent Masculinity: Gang Reform through Community Service in Urban Kenya
In a changing urban environment where community-led peace-building and deradicalization initiatives increasingly appear alongside punitive state interventions, several former criminal gangs in Mombasa, Kenya, have begun transforming themselves into youth groups that pledge to end violence. One such group is the Kali gang, once notorious for violent robberies and local dominance, which underwent a self-directed reform process between 2019 and 2021…
Resilience Pathways of Informal Settlements in Nairobi: Stasis, Decline, Adaptation, and Transformation
Adaptive governance by community based organisations: Community resilience initiatives during Covid‐19 in Mathare, Nairobi
Adaptive governance describes the purposeful collective actions to resist, adapt, or transform when faced with shocks. As governments are reluctant to intervene in informal settlements, community based organisations (CBOs) self‐organize and take the lead. This study explores under what conditions CBOs in Mathare informal settlement, Nairobi initiate and sustain resilience activities during Covid‐19. Study findings show that CBOs engage in multipl…
Reclaiming the city from an urban vitalism perspective: Critically reflecting smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just city labels
This article analyses four of the most prominent city discourses and introduces the lens of urban vitalism as an overarching interdisciplinary concept of cities as places of transformation and change. We demonstrate the value of using urban vitalism as a lens to conceptualize and critically discuss different notions on smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just cities. Urban vitalism offers a process-based lens which enables us to understan…
Providing to belong: Masculinities, hustling and economic uncertainty in Nairobi 'ghettos
Hustling as a concept has travelled through the global soundscapes of impoverished, neglected, racialized and otherwise marginalized urban settings. The widespread rearticulation of the term 'hustling' in a broad range of urban languages reveals that its use in particular forms of Black Atlantic music cultures speaks to shared experiences worldwide. Simultaneously, it shows the flexibility of this term to acquire new and unfolding meanings. This …
Harnessing the 'hustle: Struggle, solidarities and narratives of work in Nairobi and beyond Introduction
In a workshop entitled ‘Harnessing the Hustle’, held at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) in April 2017, a group of academic researchers and community activists came together to discuss a concept that resonated across ethnographic findings and everyday life alike: hustling. For many of us working in Nairobi for years, we considered the real ‘experts in the room’ to be our Kenyan interlocutors, many of whom have become research collab…
Youth and masculinity
This chapter explores the meanings of “youth” and associated politics of masculinity in Kenya from the perspectives of young and poor men in urban settlements. Specifically, the chapter investigates how the idea of “junior manhood” is connected with efforts to become “men” by providing for loved ones in a context of gross inequality, limited opportunities, and high expectations. Using the example of Mathare in Nairobi, the chapter reveals how you…
Our time to recover: Young men, political mobilization, and personalized political ties during the 2017 primary elections in Nairobi
In this article, we show how youth groups in Nairobi’s poor settlements engage with politics while carving out a political space for themselves and providing a livelihood. In doing so, we challenge dominant neo-patrimonial narratives of youth radicalization and instrumentalized youth mobilization in relation to electoral processes. Based on long-term ethnographic engagements, we argue for more complex dynamics between local youth groups and polit…
When the Numbers Stop Adding: Imagining Futures in Perilous Presents Among Youth in Nairobi Ghettos
Studying the aspirations of young men, in Mathare, Nairobi, highlights their social becoming in contexts in which they incessantly risk social and physical death. Taking aspiration as a relational concept brings into view the temporal and spatial interactions between different aspirations and how these connect to emerging and future pathways of these young men. The ensuing relationalities at play are analysed through their context-bound negotiati…
Police killings and the vicissitudes of borders and bounding orders in Mathare, Nairobi
This article sets out to explore the ways in which local divisions contribute to and contest "permissive spaces" for police killings in an urban settlement in Nairobi called Mathare. Taking police killings as part of local bordering and bounding draws attention to the underlying social divisions that are implicated in policing these neighborhoods and which enable and contest such killings. As such, it opens up a view on the way police violence is…
On Tensions and Opportunities: Building Partnerships Between Government and Sex Worker-Led Organizations in Kenya in the Fight Against HIV/Aids
This research reveals how the experienced “tokenism” by sex workers’ representatives who take part in HIV prevention and care partnerships hinges on a lack of expertise by “technical experts” to make use of the different types of knowledge brought to the policy table by them. The article further explores other tensions and opportunities within HIV prevention and care partnerships in Kenya, including the effect of criminalization and devolution on…
We are not Kenyans: Extra-judicial killings, manhood and citizenship in Mathare, a Nairobi ghetto
This article focuses on the systematic police killings of young, male crime suspects by local police officers in Mathare since 2002. It explores the relationship between executions of young ghetto men by police and notions of citizenship. It firstexmaines the impact of such killings on positions of manhood among these men and the different roles of ‘gangs’ in popular processes of becoming men. My aim is to move away from the current association o…
Intersubjectivity, self-reflexivity and agency: Narrating about ‘self’ and ‘other’ in feminist research
Maisha Bora, Kwa Nani? A Cool Life, For Whom? Mediations Of Masculinity, Ethnicity, And Violence In A Nairobi Slum
In this chapter the author argues that ethnic differences by themselves do not explain the post-election violence. The application of the concept of ethnicity as an explanatory concept by itself glosses over the underlying dynamics of historical, political, social and economic factors that come together in a particular locality at a particular moment in time. In this chapter he generally refers to direct forms of violence but, when analysing the …
Harnessing the 'hustle: Struggle, solidarities and narratives of work in Nairobi and beyond Introduction
In a workshop entitled ‘Harnessing the Hustle’, held at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) in April 2017, a group of academic researchers and community activists came together to discuss a concept that resonated across ethnographic findings and everyday life alike: hustling. For many of us working in Nairobi for years, we considered the real ‘experts in the room’ to be our Kenyan interlocutors, many of whom have become research collab…
Providing to belong: Masculinities, hustling and economic uncertainty in Nairobi 'ghettos
Hustling as a concept has travelled through the global soundscapes of impoverished, neglected, racialized and otherwise marginalized urban settings. The widespread rearticulation of the term 'hustling' in a broad range of urban languages reveals that its use in particular forms of Black Atlantic music cultures speaks to shared experiences worldwide. Simultaneously, it shows the flexibility of this term to acquire new and unfolding meanings. This …
Intersubjectivity, self-reflexivity and agency: Narrating about ‘self’ and ‘other’ in feminist research
We are not Kenyans: Extra-judicial killings, manhood and citizenship in Mathare, a Nairobi ghetto
This article focuses on the systematic police killings of young, male crime suspects by local police officers in Mathare since 2002. It explores the relationship between executions of young ghetto men by police and notions of citizenship. It firstexmaines the impact of such killings on positions of manhood among these men and the different roles of ‘gangs’ in popular processes of becoming men. My aim is to move away from the current association o…
Police killings and the vicissitudes of borders and bounding orders in Mathare, Nairobi
This article sets out to explore the ways in which local divisions contribute to and contest "permissive spaces" for police killings in an urban settlement in Nairobi called Mathare. Taking police killings as part of local bordering and bounding draws attention to the underlying social divisions that are implicated in policing these neighborhoods and which enable and contest such killings. As such, it opens up a view on the way police violence is…
Our time to recover: Young men, political mobilization, and personalized political ties during the 2017 primary elections in Nairobi
In this article, we show how youth groups in Nairobi’s poor settlements engage with politics while carving out a political space for themselves and providing a livelihood. In doing so, we challenge dominant neo-patrimonial narratives of youth radicalization and instrumentalized youth mobilization in relation to electoral processes. Based on long-term ethnographic engagements, we argue for more complex dynamics between local youth groups and polit…
When the Numbers Stop Adding: Imagining Futures in Perilous Presents Among Youth in Nairobi Ghettos
Studying the aspirations of young men, in Mathare, Nairobi, highlights their social becoming in contexts in which they incessantly risk social and physical death. Taking aspiration as a relational concept brings into view the temporal and spatial interactions between different aspirations and how these connect to emerging and future pathways of these young men. The ensuing relationalities at play are analysed through their context-bound negotiati…
Reclaiming the city from an urban vitalism perspective: Critically reflecting smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just city labels
This article analyses four of the most prominent city discourses and introduces the lens of urban vitalism as an overarching interdisciplinary concept of cities as places of transformation and change. We demonstrate the value of using urban vitalism as a lens to conceptualize and critically discuss different notions on smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just cities. Urban vitalism offers a process-based lens which enables us to understan…
On Tensions and Opportunities: Building Partnerships Between Government and Sex Worker-Led Organizations in Kenya in the Fight Against HIV/Aids
This research reveals how the experienced “tokenism” by sex workers’ representatives who take part in HIV prevention and care partnerships hinges on a lack of expertise by “technical experts” to make use of the different types of knowledge brought to the policy table by them. The article further explores other tensions and opportunities within HIV prevention and care partnerships in Kenya, including the effect of criminalization and devolution on…
Adaptive governance by community based organisations: Community resilience initiatives during Covid‐19 in Mathare, Nairobi
Adaptive governance describes the purposeful collective actions to resist, adapt, or transform when faced with shocks. As governments are reluctant to intervene in informal settlements, community based organisations (CBOs) self‐organize and take the lead. This study explores under what conditions CBOs in Mathare informal settlement, Nairobi initiate and sustain resilience activities during Covid‐19. Study findings show that CBOs engage in multipl…
Maisha Bora, Kwa Nani? A Cool Life, For Whom? Mediations Of Masculinity, Ethnicity, And Violence In A Nairobi Slum
In this chapter the author argues that ethnic differences by themselves do not explain the post-election violence. The application of the concept of ethnicity as an explanatory concept by itself glosses over the underlying dynamics of historical, political, social and economic factors that come together in a particular locality at a particular moment in time. In this chapter he generally refers to direct forms of violence but, when analysing the …
Intersubjectivity, self-reflexivity and agency: Narrating about ‘self’ and ‘other’ in feminist research
We are not Kenyans: Extra-judicial killings, manhood and citizenship in Mathare, a Nairobi ghetto
This article focuses on the systematic police killings of young, male crime suspects by local police officers in Mathare since 2002. It explores the relationship between executions of young ghetto men by police and notions of citizenship. It firstexmaines the impact of such killings on positions of manhood among these men and the different roles of ‘gangs’ in popular processes of becoming men. My aim is to move away from the current association o…
On Tensions and Opportunities: Building Partnerships Between Government and Sex Worker-Led Organizations in Kenya in the Fight Against HIV/Aids
This research reveals how the experienced “tokenism” by sex workers’ representatives who take part in HIV prevention and care partnerships hinges on a lack of expertise by “technical experts” to make use of the different types of knowledge brought to the policy table by them. The article further explores other tensions and opportunities within HIV prevention and care partnerships in Kenya, including the effect of criminalization and devolution on…
Youth and masculinity
This chapter explores the meanings of “youth” and associated politics of masculinity in Kenya from the perspectives of young and poor men in urban settlements. Specifically, the chapter investigates how the idea of “junior manhood” is connected with efforts to become “men” by providing for loved ones in a context of gross inequality, limited opportunities, and high expectations. Using the example of Mathare in Nairobi, the chapter reveals how you…
Our time to recover: Young men, political mobilization, and personalized political ties during the 2017 primary elections in Nairobi
In this article, we show how youth groups in Nairobi’s poor settlements engage with politics while carving out a political space for themselves and providing a livelihood. In doing so, we challenge dominant neo-patrimonial narratives of youth radicalization and instrumentalized youth mobilization in relation to electoral processes. Based on long-term ethnographic engagements, we argue for more complex dynamics between local youth groups and polit…
When the Numbers Stop Adding: Imagining Futures in Perilous Presents Among Youth in Nairobi Ghettos
Studying the aspirations of young men, in Mathare, Nairobi, highlights their social becoming in contexts in which they incessantly risk social and physical death. Taking aspiration as a relational concept brings into view the temporal and spatial interactions between different aspirations and how these connect to emerging and future pathways of these young men. The ensuing relationalities at play are analysed through their context-bound negotiati…
Police killings and the vicissitudes of borders and bounding orders in Mathare, Nairobi
This article sets out to explore the ways in which local divisions contribute to and contest "permissive spaces" for police killings in an urban settlement in Nairobi called Mathare. Taking police killings as part of local bordering and bounding draws attention to the underlying social divisions that are implicated in policing these neighborhoods and which enable and contest such killings. As such, it opens up a view on the way police violence is…
Providing to belong: Masculinities, hustling and economic uncertainty in Nairobi 'ghettos
Hustling as a concept has travelled through the global soundscapes of impoverished, neglected, racialized and otherwise marginalized urban settings. The widespread rearticulation of the term 'hustling' in a broad range of urban languages reveals that its use in particular forms of Black Atlantic music cultures speaks to shared experiences worldwide. Simultaneously, it shows the flexibility of this term to acquire new and unfolding meanings. This …
Harnessing the 'hustle: Struggle, solidarities and narratives of work in Nairobi and beyond Introduction
In a workshop entitled ‘Harnessing the Hustle’, held at the British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) in April 2017, a group of academic researchers and community activists came together to discuss a concept that resonated across ethnographic findings and everyday life alike: hustling. For many of us working in Nairobi for years, we considered the real ‘experts in the room’ to be our Kenyan interlocutors, many of whom have become research collab…
Adaptive governance by community based organisations: Community resilience initiatives during Covid‐19 in Mathare, Nairobi
Adaptive governance describes the purposeful collective actions to resist, adapt, or transform when faced with shocks. As governments are reluctant to intervene in informal settlements, community based organisations (CBOs) self‐organize and take the lead. This study explores under what conditions CBOs in Mathare informal settlement, Nairobi initiate and sustain resilience activities during Covid‐19. Study findings show that CBOs engage in multipl…
Reclaiming the city from an urban vitalism perspective: Critically reflecting smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just city labels
This article analyses four of the most prominent city discourses and introduces the lens of urban vitalism as an overarching interdisciplinary concept of cities as places of transformation and change. We demonstrate the value of using urban vitalism as a lens to conceptualize and critically discuss different notions on smart, inclusive, resilient and sustainable just cities. Urban vitalism offers a process-based lens which enables us to understan…
Resilience Pathways of Informal Settlements in Nairobi: Stasis, Decline, Adaptation, and Transformation
Unlearning Violent Masculinity: Gang Reform through Community Service in Urban Kenya
In a changing urban environment where community-led peace-building and deradicalization initiatives increasingly appear alongside punitive state interventions, several former criminal gangs in Mombasa, Kenya, have begun transforming themselves into youth groups that pledge to end violence. One such group is the Kali gang, once notorious for violent robberies and local dominance, which underwent a self-directed reform process between 2019 and 2021…
Sociology (13 works) · Political science (9 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Geography (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · Criminology (4 works) · Economic growth (4 works) · African studies and sociopolitical issues (3 works) · Economics (3 works)