Nairobi city, streets and stories

Urban ethnography in the twenty-first century poses a host of epistemic, ontological and methodological conundrums. This chapter interrogates some of the conundrums by focusing on a group of youth with whom the author collaborated during the production and recording of that short documentary film and accompanying hip-hop soundtrack in 2010. It builds on the author's ethnographic insights. The chapter reflects on the particular spatialities of fieldwork and forms of ‘telling young lives’ that might emerge when one’s window into these lives is digitally mediated. It focuses on three storytellers from Mathare, whose portrayals of their lifeworlds through social media canvases have increasingly used digital modes of self-fashioning and storytelling to link local and previously unseen ordinary happenings to wider expressions of youth urban culture and belonging

Geography · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Socioeconomic Development in Asia

• Dying to live

  Open Access•Yusef Bakkali•The Sociological Review•2019

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