News

The Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology is proud to share that Atta Kwarkye, a recent graduate of the European Interdisciplinary Master African Studies (EIMAS) and now a PhD candidate in our department, has been invited to present their research at the African Union Headquarters during the closing ceremony of the EIMAS program.

Atta Kwarkye’s research investigates the contested role of prepaid electricity meters as
“critical infrastructure” in Africa’s energy transitions.

By comparing Ghana’s state-dominated energy system with Kenya’s market-oriented model, the study explores how prepaid meters, often promoted as tools for efficiency and debt management, shape everyday life, political legitimacy, and resilience from below.

The project proposes a novel conceptual framework by reinterpreting infrastructure as an affordance, drawing on both material and digital arrangements that enable and constrain action for states, utilities, designers, and consumers. It further addresses the global imbalance in infrastructure scholarship by foregrounding perspectives from African contexts, thereby challenging epistemic injustices in knowledge production.