Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Writing about the digitalisation of subnational administrations in Kenya, Datta and Hoefsloot make the case for engaging the temporality of the state as a locus of power and its expression. As a cinematic auteur, they argue, the state times and sequences the asynchronous moments of its action. Building on this insight, the following commentary adds a vectoral dimension to the relationship between time and statecraft: acceleration, or, as physicists would define it, a directional rate of change in speed. Yet acceleration is more than an analytical metaphor: as we argue, it has been a collective grammar through which the Kenyan state itself has been given effect and sense through hastened infrastructural projects in the transition from autocracy and immobility to democracy and (digital) development.
Source: Dialogues on Digital Society
Authors: Andrea Pollio, Jack O. Odeo
Institutions: Politecnico di Torino, Stockholm University
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: Vetenskapsrådet
OpenAlex ID: W4407546055