Disseminating Research on Youth Knowledge, Informality and the Politics of Everyday Violence in Mathare

 by Dr. Rachel Sittoni

In September 2025, I had the privilege of returning to Mathare, Nairobi to share my doctoral research findings, funded by the BIEA. Between 2018 and 2022, my PhD research traced the political history of youth, informality and state violence in Kenya. Centring Mathare youth as political agents whose knowledge, histories, and everyday practices ground debates on police violence, I followed youth everyday experiences and adaptation to violence in Mlango Kubwa and Mradi wards. This research explored police violence as a ‘dimension of [youth] existence and not external to their society or culture’[1] and equally as the very way that informal urban youth are included within the state.

Returning to Mathare in 2025, my dissemination activities took place within a context of ongoing state violence, with reported cases of abduction, disappearance and overt arbitrary arrests of youth, I was aware of both the sensitivity and urgency of the research in this context.

I was also aware of the danger the dissemination activities could bring to my respondents and organisations involved. The dissemination was hence about balancing multiple responsibilities to: a) the place, Mathare, as my primary site of study; it was as important that we hold conversations in the community as a way to plough back into it and as an opportunity to feature the community in different light, as a place where our understanding of how we relate to and theorise the state, too, can be shaped; b) to the individual youth, originally a part of the study; c) it was also about justice for Mathare youth (and their families) that have long been on the receiving end of state violence.

Guided by the rhythms of youth everyday lives in Mathare, my dissemination activities included workshops in two community-based organisations and a session with a collective of local artists that was also recorded into a podcast episode.

Mathare Social Justice Centre (MSJC)

As my host organisation during my research, my first stop was MSJC. Given MSJC’s continued advocacy and research on social justice and its documentation of police violence in the community, my research findings were of interest to the team’s continued efforts in strengthening the scholar-activists relationship. I held an intergenerational workshop bringing together 41 youth and elder members of the community. We unpacked pre-existing intergenerational tensions that have long mediated police violence within the community but importantly, deliberated on intergenerational solidarity and the various ways that elders of society could better support youth efforts especially in the current context.

The session also gave an opportunity for both sides to articulate what they saw as each group’s responsibility in restoring the social fabric going forward.

Mathare Greenpark

Known for its ecological justice work in the community, Mathare Greenpark was started as a symbolic act to commemorate victims of police violence, with each tree they planted representing a youth that had fallen victim to police killings. Today, the park has grown into one of a handful of green spaces in Mathare and doubles up as a community centre where youth meet for different activities. Adapted to these youth activities, the workshop brought together a group of 35 young men and women and led to a discussion about how to bring elders (including tenets of government) into the fold to bridge the generational gap.

Starifik

The final activity involved working with an upcoming collective of local artists, Starifik, for them to adapt the research findings into various forms of art. Through a half day workshop, I shared my research findings with the artists who, in turn, performed different pieces of art that articulated their experiences of violence and social justice in the community.

While any study of violence can naturally feel doom-laden, the collective message across all performed pieces was that there exists life and hope even in the face of violence. There’s a need to capture that hope while also using art to engage its ugliness and to facilitate difficult conversations in the community.

Among the outputs of the session was an animation video that will be used for further engagement and dissemination on social media.

To my surprise, the community engagement was enthusiastic. Although some of the youth I’d originally interviewed had gone into hiding in the current spate of abductions and arbitrary arrests and detention, the community remained eager to have conversations about police violence and social justice more broadly. I selectively shared my research findings, for the safety of those involved and myself, yet the participants and artists asked questions that forced engagement on what I’d imagined would be untouchable topics.

I concluded my time in Nairobi with a talk to share my research findings with the Graduate Forum at the BIEA and held a closed session with the Graduate Attaché Students who had expressed interest in my work.

This dissemination exercise helped to reinvigorate my research interest and reactivate my engagement with the informality, violence, youth and urban studies research communities, including within the BIEA. It was also a great opportunity to imagine creative ways to share my research outside traditional academic circles and medium and among groups that can practically ensure its uptake.

[1] Antonius C G M Robben and Nordstrom, C. (1995). Fieldwork under fire: contemporary studies of violence and survival. Berkeley Calif.: University Of California Press. P1