Professor Nina Berman will provide an overview of her study of Diani, one of the main tourism resort areas of Kenya. Tourism has brought into contact vastly different actors, who compete over resources but also invent practices of interaction that allow less powerful individuals to address their precarious situations. Germans, Swiss, and Austrians played a pivotal role in the making of the tourism infrastructure and the real estate market, both of which have had far-reaching consequences for the local social, political, and economic environment. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, statistical data collection, and analyses of cultural representations and public debates, this analysis of the gentrification of Diani is relevant for understanding processes presently underway in areas around the world.
The talk will be hosted by the Department of Comparative Studies in the conference room of 451 Hagerty Hall.
