To aid research on ''Black Spots': Roads, Accidents, and Uncertainty in Kenya

AMIEL MELNICK, then a student at Columbia University, New York, New York, received funding in 2012 to aid research on 'Black Spots: Roads, Accidents, and Uncertainty in Kenya,' supervised by Dr. Brian Larkin. The research project was a historically informed ethnography of roads and their hazards. Data was gathered through case studies of road accident victims, a sited ethnography of a 'black spot' (a stretch of road where accidents happen frequently), research on the insurance industry, and archival research on both road safety and insurance. This research explores how the hazards of the road-both the high incidence of injury and death, and the dangers of connection across distance-require social, ethical, and political forms for dealing with uncertainty and harm. The data will help illuminate both how obligations and solidarities are created and tested within and outside co-ethnic spaces, as well as how the political-economic shifts dubbed 'neoliberalism' have affected the forms of managing, and capacity to manage, uncertainty.