Dr. Prince K. Guma

British Institute in Eastern Africa
Humanities and Social Sciences

Early Career Fellow
FRIAS Fellowship Programmes

March 2026 – June 2026

Last Update: 04.09.2025

Curriculum Vitae

Prince Guma is an interdisciplinary social and political scientist whose work sits at the intersection of critical urban studies, infrastructure studies,and technology studies, with a focus on development, political economy, and
social justice. He earned his PhD in 2021 from the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University, where his research explored the diffusion and adoption of new plans, ideas, and technologies in urban and infrastructure domains. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the British Institute in Eastern Africa, where he previously served as Assistant Country Director. From 2008, Prince spent three years working with regional institutions on programs aimed at building capacity and promoting justice. In 2012, he transitioned into academia, initially focusing on public sector management and civic governance before shifting to the geographies of the built environment, the digital, and the urban. Driven by a commitment to addressing key social challenges through collaboration and the application of science in real-world contexts, his work seeks to open new avenues for exploration, contribute fresh insights from the global South, and expand possibilities for alternative theorization. He serves on the editorial boards of Urban Geography, Dialogues in Urban Research, Digital Geography and Society, Erdkunde (Archive for Scientific Geography), Sociology Compass, and UCL Press Urban Africa Book Series.

Selected Publications

Guma PK 2025. ‘Transforming the Smart City Ideal from the Margins: Everyday Regimes of Labor and Governance.’ Territory, Politics, Governance. 10.1080/21622671.2025.2477569
Guma PK 2025. ‘Everyday Infrastructures of Urban Life.’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. DOI: 10.1111/1468-2427.13324
Guma PK, Mwaura M, Njagi WE, & Akallah JA 2023. ‘Urban way of life as survival: Everyday survival in a pluriversal global South.’ City. 27(3-4): 275-293.
Guma PK 2020. ‘Incompleteness of urban infrastructures in transition: scenarios from the mobile age in Nairobi.’ Social Studies of Science. 50(5): 728–750.
Guma PK 2016. ‘The governance and politics of urban space in the post colonial city: Kampala, Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.’ Africa Review. 8(1): 31–43.

FRIAS Project

Infrastructural Vulnerability and Temporalities of Care and Repair in the Anthropocene

While social studies have attempted to examine issues of infrastructural vulnerability in the present phase of the current phase of global capitalism, the ordinary and everyday articulations of care and repair remain largely une plored. This project examines ways through which populations rise above the oddities of despair and despondency to carve out alternative pathways, radical politics and everyday temporalities of care and repair both within and outside the government’s purview. The project focuses on the marginal areas of eastern and central Africa to uncover how populations create a semblance of viable life through modest, low-cost, small-scale, and sometimes improvised interventions in their daily lives, beyond infrastructural absence, inadequacy, and inefficiency. Interest in this project partly stems from emergent social studies that have explored infrastructure from a liberal scientific point of view and through a linear lens, often at the expense of ordinary, mundane, and everyday processes of care and repair that do not conform to such perspectives. Ultimately, this project is aimed at rethinking infrastructural vulnerability and temporalities of care and repair beyond hegemonic and reductive conceptions.