Strategic Making: aspiration, endurance, and collective care in rural Tanzania

My ethnographic research explores multigenerational experiences with precarity and aspiration in the Kahe Ward of northern Tanzania. As subsistence farmers in an unforgiving economic and ecological place, interlocutors in Mwangaria Village highlight the extent to which their hard work leads not to fruition, but exhaustion. In a remote participatory research project (January 2022 to August 2022), I will work with college students born in Mwangaria to map collect photographs and audio recordings of the elders’ memories of sites and landmarks that reflect in Mwangaria’s last three decades of rapid transformation.