Symposium: Cultures of Platformisation in Africa
Africa’s digital landscape is expanding and rapidly changing. In this moment, digital platforms–and the products, services, communication, and networking they offer– significantly shape everyday economic, social, and political life on the continent. This digital landscape is underpinned by a combination of economic/financial, political and cultural logics and practices, both global and local.
Platforms promise business success, consumer satisfaction, entrepreneurial opportunities, innovations, and social transformation, including new forms of collective connection and action. Platforms are also linked to scams, debt, data misuse, violence, worker exploitation, censorship, and mental ill-health. The merits and harms of platforms are contested across the continent. For example, platforms have been celebrated as accelerators of local and regional innovation and as vehicles of sovereignty projects. They have also been critiqued as replicators of colonial circuits of wealth and power that reinforce historical, and perhaps racialised, inequities.
As platforms–and platform-based firms and entrepreneurs–further extend their business models into the social fabric of those living on the continent, states deliberate the appropriate policy environment that will drive platforms to better balance innovation and security, and citizen, corporate, and state interests. Meanwhile, individuals enact digital practices that blend modernity and tradition in ways that can both reproduce and resist the asymmetries of platform capitalism. Against this background, we take stock of accelerating and expansive platformisation in Africa.
Organising Committee:
Leah Komen (Daystar University); Cathleen LeGrand (University of Leeds); Winston Mano (University of Westminster); Chris Paterson (University of Leeds); Daivi Rodima-Taylor (Boston University); Jörg Wiegratz (University of Leeds).
Symposium Panels:
View the extended abstracts for the symposium presentations
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Additional Reading:
LeGrand, C., Paterson, C., and Wiegratz, J. (2024). Afro-optimism and progressive modernity: the Fintech story in the African press. Globalizations, 21(5), 803–820.
Rodima-Taylor, D., Paterson, C., Wiegratz, J., and Legrand, C. (2025). The Making of FinTech in Africa: Actors, Narratives, Challenges. Democracy in Africa, January 2025.