Capricious Connections: the politics of knowledge infrastructure in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Islands

This project enables the completion of ongoing research that explores knowledge systems in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean islands. Through the completion of a monograph of the same (provisional) title, I propose to write a book combining insights from anthropology, science and technology studies, communications and engineering. This work builds on eight years of prior research in Angola, Brazil, Mozambique and Mauritius, which has given me a deep appreciation of what I have theorised as ‘knowledge mobilities’. Specifically, it involves an ethnographic study of the two undersea internet cable systems that extend across the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean respectively, answering questions and contributing to interdisciplinary dialogue pertaining to Africa’s place in the world of data, undersea infrastructure, conflict, cost, and movement through the online, offline, and intermediary spaces of contemporary communication and thought.