Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
Germany
fellow
Prince K. Guma
2025-2026
Home institution
British Institute in Eastern Africa
Country of origin (home institution)
Uganda
Discipline(s)
Humanities
Political Sciences
Social Sciences
Theme(s)
Cities & States
Democracy, Citizenship, Governance
Inequalities, inclusion & Social Innovation
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
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.
Research 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.
Research Interests:
Human geography; intersections of development; political economy; social justice; urban studies; infrastructure studies; science and technology studies; knowledge production; epistemic justice