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Naluwembe, Binaisa

Binaisa, Naluwembe

Theme-group Fellow

Architectures of fear and belonging: visuality, mobilities and identities

Research Question

In an age of ‘new’ boundaries of exclusion, how does photography as ‘image-event’ actualise or destabilize understandings of refuge and belonging within the multi-layered mobilities of Africans?

Project Description

‘Architectures of fear’ draws attention to photography as it renders the citizen visible through the multi-layered visuality, mobilities and identities of Africans and their descendants. Photography as a worlding ‘image-event’ reveals power dynamics within regimes of violence, accommodation and resistance to pathways of belonging and refuge framed as civility, rights, ‘law and order’. In a time of increasingly restricted mobilities and the simultaneous attenuation of hyper digital flows, my research explores intersections between aspirations, sanctuary and industriousness that undergird the liveliness of the ‘image-event’ to reveal instabilities of value across the human and non-human.

Selected Publications

Binaisa, N. (forthcoming) “We are moving with technology”: Photographing, voice and belonging in Nigeria. In Pinney, C. (Ed.) Citizens of Photography.

Binaisa, N. (2019) Lagos: Negotiating urban mobilities in an Age of Mobile Telephony, in Eyebiyi, E.P. & Mendy, A.F. (Eds.) Migration, Mobility and Development in Africa, Volume 1. Mobility, Circulation, Borders (MIGDEVRI/LASDEL),

Binaisa, N. (2013) Ugandans in Britain making ‘new’ homes: transnationalism, place and identity within narratives of integration, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(6), 885-902.