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Amy Mjema Omolo

Amy Mjema Omolo

Amy Mjema Omolo headshot

Biography:

Amy Mjema Omolo is a dual-title PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature and African Studies. Her dissertation – Re-imagining Waithood: Narratives of Young Kenyans Negotiating Adulthood – interrogates the concept of waithood to explore representations of relationships, livelihoods, and socio-political critique that young people in Kenya engage in. Some of the questions she contemplates include: How are ideas of youth and waithood liminal within the context of African youth? How have youth in Kenya related with the city, the state, and the global world as they consider what it means to be an adult? How have digital platforms become spaces of resistance, solidarity, and exploration of identities? Ultimately, she asks to what extent and in what ways have/are Kenyan youth negotiating adulthood. Drawing on fields such as Popular Culture and Literature, her dissertation rejects the binary positioning of youth as either vandals or vanguards of society to explore how young Kenyans are self-fashioning adulthood within waithood.