In this presentation, I examine digital scapes as crucial spaces for anti-establishment politics, focusing on how urban youth movements shape the way we think about data and AI. In particular, I examine how publics appropriate open data and generative AI tools to challenge political excess and authoritarian surfeit, conceptualizing digital scapes as socio-technical and techno-popular sites of algorithmic activism and resistance. In so doing, I highlight three key domains: local tech firms, where code, software, and platforms are repurposed for civic protest; grassroots actors and activists, who mobilize data-driven tools for engagement, resistance, and organizing; and urban youth and majority populations, who harness popular media and platforms for defiance, solidarity, and political organizing. Drawing on two East African movements—the Digital Maandamano protests in Kenya, and the more subtle, everyday forms of nonconformist digital activism in Uganda—I seek to better understand how, amidst authoritarianism, populations carve out both virtual and embodied spaces of resistance, solidarity and hope. Ultimately, I hope to advance a citizen-oriented, context-specific, and nonlinear understanding of protest and activism, and contribute an East African inspired analytical agenda that frames digital geographies through lived, shifting relations, philosophies, and conditions of situated urbanism.

Dr Prince Guma is Smuts Research Fellow in African Studies at Cambridge University. He 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 Human Geography and Spatial Planning from Utrecht University in 2021, where his research explored the diffusion and adoption of new plans, ideas, and technologies in urban and infrastructure domains.