The Covid-19 pandemic and the restructuring of the global economy it has triggered have exacerbated the need to study a topic that has flown under the radar of social scientists for too long: individuals and social groups experiencing economic pressure which manifests in myriad of somatic and psychological ways. The fallout from pressure — sleeplessness, ulcers, an atmosphere of hopelessness and social mistrust, gambling, suicides, as well as a growing concern about a lack of mental health facilities in cities of the Global South — now pervades urban as well as rural environments around the world. This blog series aims at taking a fresh look at the phenomenon of economic pressure through a decisively comparative and interdisciplinary approach. We will critically interrogate the role of economic pressure in the lives of both the rich and the poor, the unemployed and the workforce, across class and continents in order to answer, among others, the following questions:

• What meanings does economic pressure take on as it travels between different contexts?
• How do city dwellers of diverse class, religious and gender backgrounds experience pressure in their professional and private lives? How do they accommodate, negotiate and deflect pressure?
• Does economic pressure offer new analytical possibilities vis-à-vis other concepts used to describe similar phenomena (e.g. poverty, uncertainty, precarity etc.)?
• What is the relation between individually perceived economic pressure and structural changes of the economy or polity?
• What moral valuations do urban residents assign to economic pressure? What logics underpin ‘good’ and ‘bad’ forms of pressure?
• How can inter-disciplinary methodological and/or theoretical approaches deepen our understanding of economic pressure —the forms it assumes, the actions it motivates and the effects it generates?

We welcome contributions from a wide range of scientific disciplines (political economy, anthropology, economics, sociology, development studies, gender studies, international relations, geography, etc.) as well as other professions (such as practicing psychologists, counselors, activists, bankers, sports professionals etc.). As the blog’s organizers are all Africanists, the blog will, however, have an initial focus on sub-Saharan and, especially, Eastern Africa. We are confident that this will be balanced over time.

• Pressure in the City: Stress, Worry and Anxiety in Times of Economic Crisis. The first contribution to the series, written by Jörg Wiegratz, Catherine Dolan, Wangui Kimari and Mario Schmidt will detail the rationale of the series and provide necessary background information and context.
• Urban Africa under Stress: Rethinking Economic Pressure in Cities. Written by the same four scholars, this post explains in more detail the objectives of our blog series intervention, and our observations regarding pressure as a social phenomenon in a capitalist city in the Global South. It introduces Nairobi as a city of pressure and critically discusses the scholarship on economic pressure. As such, it acts as an introduction to subsequent blogs on Nairobi as a city of pressure.
• ‘There is a Lot of Pressure on Me. It’s Like the Distance Between Heaven and Earth’ – Landscapes of Debt, Poverty-in-People and Social Atomization in Covid-19 Nairobi. Written by Mario Schmidt, Eric Kioko, Evelyn Atieno Owino, and Christiane Stephan. This post sheds light on the multidimensional ways in which Kenya’s political elite’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has increased economic pressure on actors living in informal and low-income settlements of Nairobi (Kibera and Pipeline). It will be followed by a second post exploring the effects of the pandemic on inhabitants of Kileleshwa, a wealthier suburb of Nairobi.
• ‘Life On These Stones Is Very Hard’ – House Helps in Covid-19 Nairobi. Written by Eric M. Kioko, Judith K. Musa, Mario Schmidt and Christiane Stephan, this blog focuses on the economic pressure experienced by women who lost jobs as house helps following the Covid-19 pandemic and how they manoeuvre their new economic situation within Nairobi’s richer suburbs.
• “Under pressure”: negotiating competing demands and desires in a time of precarious earnings. Written by Hannah Dawson, this post examines the social and economic pressures faced by un(der)employed young men in an informal settlement on the outskirts of Johannesburg. It highlights the multiplicity of demands on young men’s precarious incomes and the tension they experience from the simultaneous pressure to consume and improve their own lives while at the same time providing for their families and children.
• (De)pressurizing in urban centers beyond the megacity: notes on pressure from Nakuru, Kenya. Written by Nick Rahier, this post sheds light on life ‘under pressure’ from the perspective of Nakuru, a vibrant secondary Kenyan city situated 160 km Northwest of Nairobi. It presents Nakuru as a place where pressure manifests itself as a highly volatile and affective state of being that is rich in meaning about what it means to (de)pressurize beyond the megacities.
• Less flow, more pressure: accessing water in N’Djamena in times of Covid-19. Written by Ismaël Maazaz, this blog post looks at state policies designed to mitigate the economic pressure weighting on water end-users of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad in the midst of the pandemics in 2020. Such policies adversely affected the actual pipe water pressure, generating additional challenges.
• Inner-city pressure and living somewhere in-between. Written by Aidan Mosselson, this blog post traces the (pre-covid-19) experiences of people living in social and affordable housing in inner-city Johannesburg. Inner-city residents contend with economic pressure, as they work hard to pay their rent and often forgo other forms of social interaction whilst they strive to get by. But pressures are also more-than-economic, and emanate from difficult and unpleasant environments and concerns about safety. Combined, these pressures create a state of resignation and being in-between, of living in an undesirable area, aspiring to be elsewhere, but unable to find somewhere better and still affordable.
• Living in the shadows of Dubai. Written by Jonathan Ngeh, this blog post draws on the lived experiences of African migrants in Dubai to shed light on how economic inequality increases pressure on low-income migrants. Furthermore, it reveals how the existence of poverty alongside wealth puts pressure on not only the poor but also on the wealthy city residents.
• Pressure to Succeed: From Prosperity, Stress (A reflection on aspiration in the new Kenya). Written by Peter Lockwood, the blog post draws attention towards the subjective experience of pressure to succeed, to ‘make it’, and live a good life, by Kenyan youth living on the northern outskirts of Nairobi. Departing from a purely economic understanding of pressure in the city, the blog highlights the feelings of shame and failure harboured by Kenyan youth unable to accumulate the wealth that would allow them to live good lives according to mainstream understandings of economic success’.
• The pressure to provide and perform: Anti-feminism, masculinity consultants, and the threat of male expendability in contemporary Nairobi. Written by Mario Schmidt, tries to open a space for critical debates about how capitalism affects gender relations by exploring the relations between the sorrows of heterosexual migrant Kenyan men who increasingly feel under pressure and Nairobi’s blossoming sphere of toxic masculinity consultancy.
• Layers of compounding pressure: the gendered experiences of rural migrant youth in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Written by Elizabeth Dessie, this blogpost explores the gendered ways in which rural-urban migrant youth experience pressure in a post-pandemic Addis Ababa, highlighting how strategies devised to counteract pressure are central to migrants’ everyday lives, despite synchronously creating new layers of social and economic strain.        

Blog series editors:

Jörg Wiegratz is a Lecturer in Political Economy of Global Development at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, and Senior Research Associate, Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg. j.wiegratz@leeds.ac.uk.

Elizabeth Dessie is a postdoctoral fellow at the African Cities Research Consortium at the University of Manchester. elizabeth.dessie@manchester.ac.uk.

Catherine Dolan is Professor in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London. cd17@soas.ac.uk

Wangui Kimari is a Postdoctoral researcher at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. kuikimari@gmail.com

Mario Schmidt is postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale, Germany). marioatschmidt@gmail.com