Doris Okenwa is a social anthropologist and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from LSE.
Her work fuses academia with a multimedia approach that draws on her professional background in journalism.
Doris’s research explores the political economy of oil in Kenya and its impact on the host community of Turkana County. Drawing on the anthropology of development, natural resources and distributive politics, her work analyses the dynamics of resource exploration and extraction including promises of development and social inclusion for this hitherto relegated region.
In recent years, there has been a proliferation of policies around ‘ethical extraction’ and the requirement that oil companies must leave communities better off than they found them. However, Doris’s study shows how in spite of the social performances of global best practices, oil has actually exacerbated the precarious living conditions in Turkana County instead of providing the stability that was promised.
The study develops an original framework of impermanence to describe a net result that contradicts narratives and brochures of progress. Rather than the promised economic benefits, what has emerged is a community that lives in a cycle of impermanence characterised by temporary jobs, incomplete infrastructure, and inconsistent development projects. This has resulted from a combination of the fragile and indeterminate nature of oil itself, the technical nature of jobs in the extractives industry, the unequal power relations between industry and government, and the ambiguous ethical codes that appear to breed secrecy more than accountability and transparency.
Some of these ideas have been analysed in a co-edited book entitled Land, Investment & Politics: Reconfiguring Eastern Africa’s Pastoral Drylands, published in May 2020
Doris is expanding her PhD thesis in a monograph with the working title “Impermanent Development: The Ambiguous Benefits of Africa’s Extractives Industry.” The book broadens the concept of impermanence towards a comparative study between Kenya’s nascent oil industry and Nigeria’s long standing struggles with oil governance. The book will also be accompanied by an ethnographic film that visually explores the implications of natural resource development on local livelihoods, economic growth and social mobility.
An exhibition of her photo essay entitled “Lifeworlds of an Oilfield” can be found on the LSE’s Anthropology Department website.
In addition to her PhD in anthropology, Doris has a strong background in visual media having worked extensively as a broadcast journalist in Nigeria and London.