Multi-religious encounters in urban settings (MEUS)

Project Lead: Leslie Fesenmyer

Leslie’s current research looks at multi-religious encounters and cohabitation in urban Kenya. In particular, she is interested in how people who follow different religions (have come to) coexist in Nairobi, often through rural-to-urban migration, and how their pursuit of social mobility may generate mixing and borrowing across religious lines that are otherwise taken to be incommensurate. To that end, she has conducted fieldwork in two housing estates with long histories of religious diversity, one poor and the other upwardly middle class, both of which are undergoing significant socio-demographic and physical changes as part of Nairobi's wider transformation.