Books by Brooke Bocast
Oxford University Press, 2023
Peer Reviewed Articles by Brooke Bocast
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2019
This article demonstrates how female students in rural Uganda experience education sponsorship in... more This article demonstrates how female students in rural Uganda experience education sponsorship in ways that belie international development discourse about girls' empowerment. Since the 1990s, international development organizations have promoted community-based programming alongside efforts to empower individual subjects. I examine the intersection of these trends through the lens of an American nongovernmental organization's (NGO) scholarship program in a Ugandan village. Drawing from recent work on the politics of potentiality, I argue three nested points: (1) NGOs and the various groups that interact with them construct the community as a site for intervention; (2) notions of potential are key to these constructions; and (3) the community-potential nexus is gendered in ways that reconfigure young women's networks of support and obligation with kin, local leaders, and NGO staff. This analysis illuminates larger tensions surrounding notions of individual autonomy and community obligation in Uganda and rural sub-Saharan Africa more broadly.
City & Society, 2017
This article examines the relationship between " sugar daddyism " and emerging forms of female so... more This article examines the relationship between " sugar daddyism " and emerging forms of female sociality among young, educated women in urban Uganda. In particular, I demonstrate how the practice of " housing " —wherein one man sponsors an outing for multiple women—fosters new spaces for female friendship. Scholars of African social relations have long noted the centrality of material exchange in establishing and maintaining ties of kinship and political patronage; more recently, the interplay between capital and sentiment in sexual relationships has garnered significant attention. Yet friendship, in Africa and elsewhere, remains remarkably undertheorized. Profound generational shifts in sociality, shaped by rural-urban migration, the expansion of higher education, and the influx of Western media, make Uganda a fertile site for the study of new forms of non-kin affiliation. In this article, I analyze the relations of exchange that simultaneously constitute sugar daddyism and female peer relationships in order to make three major points. First, although sugar daddyism functions according to logics of asymmetrical exchange, such relationships animate horizontal reciprocity within female peer groups. Second, educated young women discursively construct friendship as a space for " fun, " in opposition to romantic and kin relationships. Third, these peer networks allow female students to cultivate felt freedom according to a logic of independence through multiple dependencies. This article is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with female students at Makerere University in Uganda's capital, Kampala, from 2010 to 2012. [Africa, city, sexuality, reciprocity]
Pragmatics, Jan 1, 2010
In this article, we explore the presentation and contestation of discourses of womanhood in verba... more In this article, we explore the presentation and contestation of discourses of womanhood in verbal art performance. In Tuscan-Italian Contrasto verbal duels the artists, both males and females, may impersonate female characters as they exchange insults between each other. In doing so, they deploy multiple discourses of womanhood to demonstrate their wit and verbal artistry. As a consequence, they often subvert and contest "appropriate" female behavior as well as ideas of morality, which might be connected to those behaviors. This highlights the manipulability of discourses of womanhood to obtain particular goals. We analyze Contrasti performances where characters of mother-in-law and daughter-inlaw are impersonated. We further argue that the contraposition of different discourses on stage increases the fluidity of gender as a category. In this sense poetic performances are revealed as a loci where perceptions of established gender roles and the connected moral order might be negotiated or destabilized.
Anthropology and …, Jan 1, 2008
Crossroads of Language, Interaction and …, Jan 1, 2003
National Association of Student Anthropologists e-journal, 2009
Public Writing by Brooke Bocast
Uganda's capital, Kampala, to publicly share and discuss her research findings on female universi... more Uganda's capital, Kampala, to publicly share and discuss her research findings on female university students' strategies for social advancement in relation to higher education reform and rising rates of HIV on Ugandan university campuses.
Conference Papers by Brooke Bocast
Syllabi by Brooke Bocast
Papers by Brooke Bocast
Routledge eBooks, Sep 16, 2022
City & Society, 2017
This article examines the relationship between "sugar daddyism" and emerging forms of female soci... more This article examines the relationship between "sugar daddyism" and emerging forms of female sociality among young, educated women in urban Uganda. In particular, I demonstrate how the practice of "housing"-wherein one man sponsors an outing for multiple women-fosters new spaces for female friendship. Scholars of African social relations have long noted the centrality of material exchange in establishing and maintaining ties of kinship and political patronage; more recently, the interplay between capital and sentiment in sexual relationships has garnered significant attention. Yet friendship, in Africa and elsewhere, remains remarkably undertheorized. Profound generational shifts in sociality, shaped by rural-urban migration, the expansion of higher education, and the influx of Western media, make Uganda a fertile site for the study of new forms of non-kin affiliation. In this article, I analyze the relations of exchange that simultaneously constitute sugar daddyism and female peer relationships in order to make three major points. First, although sugar daddyism functions according to logics of asymmetrical exchange, such relationships animate horizontal reciprocity within female peer groups. Second, educated young women discursively construct friendship as a space for "fun," in opposition to romantic and kin relationships. Third, these peer networks allow female students to cultivate felt freedom according to a logic of independence through multiple dependencies. This article is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with female students at Makerere University in Uganda's capital, Kampala, from 2010 to 2012. [Africa, city, sexuality, reciprocity]
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2019
While there is a lot of hype surrounding anti-corruption crowdsourcing interventions among develo... more While there is a lot of hype surrounding anti-corruption crowdsourcing interventions among development practitioners and international media, scholarly attention to the phenomenon within development context is limited. In the “Crowdsourcing Success Factor Model”, the crowd’s “motive alignment” is singled out as the key determinant of success of the crowdsourcing initiative. By looking in-depth into the project Not In My Country, which is a crowdsourcing platform used to record, report, and publicise corruption in Ugandan universities, the concept of motive alignment is scrutinised. While Not In My Country, 11 months after its launch, has a notable popular support (over 3,500 “likes” on Facebook and over 15’000 unique visitors to its website), only 110 lecturers and 10 corruption reports have been submitted. If NIMC has apparently tapped into widely held anti-corruption sentiment, and garnered significant traffic to its site, why do so few visitors actually engage with the site as it...
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Books by Brooke Bocast
Peer Reviewed Articles by Brooke Bocast
Public Writing by Brooke Bocast
Conference Papers by Brooke Bocast
Syllabi by Brooke Bocast
Papers by Brooke Bocast