Speaking in Code: Youth Poetry and the Politics of Possibility in Urban Uganda

Join the CURA community for the upcoming colloquium feature work by Sarah Lewinger, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Boston University on January 23. This year-long conversation brings together an interdisciplinary community of scholars of culture, religion, and world affairs.

Please note: Reading the paper in advance is required for attendance. CURA workshops are dedicated to focused, in depth feedback and discussion. A copy of the paper(s) will be sent to registered participants one week in advance of each session.

Abstract: Drawing on ethnographic research in Kampala, I consider how urban Ugandan youth create meaningful lives amid political repression and widespread downward mobility. With a focus on literary and artistic communities, I explore how popular performance poetry functions as both quasi-religious practice—offering transcendence and healing—and a site of neoliberal self-fashioning, where youth poets cultivate alternative forms of capital. By inhabiting contradictory positions simultaneously, Ugandan youth use strategic ambiguity as method, creating spaces that enable survival and expression while omen reproducing the very constraints they seek to transcend.

Register by: 1/20/2026
When 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm on 23 January 2026
Building Pardee School of Global Studies, 154 Bay State Road
Room 2nd floor (Eilts Room)
Contact Email cura@bu.edu
Contact Organization Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs
Fees free
Open To public
Speakers Sarah Lewinger