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

CURA announces the spring 2026 colloquium schedule. This year-long conversation brings together an interdisciplinary community of scholars of culture, religion, and world affairs. Please register below for the session(s) you plan to attend. The January23 workshop will feature a paper by Sarah Lewinger, PhD Candidate, Department of Anthropology, Boston University.

Please note that 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.