Comparative Literature, Summer 2026

This project, The Averted Gaze: Photography and the Politics of Visibility in Kenya, investigates how Kenyan photographic practices mobilize the refusal, or disruption of looking as a political and epistemological strategy. Studies of photography have largely treated visibility in binary terms: either as a form of empowerment and recognition or as a mechanism of domination and surveillance. In both cases, visibility is assumed to be the primary condition of political and cultural legibility. This project challenges that assumption by arguing that photographic practices in Kenya reveal a third position: visibility can be strategically refused or rendered unstable through what I call the averted gaze.