Dina Adhiambo Ligaga

In this project, I argue that reading the 'public script' in Kenya which navigates through various forms of popular media enables us to interrogate how dominant ideologies are circulated within discourses of everyday life. The project will offer a critical analysis of a series of popular texts-defined loosely through their access to and circulation of themes drawn from everyday life-and demonstrate how in fact, these texts are involved in the function of trying to normalize extremely problematic dominant ideologies. Specifically focusing on how issues of nationalism, ethnicity, gender and sexuality are persistently constructed in the selected texts, I hope to show how Kenyan popular media participate in embedding certain notions of being by circulating them as preferred readings. I hope to offer a more nuanced reading of how popular media, popular culture and debates around ideology collide in the space of the everyday.