Coronavirus containment: communal future-making and the logics of containment in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya

Abstract Anthropological literature on future-making has highlighted the diversity of practices migrants’ can enact to realise their possible future or future-orientated projects. While such an approach has been instrumental in thinking about how futures can be collectively enacted, less interest has been given to how they might correspond to containment logics. This paper examines the collectivist forms of future-making practices and how they correspond to or resist containment logics. By tracing the life history of Lam a South Sudanese refugee, the paper explores the different practices of future-making they employ prior to and during the coronavirus pandemic. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research in Kakuma Refugee Camp Kenya and utilizing online ethnographic methods during the coronavirus pandemic, I demonstrate how combining research methods helped expose the multiple coexisting logics of containment active in Kakuma Refugee Camp. Doing so, this paper contributes to debates on future-making by illustrating its collectivist formations practiced with networks of kin and friends or used to imagine wider national futures of a state. Moreover, the paper outlines how humanitarian and state actors who enforced containment draw upon different power-inflected logics to guide their practices and relations with people on the move.