Unravelling the “Ethos of Change” in African Urban Margins: Institutions, Stigmas, Experiences

Abstract How are desirable futures conceived in the African urban margins? What trajectories do individuals use to get there? And who decides what constitutes a desirable future? This special issue proposes the “ethos of change” as an analytical concept to better understand how urban margins in Africa shape specific lives and, in particular, aspirations for change. “Ethos of change” is a broad set of embodied norms, (self) narratives, and routine practices driving the trajectory of personal change to escape an initial self and environment that are both internalised as unsatisfactory and dishonourable. Based on case studies from Kenya, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso, analyses in this special issue focus on how individuals construct their experiences of violence, (de)radicalisation, displacement, and the intervention of large-scale state programmes. This introductory article offers an institutional framework for comprehending the other articles that constitute the special issue and summarises their contents. Additionally, it assesses how the special issue’s contribution advances our understanding of how to reconsider Africa’s urban margins as spaces for the production of difference, where individuals appropriate the idea of change with its modalities amidst multiple facets of stigma and symbolic violence in African urban margins.