CURRENT RESEARCH

Working within the FamilEA project, under the supervision of Yvan Droz, I study how (un)married mothers in Nairobi ‘do’ family with the relatives of their (former) partners with whom they have had children. This research will investigate (a) how relationships of  (un)married mothers with their relatives-in-law are initially configured upon marriage, and (b) how those relationships change over the course of the women’s lives.

PREVIOUS RESEARCH

My PhD research was on the local moralities or social expectations of what it is to be a respectable woman in Nairobi and how middle-class divorced women in my study negotiated their divorce status and changes resulting from the divorce, to achieve or maintain respectability. 

This study showed that local moralities on respectable womanhood are heterogenous and shift over time. Applying Zigon’s theory of moral breakdown, I also showed the ways that my interlocutors found themselves ‘free’ to creatively develop ways to be respectable as middle-class divorced women and mothers. By negotiating a respectable divorced womanhood and motherhood, my interlocutors not only challenged the norms, but also established alternative ways of being respectable women in their communities.

I collected data between 2020 and 2021 through in-depth online and in-person interviews with divorced women, physical ethnography in Nairobi, and digital ethnography on Kenyan social media.
Thesis title: Finding respectability: the lived experiences of middle class divorced women in Nairobi.

PUBLICATIONS

Baral, Anna, Valérie Golaz, Norah Kiereri, and Nanna Schneidermann. “Marriage as a Connector: A Conversation about Spatial and Temporal Scales of Partnership and Self-Accomplishment in Kenya and Uganda.” Les Cahiers d’Afrique de LEst, no. 56 (December 6, 2021).

Kiereri, Norah. “4. Who Do the Dead Belong to? Considering the (In)Visibility of Death as an Outsider in France.” In Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe, edited by Olga Burlyuk and Ladan Rahbari, 1st ed., 33–42. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023.

Kiereri, Norah. “Keeping Secrets: The Lived Experiences of Middle-Class Divorced Women in Nairobi.” In Self-Accomplishment and Local Moralities in East Africa, edited by SALMEA Project editorial team. To be published in Africae, 2024/5.