Cite as:
Okune, Angela. 2019. "The British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) Archives." In Scholarly Memory in Nairobi, Kenya: Care for Sites and Sources, created by Angela Okune, Trevas Matathia and Syokau Mutonga. In Innovating STS Digital Exhibit, curated by Aalok Khandekar and Kim Fortun. Society for Social Studies of Science. August. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/british-institute-eastern-africa-biea-archives/essay
The British Institute in Eastern Africa (BIEA) has been active since 1960 and has its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. BIEA exists to promote research in all the disciplines in the humanities and social sciences within the wider region of eastern Africa. Located in leafy Kileleshwa, BIEA contains original archival materials including conference papers from the 1960s under the University of East Africa; original fieldnotes from ethnographic studies conducted in the 1990s and transcribed interview data from the 1990s. The Institute is sponsored by the British Academy.
This essay is part of a broader essay on Scholarly Memory in Nairobi, Kenya which includes McMillan Library, Kenya National Museum Library, British Institute in Eastern Africa Archives, Kenya National Archives, and PALIAct Ukombozi Library.
All Innovating STS exhibits are oriented by nine shared questions in order to generate comparative insight. These are:
ARTICULATION: What STS innovations (of theory, methodology, pedagogy...Read more
Furthering its theme, Innovations, Interruptions, Regenerations , the 2019 annual 4S meeting in New Orleans will include a special exhibit, Innovating STS , that showcases innovations ...Read more
This section highlights important perspectives raised by those engaging with the creation and maintainance of spaces and materials of archives and libraries.
I think archives and libraries are unique and special because they serve as a meeting point for knowledge seekers. People who may have never met under any other...Read more
This section foregrounds artifacts created about this site either by the founders, key actors involved in the site, or others. It also includes materials that are interlinked or related such as descriptions about the digital repository third-party organizations or relevant materials found in the spaces themselves.
AO: This artifact gives an appreciation for the types of materials held by BIEA that have been archived through Aluka/JSTOR. According to this overview written up by the British Archaeology Data Service...Read more
AO: This report documents a two-day workshop held on 13th and 14th of October 2016 for scholars and archivists working in and on Africa. The workshop was held in Lusaka, Zambia on the theme of “Endangered and Post-Colonial Archives in Eastern and Southern Africa.” The workshop was coorganised by...Read more
AO: While not explicitly on BIEA or Kenya, this article is important to better understand the context out of which Aluka was created. Aluka is the digital library which houses the (partially) digitized collections of BIEA. Founded in 2003, in June 2008, the Ithaka...Read more
AO: This artifact presents the information as displayed on the BIEA website (as of July 19, 2019) as relates to the BIEA library. The library hours on Saturday have been extended to 2 PM.Read more