Focus of the visit:
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Biometric technologies in global information governance
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Mechanisms for collaboration between Cambridge, Wits, and intra-African research hubs
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Capacity development for AI and data science in Africa
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Policy questions in knowledge infrastructure: private, public and open data
About Professor Keith Breckenridge's
Professor Keith Breckenridge is Deputy Director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser), and one of the editors of the Journal of African History. He writes about the cultural and economic history of South Africa, particularly the gold mining industry, the state and the development of information systems. He studied at Wits and Johns Hopkins and completed his PhD at Northwestern in 1995.
His book Biometric State: the Global Politics of Identification and Surveillance in South Africa, 1850 to the Present (Cambridge, 2014) shows how the South African obsession with Francis Galton's universal fingerprint identity registration served as a 20th century incubator for the current systems of biometric citizenship being developed throughout the South. In 2017 the book was awarded the inaugural Humanities Book Award by the Academy of Science of South Africa.
With Simon Szreter (University of Cambridge), he edited Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (OUP and the British Academy, 2012), a volume of essays which examines the workings and failures of civil registration in twenty different regions and periods around the world.
About Professor Keith Breckenridge's visit to Cambridge
Please contact the Programme Manager (Sara Serradas Duarte, coordinator@gci.cam.ac.uk) if you would like to meet Professor Keith Breckenridge during his visit to Cambridge.
This edition of the GCC Global Visitor's Programme is funded by a EPSRC GCRF Institutional Award.
