Bodies that work: infrastructured labour of Africa’s infrastructure rush

Material infrastructures reveal little about labour that produced them. While there has been a growing interest in the relationship between infrastructure and work, construction workers and their embodied experiences remain relatively unexplored. The article mobilises infrastructured labour as an analytical lens to examine the embodied labour of infrastructure projects in Africa’s infrastructure rush. Using the case of the Nairobi Expressway and other infrastructures in Nairobi, it is argued that labour of infrastructure is mobilised, disciplined and abstracted through intertwined political and economic processes which transform the productive body into an infrastructure of future-making, highlighting the problematic inclusion of vulnerable workers into the global economy.