Cryptopolitics

Hidden information, double meanings, double-crossing, and the constant processes of encoding and decoding messages have always been important techniques in negotiating social and political power dynamics. Yet these tools, "cryptopolitics," are transformed when used within digital media. Focusing on African societies, Cryptopolitics brings together empirically grounded studies of digital media toconsider public culture, sociality, and power in all its forms, illustrating the analytical potential of cryptopolitics to elucidate intimate relationships, political protest, and economic strategies in the digital age.

Katrien Pype is a cultural anthropologist and works at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven University. She is mainly interested in media, popular culture, and technology. Her monograph, The Making of the Pentecostal Melodrama. Religion, Media, and Gender in Kinshasa was published with Berghahn Books (2012). Pype also co-edited, with Jaco Hoffman, Aging in Sub-Saharan Africa: Spaces and Practices of Care (2016, Policy Press).