Kai Herzog - global dis:connect

the centre
- The Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, funded by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, investigates globalisation as a dynamic process shaped by the interplay of integration, disconnection, and disintegration. Our work focuses on understanding how connections emerge, fail, or remain absent, in both historical and contemporary contexts.
- the centre
research
- global dis:connect approaches globalisation through the lens of dis:connectivity, focusing on absences, detours and interruptions that shape historical and contemporary global processes. Rather than assuming linear integration, we examine the gaps, delays and disruptions that make globalisation uneven and socially significant.
  
  Our research is structured around six key areas – absences, detours, interruptions, laboratories, cultural infrastructures and temporalities – which foster interdisciplinary dialogue without normative assumptions or claims of completeness.
- research
fellows
- The cornerstone of global dis:connect is the fellowship programme, in which approximately ten scholars come to Munich each year. They research dis:connectivity on site and in close contact with the directors and their peers. Fellows also have the opportunity to host workshops on the topics of their research.
- fellows
events
- Here is where to find out about coming events, new publications, press releases and other news from global dis:connect.
- events
outreach
- At global dis:connect, research is meant to circulate. Through publications, media formats and artist events, we connect academic research with public debate and artistic perspectives.
- outreach
  - gd:c blog
  - static
  - podcast
- global dis:connect publishes innovative interventions on dis:connectivity across a range of media, from the blog, which covers the latest news, research and art at gd:c, to static, a periodical containing the best work from within and beyond global dis:connect, in addition to traditional scholarly formats.
- publications
  - aperiodic open-access publications

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Kai Herzog

Kai is a historian and postdoctoral research fellow at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg, specialising in Africa’s colonial and imperial history and history of decolonisation. Regionally, his work focuses on Southern and Eastern Africa. Thematically, it engages with issues of technology, knowledge and violence within both regional and global frameworks. His dissertation discussed how everyday violence and forms of not-knowing shaped colonial rule in trans-imperial settings, while his current research looks at automobilty and technical knowledge in the context of motor racing.

Kai joined global dis:connect funded by the Munich Centre for Global History.

Technical divergence: the Safari Rally, automotive development, and decolonisation in East Africa (1950s-2000s)

The project engages with automotive engineering as site of decolonisation struggles, using the Safari Rally (1953-2002) as a case study. An endurance race deemed the ultimate test for man and machine, the Safari Rally made post-colonial East Africa a hub of automotive development. While car manufacturers used the race for testing, Africans provided infrastructure, know-how and labour. But racing regulations and manufacturers’ marketing soon rendered collaboration restrictive. The Safari rally is thus a laboratory of dis:connectivity, producing both technological entanglement and marginalisation.

Have a look at Kai’s research poster about his project.

Contact

Click HERE to mail Kai and HERE for a list of his publications.