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# WhatsApp Affordances Through an Intersectional Lens: Constructing and Rehearsing Citizenship in Western Kenya

Anna Colom

► To cite this version:

Anna Colom. WhatsApp Affordances Through an Intersectional Lens: Constructing and Rehearsing Citizenship in Western Kenya. 17th International Conference on Social Implications of Computers in Developing Countries (ICT4D), May 2022, Lima, Peru. pp.566-580, 10.1007/978-3-031-19429-0_34 hal-04601136

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# WhatsApp Affordances through an Intersectional Lens: Constructing and Rehearsing Citizenship in Western Kenya

Anna Colom

The Open University, UK

anna.colom@open.ac.uk

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3696-1463

**Abstract:** This paper draws on a digital ethnography with young activists in Western Kenya to explore how WhatsApp's affordances mediate citizenship. It applies an intersectional lens to highlight sites of oppression and invisibility. The paper makes two central arguments. Firstly, it finds that WhatsApp is not only important for participants because of its communicative and organisational affordances, but also for agentic and social affordances that relate to activists' sense of belonging and purpose, and the discursive affordances that enable the building of narratives, making it a space for constructing and rehearsing citizenship. Secondly, it finds that inequalities in meaningful online access hindered some participants from these spaces of belonging, interaction, and visibility. These inequalities intersect and risk amplifying existing sites of disadvantage, like those related to gender, class or location. An intersectional digital rights approach is needed in the design of communication strategies by activists or organisations in civic engagement processes.

**Keywords:** citizenship; WhatsApp; intersectionality; digital rights; instant messaging; affordances

## 1. Introduction

An expanding body of work from political, media and internet studies has documented the role of the internet, and in particular social media, in citizen engagement and political activism. Social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook have been found to enable the creation of alternative public spheres where new groups and agendas can visibilize and amplify counter-narratives and shape public discussion (Bosch 2017; Nyabola 2018).

Although less available to scrutiny, instant messaging apps, also called the Dark Social, are the most accessed type of online platform in many contexts, more so than Twitter or Facebook. In Kenya, WhatsApp is the favourite social platform among Internet users (Global Web Index 2020) and permeates all activities, including political mobilization and discourse (Omanga 2018).

This paper explores the role of instant messaging app WhatsApp in processes of civic engagement in Western Kenya. It takes an intersectional feminist approach to shed light on inequalities and sites of oppression and invisibility. It does so through a digital ethnography based around a group of young people engaged in a process of civic education and engagement in Busia county supported by the local civil society organization Siasa Place.

This paper is structured as follows. First, it sets out the context of the study within processes of citizen engagement and Internet use in Kenya. It then covers the theoretical framework used in the study, followed by the study's research approach. It then presents the analysis findings by discussing the WhatsApp affordances that mediate citizenship and how this mediation affects those without meaningful access to mobile internet and existing structural inequalities.

## 2. Citizen Engagement and Digital Technologies in Western Kenya: Case Study Context

This paper is based on a case study in Busia county, situated in Western Kenya and at the border with Uganda. Its overall research question is to understand how digital technologies, and in particular instant messaging, mediate civic engagement for young people. I used a multi-method digital ethnography approach that followed a network of young activists, online and offline, across the seven electoral constituencies of the county.

### 2.1 Enabling ‘active citizenship’
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Participants included a group of 18 to 35 years old supported by the youth-led civil society organisation Siasa Place, which enables spaces and civic education training for youth to engage in governance processes. Siasa Place identified a lack of knowledge on existing constitutional rights as well as a context in which young people felt dismissed and therefore discouraged from engaging. This sense of dismissal and lack of information was strongly echoed across participants' accounts.

Through a series of meetings and seminars, the group was given a space for discussion and learning on Kenya's system of devolved governance and the rights and mechanisms for political participation included in the country's 2010 constitution. This core group would in turn mobilise and share this information and skills with other peers in their communities.

The core group of activists would meet monthly or bi-monthly in Busia town to attend trainings facilitated by the organisation and discuss their plans for mobilising. In between meetings, they interacted more frequently through WhatsApp, which was the main digital technology used by the core group of participants to communicate between them and with peers in their communities with Internet access.

## 2.2. Internet and WhatsApp access

In 2021, Kenya was the country with the highest monthly use of WhatsApp (Bayhack 2021; Rollason 2021). WhatsApp is ubiquitous among Internet users in Kenya, taking the role of what Gómez-Cruz and Harindranath have called a “technology of life” (Gómez-Cruz and Harindranath 2020, 1), used for all sorts of personal and social interactions, including work and, as stated by Omanga, important in Kenya’s “political talk” (Omanga 2018, 2).

However, this apparent omnipresence contrasts with the still pervasive gaps in Internet access. In 2020, Internet penetration in Kenya was forecasted to be at approximately 40% (Global Web Index 2020; Hootsuite and We Are Social 2020). These statistics flatten unequal and intermittent access. According to the Kenya 2019 census, only 11.3% of the female rural population accessed the Internet in the last three months compared to 45.3% of the male urban population (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics 2019, 432). These inequalities were apparent also within the group of participants and throughout the research period. Not only did not everyone own a smartphone, but it also became clear that internet access is not binary (Roberts and Hernandez 2019) and that some participants were able to connect only intermittently because they could not afford data bundles, because they used someone else’s phone or because of network access, among other reasons.

# 3. Theoretical Framework

The study of technology in processes of social change has been criticised for either being overly deterministic about the role of technology or, by contrast, for overlooking it and turning it into a neutral artefact (Roberts 2017). The Theory of Affordance has been used by scholars in the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) field and beyond because it accounts for the materiality of a particular technology whilst acknowledging that what this materiality affords is contingent on the political and cultural context in which the technology is interpreted and used (Zheng and Yu 2016). This study therefore draws on this theory to explore the action possibilities that WhatsApp affords and how these relate to participants’ civic engagement.

In addition, a review of the ICT4D literature suggests the need for an agenda that focuses on the most disadvantaged and oppressed groups and for evidence on how ICTs contribute to specific and transformational outcomes (Walsham 2017; Zheng et al. 2018). Research in Kenya has found that the use of mobile phones helped women in rural locations “assert their agency”, create communities of support (Sanya 2013, 13) and engage in discussions on rights and the Constitution (Sanya and Odero 2017). It has also found that online platforms enabled the networking between and the visibilizing of narratives from otherwise marginalised groups in the public spheres (Mukhongo 2020; Nyabola 2018). Yet, this scholarship also warns that these same technologies can replicate or amplify existing structural inequalities (Kibere 2016; Nyabola 2018).

This study draws on feminist intersectional theory to allow for the exploration of sites of oppression and invisibility that single-axis analysis can overlook (Carastathis 2016; Crenshaw 1989). As stated by Yuval-Davis: “when we carry out intersectional analysis, we cannot homogenize the ways any political project or claimings affect people who are differentially located within the same boundaries of belonging” (Yuval-Davis 2011, 4).
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## 4. Research Approach

This study understands reality as constructed and situated in historic and relational dynamics of meaning-making based on power and language and therefore takes an interpretivist ontological approach. The research was based on a digital ethnography that encompassed both online and offline spaces and the connections between them (Hine 2017; Postill and Pink 2012). It included the following methods: face-to-face semi-structured interviews with 25 participants, participant offline observation, non-participant online observation in three WhatsApp groups, an online focus group discussion on WhatsApp (Colom 2021), and a fieldwork diary. Digital ethnography allowed the research to travel across offline and online fields and to explore the connections between the two; online interactions take place not in a vacuum but in relation to offline realities (Hine 2017; Postill and Pink 2012; Sumiala and Tikka 2020). The value of digital ethnography in acknowledging that participants interactions are “multi-modal”, “multi-sited” and “networked” (Hine 2017, 23) crystallised in many occasions during the research and analysis. For example, whilst observing participants attending an in-person public participation event on the county’s budget and development plan, I was also able to observe what and how the participants communicated with others in the WhatsApp group who were attending other simultaneous events in other parts of the county, as well as observe what narratives and reactions this created that related to their aspirations as citizens mobilized in civic engagement processes. Similarly, this approach helped me to observe first-hand how accounts during in-person interviews in relation to exclusion from the Internet manifested in participants’ online presence and the types of disadvantages this created or amplified across the online, offline, public, and private spheres.

The data was all entered in Nvivo and analysed using a thematic analysis approach. The intersectionality lens was embedded in the design of tools to account for a multi-layered understanding of citizenship (Pailey 2016; Yuval-Davis 1997) that encompassed intersecting positionings across the private and public spheres and across the community, county and state level. It was also embedded in the analysis approach by intentionally focusing on identifying sites of oppression, difference or resistance in the language and accounts of participants.

## 5. WhatsApp Affordances and citizenship

Affordances are action possibilities facilitated by the materiality of a technological artefact but contingent on the historical and social context in which they are interpreted. However, affordances can be conceptualized differently depending on the extent to which they focus on the functionalities of the technologies vis-a-vis their relational potential consequences. For example, both Roberts and Zheng and Yu distinguish the functional affordances of a technology from the collective actions they enable, a distinction that emphasises their relational and practical aspect (Roberts 2017; Zheng and Yu 2016).

The affordances identified and covered in this section result from the analysis of the accounts from participants in relation to the role of WhatsApp in their civic engagement processes and are largely functional. Understanding the functional affordances on instant messaging as a dark social is relevant as distinct from those that more open social media platforms have been found to offer. However, these functional affordances can be grouped into five categories based on their relational use and the transformational potential in the context of this study: communicative, organizational, social, agentic, and discursive. A functional affordance can relate to more than one of these categories and may only become actualized in combination with other functional affordances as found by Sæbø, Federici and Braccini when exploring how social media enabled specific collective action processes (Sæbø, Federici, and Braccini 2020, 714).

The functional affordances are briefly discussed as a list in this section before then unpacking their transformational potential for citizenship.

### Immediacy

The labelling of apps like WhatsApp as *instant messaging* applications conveys an obvious but important affordance identified in participants’ accounts, who referred to its use making it quick and easy to receive and send information, including the ability to know when someone is active or when they were last online. This was important for participants to share information, keep up-to-date, and mobilise as part of their activism. For example, a participant referred to the value of communicating via WhatsApp to organize meetings with less notice and planning: "You know,
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like [in a] church meeting, we'll have to tell people (...) you tell them before, even 2 days or one week... But if you use WhatsApp, a person will get information immediately (Interview P6)".

## Scale

Related to the descriptions of immediacy was the ability to communicate with more than one person at the same time no matter where they were. Participants referred to the benefits of this affordance compared not only to offline communication but also to texting or calling, which was more expensive, as this participant said: "... actually, it's been easier to communicate than when you communicate manually, or, rather when you just use calls and SMS. It has been easy because we are together and everyone can speak... is a free space in that, anyone, you can type at the same time, you can deliver messages, a message, as the other person delivers. But, for SMS, the message will go from one person to the next and then, sometimes you can feel that maybe, if they send you the message, you don't have maybe credit to reply, so it's easier. (...) And it's faster (Interview P19)".

## Multimodality

The literature often mentions this as a characteristic of instant messaging apps like WhatsApp (Baxter 2018; Treré 2020). It refers to the possibility to share not only text but also photos, audio-visual content, or other files. A participant during the focus group wrote: "*Its even easier to give evidence using Action photos, videos and statistical data from genuine source even if its a heavy document it can be uploaded easily as opposed to carry bags of papers to the meeting where you may not get a chance to contribute. so a person who is not in WhatsApp misses a lot.*"<fnref n="1" /> It was common for participants to share photos of themselves or group members speaking in public or delivering petitions to governments officials as well as to share PDFs of official documents, such as county budgets or the Constitution.

## Information visibility

In instant messaging apps like WhatsApp, information and conversations remain in the platform's interface and are visible to other members of the group as shared by the senders and unless deleted. Content can also be forwarded and shared with other contacts or in other groups.

This affordance is closely related to scale and multimodality and it also relates to the possibilities for building spaces and narratives where young people can find their own voice and make connections, as it will be later discussed. For example, participants expressed the value of sharing with others in their contacts pictures of themselves doing work for the community: "*Yeah it's made a difference because you call [reach] people very fast. They know also very fast. For example, when we were in Busia at [venue] after doing that [meeting] then I post. People, many people knew very fast! Hey, they said, wow, you have done a good job.* (Interview P18)".

## Group relevance

WhatsApp was seen by participants as a space for more intimate conversations with relevant groups of people close their personal or social spaces and interests, especially when compared to other social media platforms. For example, a participant said: "*through WhatsApp, you just share with the people that you want but with Facebook everyone will just see it on their wall (Interview P17)*" and another participant referred to WhatsApp being for interacting with "*those people who think the same idea (...) yeah come up with a group and people of the same, the likeminded people, they join you in that WhatsApp group*" (Interview P9).

Participants referred to interactions being more intimate and information being more targeted to relevant people. In the context of activism, this provides a specific discursive potential resulting from a combination of traits from personal exchanges with those from public group discussions (Milan and Barbosa, 2020: 8).

<footnote n="1">¹ Quotes from the WhatsApp focus group are included as typed by participants unless typos need to be corrected for intelligibility.</footnote>
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This resonates with literature that finds WhatsApp to relate to “a stronger sense of belonging rather than network-based Facebook” (Milan and Barbosa 2020, 8) or to “collective identity [and] internal solidarity” (Treré 2020, 1).

## Perceived privacy

Participants did not refer to privacy in relation to its end-to-end encryption but in relation to the less open nature of the space, which felt less exposed when compared to other social media platforms: “I cannot say that there isn't anything I don't like in WhatsApp because I feel it has a little bit of privacy (Interview P14).” Another participant also referred to this sense of safety: “WhatsApp is also a bit safe in terms of... it's not... you can't track it so easily (Interview P25).”

Privacy was however relative, hence the labelling of the affordance as ‘perceived’. During the break of one of the events I attended, a few participants gathered around a mobile phone to watch the video of a Citizen TV news piece in which the National Cohesion and Integration Commission (NCIC) of Kenya was warning WhatsApp group administrators against hate speech. This observation contrasts with the accounts of participants on privacy, a difference enabled by the digital ethnography approach of the study.

Although WhatsApp was referred to in the research as a more private safe space, a participant mentioned having left WhatsApp for a period of time after being harassed for their activism, which highlights the contingency of affordances in relation to people's positionalities and experiences. Overall, however, there was a sense of control in the groups that I observed of who was allowed to be a member and this explains this perception of WhatsApp as a private space when compared to more open social media platforms where the sense of privacy is not afforded or requires a more complex use of the platforms' settings.

The contingency of this affordance is also reflected in the lack of references in participants' accounts to the ways in which Big Tech corporations like WhatsApp's company, Meta, use data. An understanding of privacy based on the storage and use of Big Data for micro-profiling and in governance processes would contradict this affordance, which is beyond the scope of this paper but highlights the need for more information among activists on digital citizenship and data justice (Dencik, Hintz, and Cable 2016).

## Perceived freedom

Participants referred to WhatsApp as a free space, where they could share their views without being dismissed: “Everyone has the liberty to air their views and thoughts with no fear resulting from a one on one engagement. (WhatsApp FGD)”.

Treré refers to the “digital comfort spaces” enabled by WhatsApp interactions (Treré 2015, 911) and a systematic review on the use of WhatsApp for political and civic engagement found people valued the “informal and ‘de-politicised’ conversations” (Pang and Woo 2020, 1). Online spaces of interaction more broadly have also been found to offer a disembodied experience that affords a sense of freedom (Ndlela and Mulwo 2017), including my own perceptions of the extent to which women participated in WhatsApp discussions when compared to offline meetings (Colom 2021).

## Diffuse hierarchies

Some participants referred to WhatsApp as a “flat” space: “with WhatsApp someone can ask me a question in a WhatsApp group, and I must answer you, I must, because it's in an open forum. And so it allows for people to... to feel that they have the same voice. On WhatsApp... it's a flat....it's a flat playing field (Interview P23).” This affordance has also been referred to in the literature on WhatsApp as a tool for activism. For example, Bowes-Catton et al, argue that voices in the authors' activist WhatsApp group were equally treated (Bowes-Catton et al. 2020, 384) and Milan and Barbosa refer to the “equal footing” of WhatsApp conversations (Milan and Barbosa 2020, 6) characterised by “diffuse leadership and experimental pluralism” (2020: 9).

## Deliberation

Participants talked about WhatsApp as a space where they can have discussions and make decisions: “We share some issues, maybe we see the problems that people come up with... we try to get people ask maybe questions concerning what happens [to] them so we decide to discuss there in the group (...) to see maybe if we can make solutions
(Interview P5)". They also referred to the value of WhatsApp as a space for discussion in comparison to Facebook, which they saw as a place for accessing or sharing news.

These discussions often combine synchronous and asynchronous interactions, allowing participants to reply in their own time, and it was not uncommon for participants to take part in synchronous WhatsApp meetings: "*WhatsApping, we conduct meetings. Because engagement sometimes is distant we call each other and say when it reaches at nine we can have a meeting, everybody will need to be on* (Interview P11)".

However, I observed that moments of deliberation tended to be short-lived or left for offline meetings, which I partly related to the lack of an obvious leadership or facilitation, linked to the affordance of diffuse hierarchies. The deliberative potential of WhatsApp in Kenya in the context of political participation has been documented by Omanga in his study of the *Nakuru Analysts* WhatsApp group. Omanga argues that the group acted as a digital public but also highlights the importance of facilitation and the role of the convenor: "Digital publics do not simply emerge, but are a complex product of specific agencies, cumulative social capital and voice within a digital space" (Omanga 2018, 13).

Yet, this possibility for deliberation in WhatsApp was referred to and valued by participants with online access, and seen also as a way to meaningfully engage in decision-making processes. For example, a participant talked about the value of a WhatsApp group to bring young people and political representatives together and continue constructive conversations initiated and convened offline; and a political representative mentioned during an event I observed having created a WhatsApp group to directly engage in discussions with young people.

## 6. Relational affordances for constructing and rehearsing citizenship

The functional affordances discussed interact with each other and are processed in the context of a civic engagement and civic education programme facilitated by a civil society organisation that included offline meetings. This resonates with Sæbø, Federici and Braccini's suggestions that affordances act in combination and that studying the online platform alone is not enough to understand how they become transformational action possibilities (Sæbø, Federici, and Braccini 2020, 722).

For example, some of the functional affordances, like scale, multimodality and information visibility, are typical of social media platforms but offer relational affordances specific to instant messaging when combined with affordances such as group relevance, perceived privacy or perceived freedom. In turn, affordances like group relevance or the information visibility are closely connected to antecedents that took place offline, like face-to-face meetings that helped to establish bonds and membership boundaries, or actions taken in in-person public participation meetings that then could be framed, visibilized, and amplified in WhatsApp in multi-modal ways among trusted relevant groups.

Considering these contingencies, the functional affordances can be categorised as follows based on their relational transformational potential:

* Communicative. These are affordances often mentioned when discussing WhatsApp (Treré 2020) and are those that can change “communicative practices or habits” (Schrock 2015, 1232), such as immediacy and multimodality. These made WhatsApp a convenient space for accessing information for those who were online to the extent that it was common in the groups to communicate not only in relation to their civic engagement plans but also to share information related to jobs, grants, and funding opportunities.

* Organizational. Alongside changing communicative practices, the affordances of popular ubiquitous instant messaging apps like WhatsApp can support collective organizing. For example, group relevance, scale, immediacy, and diffuse hierarchies helped participants discuss, question, or agree on arrangements for collective action, such as attending public participation meetings. WhatsApp has indeed been discussed in the literature as a “robust organizational device” (Treré 2020, 1).

* Social. These are affordances that influence the way individuals and groups interact and affiliate. For example, affordances like perceived privacy or group relevance enabled participants ways for affiliation and interaction that are different from other online spaces because related more directly to their interests and aspirations and felt safer than more open social media platforms. This also resonates with Raemdonck and Pierson's taxonomy of social network platform affordances which finds that “closed many-to-many interactions” fosters social identity and norm-building (Van Raemdonck and Pierson 2021).
* Agentic. These refer to affordances that can enable the voice and agency of an individual or group. For example, according to participants accounts, the affordances of perceived freedom, perceived privacy, or diffuse hierarchies, enabled participants to feel freer in expressing their views without concerns of being dismissed when compared to public spaces.

* Discursive. Affordances such as group relevance, information visibility, multimodality or scale, can enable the construction and amplification of narratives through "framing", which Sebø, Federici and Braccini define as "construction of shared meanings and building of a collective understanding" (Sæbø, Federici, and Braccini 2020, 704).

The discursive potential, especially when associated to the affordance of scale, is typical of social media platforms more broadly. Nyabola, for example, has argued that the openness and networked characteristics of Twitter are allowing counter-narratives to emerge and shape Kenya's public debate (Nyabola 2018). In "open many-to-many interactions", however, participants have less influence in establishing norms other than commenting (Van Raemdonck and Pierson 2021, 6). By contrast, this discursive potential, takes a different form in instant messaging apps like WhatsApp due to other affordances that can make it a more private, intimate, and less hierarchical space.

Information visibility can also help to build a sense of purpose, group solidarity and respect, particularly important in a context where young people and women feel dismissed, because of the reasons already alluded to in relation to the affordances of multimodality and scale. For example, during a training event, and in relation to photos that had been shared on WhatsApp showing members speaking up in a public discussion, I observed the training facilitator saying to a participant: "I saw you in WhatsApp" and, to another one, "I saw you standing". Similar interactions took place in the WhatsApp groups in other instances. In the following example, the WhatsApp interaction takes place after a participant shared a number of photos of a petition with a list of signatures being delivered to the administrator of a local ward:

13:21: Great work (...)

14:02: 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 Leading from the Front 👏 (...)

Chairman

15:00 : Good work (...)

15:07: Hapo ni sawa bro! [This is good bro!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ)

This information visibility also helped with mobilising: "You know, if we use WhatsApp, I have learnt that many people they have seen our views and they've known their rights and some they have been coming in our group asking questions, getting them I can see it is helping others (Interview P6)."

In the context of this study, then, the discursive potential of a dark social like WhatsApp is associated with the organizational and social potential or possibility to organise, build a collective identity, and amplify discourses that can enable a sense of belonging, purpose, and collective action. For example, some participants shared a view that Twitter was an important avenue for youth to influence the public debate but added that, by contrast, WhatsApp helped them get organised: "But, also, WhatsApp, it's used to organise us a lot. We've managed to even organise a demonstration on WhatsApp (...) So that's how I see technology changing how we are organised, and even for me, it's much easier for me to keep tabs of what's happening in the country, I would say, without having to delay in terms of communication and its immediate effect (Interview P23)".

Affordances can also be in tension with each other. For example, the affordance for deliberation might sometimes be in tension with other affordances, such as the affordance of diffuse leadership and perceived freedom which meant that discussions were sometimes messy without a clear lead to facilitate discussions towards a clear conclusion. Similarly, participants would sometimes be asked by other members not to share content that was not relevant to the group's organisational purpose (civic engagement), yet this contradicted the social affordance of the group as a space of belonging where young people and women could be free to be themselves. I interpreted this messiness, however, as part of the process of constructing and rehearsing citizenship. The WhatsApp groups provided an alternative avenue where young citizens with online access had a space of belonging and shared interests where their voice could be heard, relationships built and maintained, and narratives and claims on citizenship constructed, practiced and amplified inwards, similar to Treré's reference to WhatsApp as a space for "backstage" activism (Treré 2020).
7. Seeing affordances through an intersectional lens

A focus on the transformational potential of these affordances without a nuanced understanding of structural inequalities risks amplifying oppressive and exclusionary dynamics. An intersectional lens requires looking not only at the axis and consequences of exclusion from online use but also how online use interacts with existing structural inequalities.

In relation to exclusion from meaningful online access, some participants in the WhatsApp groups I observed would drop in and out due to intermittent access to smartphones and data and there were compounding reasons for this that were not solved by simply providing an allowance to buy data bundles. A participant, for example, was offline for up to seven months during the digital ethnography because her phone broke and could not afford to repair it. Others used their husbands' phones to check in or catch up with the group communication from time to time. Some participants mentioned having to prioritise school fees or supporting others in their community over getting a smartphone. Some lived in areas with limited electricity or network access and had limited time and resources to travel to a place to access wi-fi. This intermittency, and the importance of offline communication for them, manifested also in the conversations in WhatsApp groups, where in various instances some members reminded others of texting or calling those offline:

“20:14 -: 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 Good job chair

20:15 -: 👏 👏 👏 kindly madam chair text, there are some members who have gone analog..”
(Observation - WhatsApp Group 1)

A number of axes of exclusion in relation to access and use of Internet were identified in the analysis, including class or socio-economic background, location, education level, gender, infrastructure, (digital) literacy, language, and (dis)ability. These intersected: a participant who identified as a young woman, located in a rural village with secondary education, with care responsibilities and intermittently working in the informal sector interacted with WhatsApp and its affordances differently compared to a young woman based in the capital town with a higher education degree, a more stable job and more limited care responsibilities.

Intermittent access to WhatsApp meant some participants could not benefit from the affordance of immediacy and this had an impact on the opportunities for some participants to receive information related to civic engagement plans, jobs, and opportunities for interaction and affiliation: “[In WhatsApp] *You just follow up what's going on every sub-county but now even I can't even know what's going on because I am not in access of WhatsApp. Even like somebody is telling me, he can say, tomorrow I am going to somewhere, if you are willing you come and join me, you are going to visit a certain place, but it is on WhatsApp so (...) we add on (...) when we go.* [Interview P17]”.

Similarly, relying on the WhatsApp affordance of multi-modality excluded some participants and their potential for transformational impact in the community. For example, some participants mentioned the need for hard copies of the constitution to share with peers in their communities as part of their mobilising. Yet, this was not always taken into account by trainers. After copies of the constitution were requested during a training I observed, a civic education facilitator said to a participant that a soft copy would be shared instead and added “Technology makes things easier, doesn’t it?”, yet the participant did not have a working smartphone. Others had access to WhatsApp but could not afford opening data-hungry files, like videos.

Even for those who could be online, the social affordances of using WhatsApp interacted with structural gendered oppressive dynamics. For example, some women talked about how access to a smartphone and the social interaction it afforded upset power dynamics and resulted in enduring violence from their husbands: “*Ah it makes us really beaten there at night because of the phones*”.

An intersectional lens helps to understand inequalities not only in relation to digital divisions but also in relation to the structural inequalities and power relations in which people are positioned (Zheng and Walsham 2021). In this study, the intersectional lens and digital ethnography helped to explore interactions across different socio-demographic positionings and across the private and public spheres and how the structural inequalities behind these positionings limited or changed the relational and transformational affordances either because of limited access to functional affordances or because the way these interacted with existing structural inequalities.
## 8. Conclusions

This paper has presented a list of functional affordances related to WhatsApp in the context of a civic engagement programme in Western Kenya and their relational and transformational impact in processes of citizen engagement. It concludes with two main arguments.

Firstly, the use of WhatsApp among young activists in Western Kenya needs to be understood not only in the context of its more obvious communicative and organisational affordances that helped young people communicate and plan more easily. Rather, its social, agentic, and discursive affordances helped participants find a safe space where they belonged, their views mattered and where they could share, build, and amplify narratives. This helped participants construct and rehearse citizenship inwards, building a sense of agency and purpose that interacted with more outward acts of citizenship, such as taking part in public participation meetings or signing petitions.

Secondly, these affordances could not be enjoyed by everyone and their transformational impact was limited for those who did not have meaningful access to the Internet. Even for those who had online access, the affordances interacted with structural inequalities and power relations. A reliance on WhatsApp in civic engagement programmes and activist can amplify existing inequalities related to gender, class, or location among others. The ubiquity of WhatsApp in the social, work, and political life of Kenyan internet users can overlook sites of oppression and disadvantage.

Initiatives supporting processes of civic engagement or citizen activism should take a digital rights and justice approach, mindful of intersecting sites of oppression, when considering the use of online spaces for interaction, even when these spaces appear to be as ubiquitous and omnipresent as WhatsApp.

## 9. Acknowledgements

The author is thankful to the members of the Kenyan organisation Siasa Place for the support and access to youth networks in Western Kenya and to all the research participants who took part. The author also thanks Prof. Rose Capdevila, Dr. Charlotte Cross and Dr. Agnes Czajka for overall support in the research as the supervisory team.

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