Keith Breckenridge

Keith Breckenridge is a Professor and Deputy Director at WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He specializes in the cultural/economic history of South Africa, biometric identification systems, and financialisation technologies across Africa.

• Biometric State (Cambridge, 2014)
• Co-editor of Registration and Recognition (OUP, 2012)

Key research themes: Historical entanglement of state surveillance with biometric capitalism, digitization of African economies, and critical analysis of civil registration systems. His work examines Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa where commercial banks are building centralized biometric databases for credit scoring.

Recent publications analyze biometric anti-bank technologies, silicosis surveillance in mining history, and the politics of parallel digital archives.

Projects: Biometric Capitalism (ongoing) and Curriculum Development (completed) in Science & Technology Studies.