In his work on the documentary Shadow scientists Patricia Kingori visited Kenya to meet academic ghostwriters.Photo: Anna Patarakina
Four years ago, at just 28 years old, Patricia Kingori became one of the youngest women and youngest black person to hold a professorship at Oxford University in the UK. As a sociologist, her research focuses on understanding, studying, and documenting different forms of ethics and power in health care, medicine, and science.
Her latest project Shadow Scientists— 138-minute documentary directed by Eloise King, executive produced — 12 years a slave directed by Steve McQueen. He explores a hidden multi-billion dollar industry: contract fraud. Kingori traces how students in wealthy, industrialized countries in the global North hand off coursework to “shadow scholars” in Nairobi. An estimated 40,000 highly educated but underemployed young people write everything from undergraduate essays to master's and doctoral dissertations, often producing multiple essays each day with tight deadlines. Kenya, where Kingori did her PhD until political unrest forced her and her family to leave the country in 2007, is the center of this global market. Surveys show that more than 70% of the company's online freelancers do “writing and translation,” which Kingori discovered is a proxy for writing fake essays.
This is not a new phenomenon: according to estimates published in 2018, at least one in seven graduates worldwide used such services.1. The governments of the UK, Ireland and Australia, as well as some US states and India, have taken steps to ban advertisements for commercial essay mills. But despite such steps, demand continues to grow. Kingori's film explores this issue by addressing the authors themselves.
In the documentary, Kingori also talks about her personal experience of someone else taking responsibility for her work. In sharing her story, she acknowledges that Kenya's ghost writers are just a small part of “a much larger, systemic problem about the value of ideas, the value of people, where knowledge comes from, who is invited into space and who is excluded.”
What was your path into academia?
I grew up as a teenager in a single-parent household in west London, after moving around a lot when I was younger, and was always very interested in how the world worked. I came across sociology and liked it because it takes the ordinary and shows how extraordinary it really is, holding up a mirror to us as a society.
I completed my BA and MA at Royal Holloway, University of London. The latter practiced medical sociology, studying how social factors shape health and illness. I then worked as a research assistant for several years before completing my PhD.
Towards the end of my PhD, I met Michael Parker, director of the Ethox Center for Bioethics at the University of Oxford, at a conference. He was extremely supportive and encouraged me to stay in academia at a time when I was ready to leave.
How did you become interested in the work of shadow scientists in Kenya?
In 2019, I attended a public meeting at the Oxford Internet Institute, a multidisciplinary department dedicated to the study of digital technologies. The topic was the iLabour project, which looks at how people use the Internet for work. Kenya was listed as a “writing and translation” hotspot, which turned out to be a euphemism for the fake essay industry. I'm of Kenyan descent, and at the time I was working on fakes and fabrications—my research into data fabrication in clinical trials sparked an interest in fakes in general—so I was intrigued. The Online Labor Index, an economic indicator calculated by the Oxford Internet Institute, contained a lot of numbers but little information about the people behind them.
Was it difficult to get shadow scientists to talk to you?
Not at all. They were hungry for the bit. They wanted the world to know that they exist because they take pride in their work, even if it's uncredited. Many said they enjoyed seeing their work used in actual dissertations and articles (often for high-profile institutions), even under someone else's name. The challenge was not to persuade them to speak up, but to decide whose stories to include.
What was the biggest surprise for you from this work?
How power makes some people invisible, and how long it lasts. During our research, we met Anne Manuel, former librarian at Somerville College, Oxford University. She recalled an oral history about Patricia Outram, a Somerville student in the 1950s who is now 102 years old. Outram's dissertation on Blitt was written in 1959 and published under her supervisor's name in a scientific journal, but in 2023 Somerville College was able to return it to her under her own name. Shadow scholars have always existed: women, migrants, and other people excluded from mainstream academia.
What also surprised me was how prejudice shapes assumptions. Tell people that a quarter of the class used the services of a shady scientist, and almost everyone will make the wrong guess about who cheated.
What can we learn from shadow scientists?
They can teach us a lot about how to deal with pressure, deadlines, and writer's block, just as we look to sports psychology for lessons on performance.
We can learn a lot about how misconceptions and biases shape our understanding of professional knowledge. When people do acknowledge that contract fraud exists, they imagine that the articles are written by unemployed scientists in Britain or the United States. They cannot imagine that Kenya is actually home to young and talented Africans who may have never left the country but still have the skills to write a PhD thesis. Their contributions are real, but long-standing assumptions about where knowledge is produced make them almost invisible.
What do you think this says about higher education in the global north and global south?
One of the things that really surprised me was the empathy Kenyan writers have for students from the north. I thought they'd say, “Oh, those lazy so-and-so's,” but what they really felt was that we'd all been sold the same broken social contract: work hard, study hard, and it'll be yours. But this dream did not come true.
Especially in the United States, which accounts for the majority of the essay writing business, students are coping with huge debts, working alongside their studies, and trying to get internships to stay afloat. In Kenya, visa restrictions for travel to countries such as the UK and Australia and low wages make it difficult to leave the country, so education is no longer seen as a ticket to a prosperous future.
