In her work for the documentary Shadow Scholars, Patricia Kingori visited Kenya to meet academic ghostwriters.Credit: Anna Patarakina
Four years ago, aged just 28, Patricia Kingori became one of the youngest women, and the youngest Black person, to be awarded a full professorship at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research as a sociologist focuses on understanding, exploring and documenting different forms of ethics and power in health, medicine and science.
Her latest project, The Shadow Scholars, is a 138-minute documentary directed by Eloise King and executive-produced by 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen. It investigates a hidden multibillion-dollar industry: contract cheating. Kingori traces how students in the wealthy, industrialized countries of the global north outsource coursework to “shadow scholars” in Nairobi. An estimated 40,000 highly educated but underemployed young people ghostwrite everything from undergraduate essays to master’s dissertations and PhD theses, often producing several essays every day, with tight turnarounds. Kenya, where Kingori undertook doctoral research until political unrest forced her and her family to leave in 2007, is a hub for this global market. Surveys suggest that more than 70% of its online freelance workforce is engaged in ‘writing and translation’, which Kingori discovered is an oblique way of referring to fake-essay writing.
This is not a new phenomenon: a 2018 paper estimated that at least one in seven graduates worldwide have used such services1. The UK, Irish and Australian governments, plus some US and Indian states, have taken steps to outlaw advertising by commercial ‘essay mills’. But despite such moves, demand continues to grow. Kingori’s film explores the issue by going to the writers themselves.
In the documentary, Kingori also discusses her personal experience of having someone else take credit for her work. By sharing her story, she acknowledges that Kenya’s ghostwriters are just one small part of a “much bigger, systemic issue around the value of ideas, value of people, where knowledge comes from, who gets invited into spaces, who is removed”.
What was your journey into academia?
I grew up as a teen in a single-parent household in west London, after moving around a lot when I was younger, and was always really interested in how the world works. I stumbled across sociology and loved it, because it takes the ordinary and shows how extraordinary it really is, holding a mirror up to us as a society.
I did my bachelor’s degree and my master’s at Royal Holloway, University of London. The latter was in medical sociology, exploring how social factors shape health and illness. I then worked for a few years as a research assistant before starting my PhD.
Towards the end of my doctorate, I met Michael Parker, director of the bioethics Ethox Centre 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 scholars in Kenya?
In 2019, I went to an open meeting at the Oxford Internet Institute, a multidisciplinary department that researches digital technologies. The topic was the iLabour project, which looks at how people use the Internet for work. Kenya was listed as a hotspot for ‘writing and translation’, which turned out to be a euphemism for the fake-essay industry. I have a Kenyan background and, at the time, I was working on fakes and fabrications — my research into data fabrication in clinical trials had sparked an interest in fakes more generally — so I was intrigued. The Online Labour Index, an economic indicator produced by the Oxford Internet Institute, had lots of figures but little information on the people behind them.
Was it difficult to get the shadow scholars to speak to you?
Not at all. They were champing at the bit. They wanted the world to know they exist, because they are proud of their work, even if it is uncredited. Many said they liked seeing their writing used in real dissertations and articles (often for lofty institutions), even under someone else’s name. The challenge wasn’t persuading them to talk, but deciding whose stories to include.
What was your biggest surprise from this work?
The way in which power makes certain people invisible, and how long that’s been going on for. During our research, we were put in touch with Anne Manuel, the now-retired librarian at Somerville College at the University of Oxford. She recalled an oral history about Patricia Owtram, a Somerville student in the 1950s who is now 102. Owtram’s BLitt thesis had been taken in 1959 and published under the name of her supervisor in a scholarly publication, but in 2023 Somerville College was able to give it back to her with her own name on it. Shadow scholars have always existed: women, migrants, others excluded from mainstream academia.
What also surprised me was how prejudice shapes assumptions. Tell people that one-quarter of a class had used a shadow scholar, and almost everyone will make an incorrect assumption about who has cheated.
What can we learn from the shadow scholars?
They can teach us a lot about dealing with pressure, deadlines and writer’s block — in the same way that we look to sports psychology for lessons in performance.
We can learn a lot about how misconceptions and bias shape our understanding of expertise. When people actually accept that contract cheating exists, they imagine it’s out-of-work academics in the United Kingdom or the United States who are writing the articles. They can’t picture that it’s actually young, bright Africans in Kenya who might never have left the country, and yet have the skills to write PhD-level work. Their contribution is real, but long-standing assumptions about where knowledge is produced make it almost invisible.
What do you think it says about higher education in the global north and global south?
One of the things that really surprised me was the empathy that the Kenyan writers had for students in the global north. I thought they might say, “Oh, those lazy so-and-sos,” but actually they felt we’ve all been sold the same broken social contract: work hard, study hard and everything will be yours. But that dream hasn’t materialized.
In the United States, especially — which accounts for a majority of the essay writers’ business — students are managing huge debts, working alongside their studies and scrambling for internships just to stay afloat. In Kenya, restrictions on visas for travel to places such as the United Kingdom and Australia, together with low wages, make it hard to leave the country, so education is no longer seen as a passport to a prosperous future.
