Junior Fellows

Current Project:

Analyse des enjeux et perspectives d'une politique d’immigration choisie au Canada. L’exemple du Québec « Immigrés subsahariens francophones – Quelles mobilités ? »

Research Interests:

English Linguistics, African Linguistics, Translation Studies

Geographical Area:

Nigeria

Current Project:

A Study of English-Hausa and Hausa-English Translations

This research work, a study of English-Hausa translations of legal documents, attempts to identify the techniques used by the translators to handle the complexities and uniqueness of the English legal language while translating it into Hausa. According to Bhatia (1993), legal discourse is considered notorious for its complexity, repetitiveness, and tortuous syntax. The intention is always to write clearly, precisely, unambiguously, and all-inclusively, with detailed specifications of the scope of legislative provisions. In legal translation, which is a unique and specialized area of translational activity (Cao, 2007), documents are characterized by brevity, economy, and neatness to prevent fraud, additions, omissions, or alterations in the text. Mistakes or mistranslations can lead to disastrous repercussions. Therefore, this research work intends to determine whether the features of the legal texts are retained in these translations even though translated language has contrary characteristics.

Several models comprise the analytical framework of this project to achieve its objectives. It includes Holme`s (2004) extended version of the Framework of Translation Studies, in which he pointed out that Translation Studies have two main objectives, which are: “to describe the phenomena of translating and translation(s) and “to establish general principles by means of which these phenomena can be explained and predicted.” The research also uses Vinay and Darbelnet’s Translation Procedure Model, as revised by Molina and Albir, and Nida’s (1964) Functional Equivalence Model. Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995) Translation Procedure Model, as updated in Molina and Albir’s Translation Techniques Model, defined translation techniques as procedures to analyze and classify how translation equivalence works. The research examines how the Hausa legal register reflects the evolution of the legal system in Northern Nigeria. It analyses how it is overloaded with borrowed terms from Arabic and English. As the research describes and appreciates these translations, it opens a floor for the discussion of English-Hausa translation, gives hints for English-Hausa translation training, and helps the machine translation programmers enrich the coding in their Hausa translation database, particularly on the translations of legal terminologies.

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Research Interests:

Yoruba Language and Literature, African Literature and Culture, Urban Studies, Popular Culture, Popular Music in Nigeria and Anglophone Africa, Poetry, Poetics

Geographical Area:

Nigeria

Current Project:

Fuji Lyrics and Everyday life in the Contemporary Yoruba Urban Space

The notion Big-man is part of the everyday life in contemporary Nigeria and it connotes multiple meanings – from self-actualization to community experience and a reflection of intersecting class dynamics. This chapter approaches the notion of Big-man as a cultural practice by reflecting on ontological orientation, social experiences and social stratifications expressed and articulated in/through Fuji music and performance. It explores the experience and performance of Big-man that is mediated through Fuji music as a cultural institution, and also articulates experiences of increasing global capitalism. It explores the performance of Big-man in the Yoruba popular music genre and within the Nigerian urban spaces by focusing on strategies of performing cultural continuities and new forms of social stratification dynamics. I adopt the Yoruba oral poetic form Oriki as a motif to track changes and continuities in the so-called networks of Big-men in today’s South-West Nigeria. Oriki in this sense signifies cultural and intellectual practices of bargaining, enhancement of social status and performance of personhood. I will draw on selected works of Fuji musicians through their transcribed lyrics, interviews of both Fuji musicians and consumers, and reports from six months’ fieldwork in the urban cities of Ibadan, Lagos and Ilorin in Nigeria respectively.

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Research Interests:

Liberian History, Television and Broadcasting, Collective Memory, Archives, Decolonial Histories

Geographical Area:

Liberia

Current Project:

Broadcasting in Liberia: Narratives of the Past and Present

When it came to power in 1980, Liberian President Samuel Doe’s People’s Redemption Council (PRC) would re-establish Liberia’s only television broadcaster, the Liberia Broadcasting System (LBS), and mandated that it extended television services to the whole of Liberia. As a result more Liberians in the hinterland in theory could have access to television which up until that point was limited to the capital Monrovia, and a few coastal Liberian cities. Television allowed Liberians to view events as they unfolded, but also to produce historical contents and to keep records of these in tapes. A large number of the tapes survived the years of war 1989 -1997 and from 1999- 2004, as well as the highly humid Liberian climate). These records now provide a unique source base for studies of Liberia history as reflected in broadcast television from the 1980s. Certain programmes of historical importance, whether fictional or non-fictional would be exhibited to see if these programmes continue to align with collective memories today following the realities of two brutal civil wars. The aim here is to create new paradigms for understanding history that merge scientific rigour with popular narratives. The potential achievements include bringing common voices into the archives, as well as the archaeological value of re-viewing tapes no one else has seen in decades.

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Research Interests:

Political Economy of Development in Africa

Geographical Area:

Ghana

Current Project:

The Political Economy of Money and Finance in Post-Colonial Ghana

My research explores how global finance, aided by domestic socio-political forces, sustain and create new forms of capital-labour exploitations and accumulation; from the rise of Fintech to the distributive effects of monetary policy. I draw from Stratification Economics’ conceptualization of inequality and International Political Economy debates on international financial subordination in the global south.

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Further information (publications)

Current Project:

Managing party loyalty in violent elections: Comparing the municipalities of Beira, Quelimane, and Tete in Mozambique

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Current Project:

Queer and Intersectional Activism in Tunisia: The Mawjoudin Queer Film Festival

Research Interests:

Internationalisation of Higher Education and students' mobility

Geographical Area:

Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi

Current Project:

Internationalisation and academic mobility: Exploring Higher Education students’ mobility in Uganda

The economic and social changes that characterize the 21st century have modified higher education (HE). The most visible change dating from the 1970s is the unprecedented expansion of HE in terms of participation and increased students’ mobility. The number of mobile students has been increasing over the years, growing to 5.7 million by 2020. Not only has the number of mobile students shot up, the population and HE systems from which these students come have changed. This contradicts the trend in the previous century where mobile students were generally from the most privileged sections of society in Africa.  At the same time, HE in developing countries is gradually shifting from a reactive and “Western”-dominated and -replicated system into a more proactive and autonomous sector with public and private universities. Most importantly, there is increasing strength in HE in emerging countries and increasing South-South cooperation. There are about 16,000 foreign students enrolled in Ugandan universities, mostly from Kenya, Burundi and Rwanda.  Adopting a mixed methods approach, via questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and document analysis, this study will examine students’ mobility into Uganda. The research focuses on the rationale that underlines international student mobility (ISM) in Africa, including the study of aspects such as the influence of the education system in students’ home countries on ISM; the extent to which ISM has moved beyond being a benefit of the privileged classes, and the policy implications on working international students in the global south. The study will enhance the existing literature on students’ mobility that primarily focuses on countries like the US, the UK and Australia. Its findings will contribute to knowledge necessary for the policy and programme development for improved service delivery.

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Current Project:

MENA Women in Diaspora: Poetics of Intersectional Resistance Versus Geometry of Appropriation

Current Project:

Friends for change: Friendship making among activists groups in Khartoum

Research Interests:

Turkey, Niger, MENA and the Sahel

Geographical Area:

Turkey’s Africa Policy, Islamism, International Politics, Muslim Charity Organizations and the Study of Religion

Current Project:

The Role of Charitable Activities of Turkish Organisations in Niger

The main objective of this project is to understand the role of the activities of Turkish charitable organizations which are shaping the new image of contemporary Turkey, in the processes of ongoing social transformation in Niger. Thus, based on concepts of ‘religious engineering’ and ‘morality/ethics’, this project aims to explore and analyze humanitarian aid and development projects carried out by Turkish charities in Niger from a relational perspective through an interdisciplinary study. This project intends to achieve these goals by investigating the following main research questions: How are Turkish charities related to "religion" in the conduct of their charitable activities? What kind of interaction exists between these charities and other actors such as donors, target groups and state? How and what moralities are generated from these multiple processes of relating? In this study, ethnographic research will be used as the dominant methodology to answer the research questions.

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Further information (CV and publications)

Current Project:

"Ni pauvre ni riche": identité de classe moyenne ou construction sociale d'une appartence intermédiaire au Bénin?

Current Project:

Political Economy of Child Labour in Cobalt Artisanal Mining Zone of Kolwezi, DRC

Current Project:

Les récits d'enfance dans la littérature judéo-maghrébine

Research Interests:

Contemporary Arts in East-Africa, Disability Aesthetics, Disability Studies, Curatorial Studies, Visual Culture

Geographical Area:

Kenya

Current Project:

Das Behinderte Kunstwerk – in den Sammlungen des Iwalewahaus

My research project on the visual representation of disability among Nairobi’s middle class is set up as an aesthetic-visual studies reflection of photos that I will collect during two research trips to Nairobi. My interdisciplinary approach between Visual Culture Studies and Disability Studies enables me to develop a new aesthetic cast on the discourse of disability in Kenya. The discussion of visual representations of disability has been a scientific niche so far. Only few authors refer their studies to photos and pictures. If they appear at all, they usually illustrate the written text and remain on the side of reflection. In contrast, I wish to empower the photos and move them from the edges to the center of my theoretical reflection. Thus, I follow Tobin Siebers, who created the knots and transitions between disability and art history; see his works Disability Aesthetics (2010), „Zerbrochene Schönheit – Essays über Kunst, Ästhetik und Behinderung” (2009), and Disability aesthetics and the body beautiful: Signposts in the history of art (2008). He uses “bildwissenschaftliche” concepts like Merleau-Pontys phenomenology of reception (1966). His “disability aesthetics” are groundbreaking within disability studies and will thus play a major part in my work as well.

I follow the social model of disability which states that no person is disabled as such, but is being disabled by his social and built environment. My work will study the idea of the perfect, the imperfect and the fragmented body and body imaginaries. I will apply semiotic approaches, codification, deconstruction and “Auflandung” just as a reflection of ‘the aesthetic‘. Possible photographic methods like “Zerstückelung, Dekonstruktion und Detaillierung“ will be analyzed to understand the representations of disability among Nairobi’s middle class. In “Practices of Looking – An Introduction of visual culture“ (2009), Sturken tracks the relations between picture, context, understanding and analysis. She builds on the semiotic theory of Roland Barthes. Barthes, in turn, draws from the semiotic studies of Ferdinand de Saussure. Images are constructions and constructivists at the same time. Stuart Hall stresses, though, that things alone have no meaning, but are only assigned meaning by people. This means that things and people can’t be regarded separately. But how, then, shall we understand Aby Warburgs “Pathosformeln”, that praise the autonomy and coherence of photography? It is exactly this discursive arena that my analysis of visual representation of disability in Nairobi will be played out in. It is here that I will describe and analyze the meaning, the discourse and the instance of disability in Nairobi.

My research is inspired and directed by the following questions: Which forms of visual representations of disability are common and practiced among Nairobi’s middle class? How are the photos related regarding content, form and style? Where do these representations appear? Is disability a concept that can be visually represented? Do public representations differ from private ones? Is ‘disability = #inspirationporn‘ as true for Nairobi’s middle class as it is for the European middle classes?

During my research, I will collect photos and images that will then be structured, categorized and analyzed. I will consciously limit my focus on photography: post cards, photo albums, mobile phone photos, facebook pictures, photography in advertisements, campaigns and exhibitions. The question of representation and the paradox of photography (absence/presence, the process of photography vs. the finished product) are hard to be analyzed only through the product. That is why I am also going to work with a Kenyan photographer on this project. I wish to document his meetings with the models and discuss the resulting pictures with him or her. The basis of my work shall be the respect for the objects of study and my informants. My aim is to produce a valuable contribution to aesthetic-visual culture studies analysis as well as to cast a new light on the discourse of disability in Kenya by adding new shades of understanding to the already existing social approaches.

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Research Interests:

Slave Trade, Literary Studies, Francophone Africa, Postcolonial Trauma, Memory, Slavery, UNESCO Heritage

Geographical Area:

Benin, Senegal

Current Project:

Writing the Slave Trade Trauma in Francophone Africa: A Study of Selected Novels

This study examines slave trade as a profound traumatic episode in African history and the role of writers in revisiting the shadowed memory of this historical trauma with its still prevailing fallouts in postcolonial Africa. The research focuses on selected literary texts that capture disturbing images of the slave trade by Francophone African novelists such as Léonora Miano, Kangni Alem and Wilfried N’Sondé. We contend that in a context where slave trade memory appears to be manipulated, shadowed and eventually misunderstood and forgotten, literature is an alternative pathway to reflecting the sufferings of slave trade victims and reinstating slave memories into the African public arena.

Literary language is instrumental in incorporating both the comprehensible and the incomprehensible, in an attempt to come to terms with the unspeakable stories of dehumanisation during the traumatic period of the slave trade which has only been sporadically discussed in the Francophone African literary spaces. In an act of remembrance and as a therapeutic process, sub-Saharan Francophone writers employ historical narrative, oraliture, magic realism, the fantastic, anachronism, epic writing, and intertextuality among other aesthetic approaches to convey their vision on this subject matter. In the quest for a collective memory, literature plays a cathartic role in the demystification of slave trade and in fostering therapeutic healing of sub-Saharan peoples from a troubled past that hinders an emancipated African self-image.

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Current Project:

Curators vs Humanitarians: a Kenyan Artist's Dilemma

Pierre Nicolas Bounakoff’s research focuses on the contemporary artists of Kenya. The most important factor to investigate is the very predominant role played by various international humanitarian structures and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on the local art scene. This leads to the spreading of a very specific iconography, derived from these organisations’ discourse, and ultimately to a redefinition of the moral values expressed in the artworks produced in Nairobi, thus conflicting with the kind of works currently in circulation within the globalised art world. This globalised art world is also represented in Kenya, mostly through the influence of the western curators, and their key role in the constitution of the current discourse surrounding the artists, as well as in the building of a large network for the diffusion of their production and its insertion in the international circles of contemporary art. The extremely rapid development of artistic activities in Kenya makes it a particularly readable example of this process. Between these two driving forces, what seems to be at stake is nothing less than a complete mutation of art as an activity in Kenya.

Research Interests:

Translation and Cultural Studies, Sufism in Contemporary Morocco, Ethics and Decolonial Studies

Geographical Area:

Morocco

Current Project:

Trances in Translation: Towards an Ethical Turn in Translating Alterity in the Moroccan Sufi Ritual al- ḍaḍra

Al-ḥaḍra is a spiritual Sufi performance that involves an altered state of mind and a unique experience of expanded consciousness accessed by individuals through meditation in a collective ritual. Al-ḥaḍra does not only aim at reaching divine knowledge but also moral and ethical advancement, and self-annihilation or al-fanāʾ. In this doctoral research, I aim to “translate” al-ḥaḍra, pushing the act of translation beyond its traditional limits by providing a translation of the poems recited during the ritual as well as conducting an ethnographic scrutiny of the ritual as a form of inter-semiotic and cultural translation. Furthermore, this research seeks to apprehend the individual experience of the divine as a process of meaning-making that contributes to the identity formation of these communities. It attempts to translate the affective experience of the participants in the ritual and to capture the melody of poetry recitations and rhythmic movement in writing.

The philosophy of ethics is the basis on which this multidisciplinary research rests. The ethical turn has a triangular presence in this project. First, I hope to explore ways of providing an ethical translation of the poems that embraces otherness and conveys its different aesthetics and rich dialogism that never cease to resist the homogenizing effects of English. Secondly, I would like to explore new ethical and decolonial methodologies in conducting ethnographic work as an alternative to the more epistemologically oppressive methodologies, in the hope of forwarding new knowledge about this practice as a part of Moroccan culture and identity. Lastly, I seek to excavate a local approach to ethical philosophy that has its origin in the Moroccan Sufi culture; to study al-ḥaḍra as special moment in the orientation of the Sufi community that promotes ethical practices in individuals. These reflections lead us to ask the following questions: What can an expression of a collective consciousness communicate about peoples’ subjectivity? How can such ritual be a factor of a much-needed social transformation due to the shared empathy and the communal purpose it serves? What potential does the study of this ritual have in developing a local concept of ethics built on empathy and connection, and that contributes to the advancement of the local community? And what contribution can Al-ḥaḍra have to a more pluriversal idea of ethics?

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Research Interests:

International Financial Networks, Financial Subordinate Integration, Complexity Economics, International Political Economy

Current Project:

Financial Subordination and Economic Complexity

​My PhD concerns the relationship between financial subordination in West Africa – consisting of a complex web of currency hierarchies and weak national banking sector, a high degree of foreign denominated debt, and a detached bank-firm relation - and the lack of diversification and long-term stagnation in product complexity. I will analyze the long-term development of financial structures and industrialization in West Africa with particular focus on Senegal and Nigeria during the colonial period and today. Therefore, I will contribute to the literature on persistency in Political Economy, Development Studies and Complexity Economics. My dissertation will consist of three papers that explore the relationship between financial subordination and economic complexity.

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Current Project:

A Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Twitter Memes used in Discourses around Nigeria’s Elections and Sociopolitics from 2015

Research Interests:

Colonial History, Global History, Print Media, Literacy, Knowledge-producing Institutions/(Higher) Education

Geographical Area:

Nigeria

Current Project:

Writing back to Empire: Newspapers, Non-Elites and Decolonisation in the Global Public Sphere, 1937-1957

Using the often neglected bottom-top analytical approach, this research investigates how non-elite groups (loosely defined as semi- and non-literate groups) in colonial Nigeria from 1937 to 1957 engaged with and shaped the decolonisation agenda using a local newspaper. This research has significance beyond academia. For development practitioners, it will help reduce (information) inequalities and increase community participation by demonstrating how news content was historically disseminated, digested and debated particularly in the absence of modern technology, infrastructure and wide spread illiteracy that still exists today. For African national governments, it will provide useful contexts in understanding the socio-economic environments that have led people to debate and act on issues that affect them.

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© UBT

Research Interests:

reproduction, fertility, family planning, contraception, motherhood/parenthood, education, middle classes/classness in Africa

Geographical Area:

Nigeria

Current Project:

Education - Work - Having Children: Family Planning of Middle Class Women in Lagos, Nigeria

Research Interests:

Gender, Style, Performance, Stereotypes, Fiction, Discourse Analysis, Sociolinguistics

Geographical Area:

Egypt

Current Project:

Style and Gender Performance in Arabic Fiction and Media

My qualitative study explores the linguistic portrayal of gender and social class in the context of Arabic fiction, film and TV series. Within this context, a purposive sample from contemporary novels, well-known films, and a TV series released by Egyptian male authors are analyzed linguistically. The study approaches the texts as corpus of performed language in order to demonstrate male authors’ stereotypical perceptions of gendered linguistic style and its relation to social class. Furthermore, Egyptian women’s reactions to some selected excerpts written by these male authors will be investigated, asking them to identify the gender and social class of the characters in order to determine the significance of a number of stereotypical linguistic features for inferring social gendered identity. The study promotes a deeper understanding of gendered style and stereotypes in Arabic and raises social awareness of stereotypical linguistic portrayals in an attempt to reconstruct social perceptions apart from categorization.

Further information (CV, conference contributions)

Research Interests:

Monetary History, Social History, Cartoons

Geographical Area:

Togo, Cameroon

Current Project:

The Social History of French colonial money in Togo and Cameroon. Currency Struggles from the Mandate Period until Independence (1914-1960)

This research project contributes to the social history of the CFA Franc in West Africa. The first phase (1900-1918) shows a shift from a situation with diverse monies with a very limited colonial statehood to a more institutionalized currency system. The second phase starts after the First World War, when Togo and Cameroon became mandated territories under the League of Nations with French and British administration. This period was de facto the starting point of the CFA Franc system, because it was for the first time that France issued a separate colonial currency different from the metropolitan Franc. Thirdly, during decolonization, monetary sovereignty was debated as a condition for independence. Research on the history of the Franc CFA during this period has insisted on the link between “conservative nationalism” on the one side and radical nationalisms, such as the UPC in Cameroon or the politics of Sekou Touré in Guinea and Modibo Keita in Mali. The currency plans of Sylvanus Olympio in Togo reveal further diplomatic alternatives.

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Current Project:

Post-apartheid Subjectivities: Psychoanalysis and/in Place in the Novels of K. Sello Duiker, Kgebetle Moele and Sifoso Mzobe

Brian Fulela joined BIGSAS as a Junior Fellow in the 2012 winter semester, where he has been admitted into the Doctoral Programme.

His project, provisionally entitled “Post-apartheid Subjectivities: Psychoanalysis and/in Place in the Novels of K. Sello Duiker, Sifiso Mzobe and Kgebetli Moele”, is specifically interested in how psychoanalysis both opens up and is interrogated by Duiker, Mzobe and Moele’s exploration of such issues as trauma, violence and loss within post-apartheid society. The aim of the thesis is to contribute to a fuller understanding of the meaning, aesthetics and ethics of the preoccupation with violence, trauma and loss in their work and to explore the inflection of the latter concerns with sexuality, history, memory and abjection. The purpose is to show that an interrogation of the synergies between psychoanalysis and the works of the selected authors – but also post-apartheid writing in English by black male authors more generally – can open up new ways in which to think about post-apartheid subjectivity. The study will attempt to articulate a relationship of reciprocity between literature and theory in a way that does not refound a hierarchy with theory as a dominant discourse.

Current Project:

Die Colonial Commodities Kakao/Schokolade. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Entanglements zwischen den medialen Dispositiven der Materialien Kakao/Schokolade und der deutschen kolonialen Vergangenheit in Westafrika

Research Interests:

(Inter-)Cultural Studies, Social and Moral Geographies, Urban Inequalities and Racism, Resistance and (Re-)Existence, Self-Organization and Social Change, Social and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Artistic Research and Reflexive Co-Creation of Knowledge with Communities from Latin America and Africa

Geographical Area:

Brazil and Colombia

Current Project:

Moral Geographies of (Re-)Existence: A Comparative Analysis of Socio-Cultural Projects from Afro-Descendant Communities in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) and Cartagena de Indias (Colombia)

Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) and Cartagena de Indias (Colombia) are not only hubs of cultural creativity and (re)invention, but also traumatic places of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. While the colonial centers of both cities are recognized as UNESCO World Heritage, many people of African descent live in self-organized neighborhoods located off the beaten track, such as ‘favelas’ in Brazil or ‘barrios populares’ in Colombia. This research sheds light on socio-cultural community projects that use Afro-diasporic music, dance and other cultural expressions to mitigate problems related to racism, exclusion, juvenile delinquency, and limited access to education and the labor market. As these initiatives come from neighborhoods stigmatized as poor and dangerous, they are mainly invisible to the tourist gaze, which is often limited to commodified versions of Afro culture.

With a particular focus on the communities of Uruguai (Salvador) and Barrio Chino (Cartagena), my research analyzes dynamics of socio-spatial transformation, enabling and restricting conditions for self-organized change, and the visions of a good life underlying these initiatives. The comparative design adopted for this work is composed of participatory action research, ethnographic and documentary methods. This innovative triangulation allows for a reflexive co-creation of knowledge that integrates local communities into joint reflections, and stimulates mutual learning processes across the African diaspora. My overarching goal is to break new ground in the field of moral geographies by developing a substantiated conceptualization of Afro-Latin American urban (re-)existence, which brings epistemologies of the Global South into dialogue with those of the Global North.

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Research Interests:

Linguistics, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, French Language Variation, Language and Morality, Health Communication, Intercultural Communication, Language and Media, Conversation Analysis

Geographical Area:

Côte d'Ivoire

Current Project:

​Le discours moral dans le domaine de la santé sexuelle et reproductive des jeunes Ivoriens. Une analyse pragmatico-discursive

As part of the research project "Health discourse as moral communication? Linquistic case studies form Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon", my PhD project will examine moral communication focusing on interactions concerning sexual and reproductive health of young Ivorian women. This research field is of particular interest due to the continuously increasing global population in developing countries (Hahn 2019), the neglect of women in the healthcare sector (Hosseinpoor et al. 2012) and the ongoing problem of early pregnancy in Côte d’Ivoire (UNFPA 2018: 33).

The aim of my research is to investigate the emergence and negotiation of moralities in communication according to Bergmann and Luckmann (1999). They refer to a constructivist conceptualization of ethics and assume that morality is co-constructed in interaction. The main research question of my project investigates how moral communication is linguistically characterized and which specific functions or purposes this kind of communication has in the context of sexual and reproductive health. In order to provide a comprehensive overview of the topic, the data will be collected in different settings and subjected to a conversation analysis. On the one hand, the data corpus will include interactions in preventive measures offered by selected NGOs and on the other hand, it will include data from focus group discussions with young women.

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Further information (CV)

Research Interests:

Extractive sector; Digital activism; ‘Weapons of the weak’; Sustainable mining; Mining governance;

Geographical Area:

Ghana

Current Project:

Digital Activism, ‘Hidden Transcripts’, and Socio-cultural Transformation in Gold-Mining Communities in Ghana

Brief Description of current project:

Economic and environmental impacts of mining operations have featured prominently in mining research, yet subtle forms of violence and socio-cultural transformations inherent in mineral extraction processes have not received serious academic attention. By employing place-making and resource materiality notions, political ecology approach and ‘hidden transcripts’ or ‘the weapons of the weak’ perspective, this project aims to uncover subtle and covert forms of resistance employed by ‘weaker social groups’ living in or near mining communities to protect their interest against dire impacts of mining operations. Medium of expression of public concerns and expectations on gold mining has expanded beyond physical or direct interactions to include virtual platforms and audio-visual aids to ensure a more result-oriented activism or advocacy, especially given unbridled socio-economic misery, cultural erosion and environmental degradation associated with gold mining spree in developing nations. This project therefore explores the use and interrelatedness of both non-digital (hidden transcript) and digital forms of activism in order to compare their relative efficacy in shaping the governance of mineral resource extraction in mining communities in protesting against mining companies and whether these techniques or technology create the critical frame to protect their interest.

PUBLICATIONS:

Projects

2017-2018  Small Scale mining and its impacts on Rural Livelihoods and Health in Prestea, Ghana.   https://bora.uib.no/bora-xmlui/bitstream/handle/1956/20107/Augustine-s-Thesis--GLODE-.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

2015-2016 Conditions and Identities of Young Migrant Workers in the City: An ethnographic study of Street Children in Kumasi, Ghana

https://bora.uib.no/boraxmlui/bitstream/handle/1956/12814/145011091.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

CONTACT:

Augustine Gyan

Junior Fellow & PhD Student

Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies

(BIGSAS), University of Bayreuth

A:   Universität Bayreuth, Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 3, 95445 Bayreuth

T:     +49 1753778744

E:     Augustine.Gyan@uni-bayreuth.de

W:   www.bigsas.uni-bayreuth.de

Current Project:

Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and the "National Question" in Ethiopia: Genesis and Trajectory

Current Project:

An ethnography of migrant sub-Saharan domestic work in Tunisia

Current Project:

Geographies of border-making in South Sudan's southern borderlands

Current Project:

Mediating Womanhood in Liberia. History, memories and representations

Contact

Research Interests:

Investment, Taxation, Mining, Regional Integration, Technology

Geographical Area:

Burundi and Tanzania

Current Project:

Combatting Illicit Financial Flows for Sustainable Development in East African Community (EAC): A Study Of Burundi Mining Laws and Lessons from United Republic Of Tanzania Mining Laws

This study examines Burundi fiscal regime anchored in the domestic legal instruments and linked to tax policies and regulations at the EAC level. At each phase of the development of a mining project, a variety of specific taxes (fixed rights, royalties based on the explored / exploited area, royalties on the value or volume of products sold, etc.) applies so that the country receives income or mining revenues to ensure sustainable economic development. To attract as many investors as possible, the Republic of Burundi, has chosen to grant tax advantages to mining companies by adopting common law tax system rather than specific mining tax regime for mining companies. As a result, no tax, duty or tax, other than those provided for by the mining convention, cannot apply or be payable by the investor during the validity period of the mining license. After benefiting these tax incentives, a mining company is required to repatriate mining earnings from exportation in accordance with the mining policies and regulations. However, the existing investment legal tax is not clear on how repatriation of export earnings mining should be carried out and, this lead to illicit financial flows and thus, affect economic sustainable development of the country.

The study is based on the assumption that the mining laws in Burundi are inadequate and also inconsistent with the East African Community (EAC) legal provisions on combating illicit natural resources exploitation.

To prove or disprove the assumption, it is the main objective of the study to critically analyze shortcomings in the existing investment legal tax planning and loopholes in the legislation of repatriation of export earnings mining as well as in Bilateral Agreements which provide tax incentives to mining companies that lead to illicit financial flows. In addition, the research methodology of this study will comprise of an analysis of primary data collected from respondents during field research as well as secondary data collected through library documentation.

Thus, the study will draw best lessons and practices from the United Republic of Tanzania given that Tanzanian legal tax regime has been found to have the best model in implementation of EAC provisions on combatting illicit financial flows in mining sector.

This study will finally make substantial recommendations that will ensure the tax revenue from mining industry to enable the country to combat illicit financial flow and attain economic sustainable development.

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Research Interests:

Social Protection, Social Policy and Conflict Transformation

Geographical Area:

Rwanda

Current Project:

Social protection for elderly people in the context of rapidly ageing population in Rwanda

Formal social protection for elderly people in Rwanda is limited to those who worked in the formal sector, while the elderly people who worked in the informal sector do not receive such protection. In the absence of formal social protection services to the growing number of elderly people in the informal sector, these elderly people rely solely on intergenerational support that is given by their families. Intergenerational support is an invaluable source of care that forms an important part of the social fabric. However, less attention has been paid to the intergenerational support to elderly people, and so, the factors and dynamics that underpin the intergenerational support to elderly people in Rwanda remain underexplored, and it has not yet attracted anthropological scholarly attention.

The aim of this research project is to contribute to the current anthropological debate on day-to-day intergenerational support in the wave of social changes. In Rwanda, social changes such as rural-urban migration of younger generations, changes in housing patterns and land scarcity as well as the 1994 genocide greatly influence the current intergenerational support to elderly people in rural areas. This research will explore factors underpinning intergenerational support to elderly people in relation to the care expectations of elderly people in rural areas of Rwanda. The issue of intergenerational support for the elderly becomes ever more important in the wake of social changes since such social changes leave a gap which renders the elderly in rural areas without daily care. This research will analyze how care is provided to elderly people and the motivation to provide care in the context of social changes. It will also explore what happens to these elderly individual when neither their families nor the government provides care for them.

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Research Interests:

Critical Race Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Citizenship Studies, African Studies, Urban Anthropology, Anthropology of Global Inequalities, Border Studies, Racism and Racialization, Pigmentocracy, Decolonization, Intersectionality, Trauma, Memory, and Embodiment

Geographical Area:

South Africa, Brazil, Switzerland, Germany

Current Project:

Black Subjectivities and Whitened Spaces in Cape Town, South Africa – Constructions, In/Compatibilities, and Reactions to Exclusions

Although apartheid is officially over, racialized segregation remains the norm rather than the exception in South Africa, where Cape Town is one of the most segregated cities and a "city of exclusion" for many PoC. An implicit assumption persists that the city belongs to "Whites" and that Blacks are "temporary sojourners" whose place is in the townships.

In her doctoral project, which is situated between the fields of Spatial Studies, Critical Race Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Citizenship Studies, Danielle explores racialized spaces and in particular Whitened spaces. Merging ethnography and autoethnography, she examines how Whitened spaces are constructed and upheld, how people excluded from Whitened spaces react to this exclusion, and how spatial formations shape Black subjectivities and vice versa in Cape Town.

To understand the complex topic of spaces and positionalities in this urban environment, she asks the following questions:

1)  How are racialized spaces de/constructed and how do they produce exclusions?

2)  How do people excluded from (Whitened) spaces respond to such exclusions?

3)  How are Black people’s subjectivities produced, challenged, transformed, in relations to racialized spaces?

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Research Interests:

Infrastructures, Coloniality of Power, Knowledge and Being, Decolonization, Social Movements, Anthropology of Ethics, Critical Urbanism

Geographical Area:

South Africa

Current Project:

“Ugesi Ngowethu”: Politics of Access to Electricity Networks in South Africa ­– A Case Study of the City of Johannesburg

The Ph.D. project’s objective is to explore the politics of access to electricity networks as they are mobilized around struggles for electricity by undersupplied and precariously connected poor urban residents. The main focus rests on the experiences and knowledges employed by them through strategies of non-payment, self-connection, manipulation, and destruction of electricity infrastructures in the city of Johannesburg, South Africa. Thinking from and with the positions of people at the margins of the electricity network yields three key insights: (1) what electricity comes to signify for the residents; (2) what (un)fulfilled promises, expectations, and grievances residents assemble as parts of the demand for equitable, affordable and reliable access to electricity in South Africa; and (3) how current struggles and practices around the electricity undersupply relate to historical experiences and strategies resisting colonial power.

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Research Interests:

Political Subjectivization, Narratives and Identities of Social Movements, Dynamics of Street Protests, Practices of Resistance

Geographical Area:

Sudan

Current Project:

What Makes for a Revolution? Subjecitivizations of Resistance in Sudan’s December Revolution

I ask the question how, after the oppressive reign of 30 years of dictatorship in the Sudan, which was in the Arendtian sense totalitarian, a revolution evolved. I want to make understandable the emergence of resistant political subjects following an interpretative paradigm and examine how this is related to revolutionary practices of self-empowerment. Using an ethnographic research design complemented by a discourse-analytical approach, I study how the first riots developed and how, through the use of specific social practices, a political space of appearance was created.

It is my goal to uncover the new identities, attributions and narratives that were created within those practices and how they influenced the processes of political subjectivization. In this regard, the meaning of space and matter, especially the matter of the body, take a central role in my analysis of those practices. I want to examine which political spaces were newly created, appropriated and interpreted through the physical appropriation of space.

This project is supposed to make an empirical contribution to the understanding of impulses leading to protests, their intersubjective dynamics and the diverse practices of this enactment. I want to contribute to the analyses of street protests, the role of embodied togetherness and the meaning of reclaiming public space.

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Research Interests:

Politics and International Relations, Diplomacy, Journalism, Political Conflicts, Politics and Policies Integration, Global Studies

Geographical Area:

Nigeria

Current Project:

Politics of the Unknown Gunmen: Television Reporting on Banditry in North-west Nigeria

This study aims at unravelling the ‘mystery’ behind the media usage of the phrase ‘unknown gunmen.’ My research fundamentally seeks to address the question of why the vague phrase ‘unknown gunmen’ is predominantly used by Nigeria’s major television houses. There is hardly any prior research on the factual or journalistic (re)presentation by television houses in Nigeria, regarding their use of the nomenclature ‘unknown gunmen’ in addressing the multiple violent attacks in the North-west. My research focuses on the theories of framing and the ideal of objectivity in journalism in relation to the political conspiracy theories that concern the persistent use of the phrase “unknown gunmen” as a generic term used by television houses to describe violent activities in North-west Nigeria. This study would shed light on the complex interrelationship between the phenomena of banditry, media narratives and popular suspicions or conspiracy theories. The idea is to triangulate different kinds of perspectives and information to highlight the ways in which different groups and social categories deal with the complexities of banditry in North-west Nigeria.

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Research Interests:

Digital Media, New Media, Social Media, Social Networking Sites, Journalism and Global Communication

Geographical Area:

Egypt

Current Project:

Popular Facebook groups exclusively for women and women empowerment in Egypt

My dissertation seeks to explore the extent to which Facebook groups exclusively for women are perceived as communities of women empowerment in Egypt. These popular Facebook groups despite being private groups, are trendy ‘only women’ zones that discuss a variety of topics of shared interests. This exclusivity allows women to connect with each other and share their thoughts and perspectives more freely. It can be argued that these groups may not have a significant impact on affecting women’s sense of empowerment in society due to the privacy settings of these platforms. However, the rapid popularity of these Facebook groups reflected in the hundreds of members joining by the day through their family, friends or peers reflects a form of new internet based socialized communication that takes part not only in the communication flow but also I argue in the construction and reconstruction of a contemporary image of Egyptian women.

By taking on a social shaping approach to contribute to literature on new media and its form of communication, this dissertation will look at how the Egyptian women use these online groups in relation to the Egyptian context, and the extent to which is has become embedded in their everyday life.

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Research Interests:

Feminist, Intersectionality, Gender, Queer

Geographical Area:

Sudan

Current Project:

Towards a History of Queer/Feminist “Movement” in Sudan

This study explores overlaps between queer and feminist movements in the time-space of three revolutions in post-independence Sudan (1960-2019). By delving into the long and complex history of feminist struggle in Sudan, the dissertation seeks to understand whether or not and how much of the feminist spaces and movements took into account the struggle of those minoritized on the basis of their gender and sexual identities. Using Afro-feminist, queer, and intersectionality theories, the dissertation investigates to what extent Sudanese feminist spaces and movements are intersectional and inclusive in particular to Queer subjects. It departs from the 2018-2019 Sudanese revolution that saw some coalition among queer and feminist activists in the struggle for building a democratic system that respects human rights and achieves peace, freedom, equality, and justice. This moment witnessed relative visibility of queer movements that integrated themselves in the political transformation along with other marginalized groups mainly women. In response to this massive popular movement, government reforms were introduced in the aftermath of the revolution such as the abrogation of flogging of gay men from the penal law. The question then is, what can we learn if we look at the history of feminist struggle in post-independence Sudan?

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Research Interests:

Processes of Regional Integration, Judicial Politics, Politics of Development Negotiations

Current Project:

Judges as agents of regional integration: A relational analysis of judicial networks in African regional courts

Diana is interested in the link between judicial decision-making and processes of regional integration in Africa. Her research project conceptualises judges on regional courts as actors, with agency, who operate within existing configurations of power. Therefore, it adopts a relational approach to investigate how the judges’ diverse relational attributes potentially shape and influence their decision-making, and in turn, how this impacts regional integration processes. Specifically, it examines how regional court judges understand their role in regional integration, probes into what shapes this understanding and traces the judicial networks that matter in advancing regional integration. Possible constraints to judicial power and individual interests that tend to deter regionalisation will also be investigated. The study employs semi-structured interviews to probe judicial relations and Social Network Analysis to analyse the structural properties of these networks.

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Current Project:

Affronter la peur : une étude comparative des initiatives locales après des attaques armées dans des communes maliennes et burkinabè

Current Project:

Hindu Temple Ritual Worship in Durban, South Africa

The project explores a specific religious identity by investigating sources and dynamics of contemporary public Hindu ritual practices in the city of Durban, South Africa. The research focuses on Amman worship with special emphasis on the fire-walking festival and Murugan worship and, in particular, its Kavady rituals, as annually practiced at and mediated by the temples in Durban.

Empirical research analyses the way in which rituals develop within the context of post-colonial and multireligious society, how these rituals are negotiated, appropriated and framed and how they are experienced, remembered and narrated – in other words, how they continue and process the local Hindu tradition by creating the various spaces – physical as well as social and symbolic – where their prestige and legal authority, just like South African Hindu identity, is located, displayed and confronted.

The project aims to contribute to the documentation of the reconstitution of a particular culture – i.e. religious identity in a rapidly changing and multicultural South African environment – while enquiring into the possibilities of linking cognitive and practical theoretical approaches that account for religious and ritual innovation.

Further information (publications)

Current Project:

Urban illiteracy in Bolivia

Current Project:

Digitalisierung und Future Archives. Posthybride Perspektiven auf künstlerische Objektbefragungen im kolonialen Museum

The 19th century saw the birth of ethnographic museums in Europe – impressive buildings in which a crucial link between colonized, othered cultures and white superiority was forged. Through the selection, display, and thus the reframing of works of art and artefacts of non-European provenance, an immaterial order of things was constructed, narrating notions of unilinear progress and modernity to a general public. With a particular focus on the relationship between exhibition display, the categories ‘art’/’artefact’, immaterial order, and white gaze, this study broadens our understanding of practices of purification, object lessons, and epistemological violence. Sophie Lembcke is interested in artistic research practices that critically engage with objects in ethnographic museums and shape their ongoing transformation. Instead of thinking about identities, theorists are arguing for a transcultural approach, transforming museums into democratic forums including diverse voices and positionalities. However, to counter colonial structures persisting in such postcolonial ethnographic museums, the research focuses on the remediation of objects by contemporary artists such as Nora Al-Badri/Jan Nikolai Nelles, Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja, Morehshin Allahyari, and Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi/ Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum. Thinking-with their artistical propositions conceptualizes the future museum as a dividual aesthetic zone for exploring collapsing temporalities, sensuous knowledges and digital commoning as strategies for overcoming colonial object lessons and display strategies.

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Research Interests:

Antimafia, Borders, Work, Gender

Geographical Area:

Italy, Mediterranean

Current Project:

Anti-trafficking as antimafia: Campaigns against human trafficking in Palermo

My proposed research deals with campaigns against human trafficking in Italy, with a focus on Palermo, their relationship to antimafia alliances, their strategies and practices and the discourses they (re)produce. I aim to study these campaigns and their connection with the antimafia movement, to understand how legality, criminality, victimhood and other related notions are contested in these alliances, and how historical, economic and political layers both constrict and enable different possibilities for actions and relations. This project asks how and by what anti-trafficking campaigners are influenced in their narratives, decisions and actions as to which principles, to abide by, and thereby wants to reveal how people conceive of, call for and enact social change between the grassroots and the state.

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Research Interests:

Colonial History (mainly British), Medicine and Health in Africa, International and Global Health Programs since 1900

Geographical Area:

Zimbabwe

Current Project:

Combating diseases in Frontier Zones: Measles Outbreaks and Vaccination Campaigns in Manicaland Province, Zimbabwe 1900-2010

Further information (CV)​

Research interests:

Gentrification in African cities, Urban governance in Africa, Spatial reconstruction in post-colonial cities, Public spaces and placemaking in Africa, Urban food security in South African townships, Equity dimensions of water security in Africa

Geographical Area:

South Africa

Current Project:

Women on the margins of African cities: An analysis of gendered geographies of gentrification in South Africa

Gentrification is the economic, social, cultural, political and physical change to an area that results in class transformation and displacement for those living and operating businesses there. While there exists some literature on the question of gentrification in South Africa, all of which trace the history of the post-apartheid city and the socio-economic and spatial impacts of gentrification on the working-class poor, there is none with a specific focus on gendered geographies of gentrification. Because these studies are not specifically focused on the displacement of women in the gentrified spaces, women are rendered invisible and on thus, continue to be on the receiving end of these “urban regeneration” processes. These women are predominantly Black, working-class, and poor. A further limitation with gentrification research in Africa is that it transposes theorisation from the global North. While there are some notable similarities, post-colonial scholars have argued against the transposition of Western knowledge onto urban spaces or cities. They contend that employing theories transposed from Western realities is akin to permitting a colonial exertion of intellectual power.

Gentrification in South Africa has its roots in three interlinked factors: colonialism, the migrant labour system and the abolition of apartheid that resulted in massive internal migration. This qualitative study undertakes to address two specific research gaps: the African understanding and experience of gentrification, and the gendered nature of gentrification in African cities, with specific reference to South Africa. It aims to investigate the socio-spatial, economic and political impacts of gentrification on women in South African cities. Employing the theories of decoloniality and intersectionality - which are concerned with the interconnectedness of colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, ethnicism and regionalism – the study demonstrates how in post-apartheid South African cities, interlocking systems of power function to place Black women at the margins of economic activity and to deprive Black working-class women of productive power. In this way, they experience disenfranchisement as both an economic and socio-spatial construct. To make sense of this, narrative interviews will be used to investigate how South African women interpret their own individual experiences within gentrified geographies.

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Research Interests:

Wax Prints Textiles, Uses of African Textiles in Diasporic Countries, Relation between Fashion and Arts dealing with Ethnic Issues, Nigerian Contemporary Fashion, Transculturation, Material Culture

Geographical Area:

Nigeria, Brazil

Current Project:

Mapping African Prints – Fashion and Visual Agency in Brazil and Nigeria

In this study, we propose to investigate the use of wax prints – or Ankara – dressing the black body as a performative act that produces and asserts identities due to the power of its visual materiality. The intention is to map ways of how wax operates expressing and discussing social and ethnic issues by studying the image created by this cultural performance. I argue that the image of wax prints is able to represent and materialize an imagined territory, a mythical Africa, which is referenced by black people from diasporic countries. Also, this hybrid object encounters tradition and modernity decolonizing notions of beauty and reaffirming Africa as an epicenter of art and fashion.

I analyze a selected number of wax prints concerning its visual characteristics as well as with other physical and sensorial properties. The empirical approach connects the visual analysis work with the uses of wax and its aesthetics experiences in everyday life and fashion collections in Nigeria and Brazil. This permits us to understand how wax acts and how it impacts peoples in both countries. We establish a connection between fashion in Lagos and the Brazilian counterparts to show how issues of cultural/racial interconnections are mediated by the wax image but also making out possible areas of transatlantic translations and transformations.

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Research Interests:

Social and cultural history of the western Sahara, Politics of state- and nation building, Identity and Belonging, Ethnicity and Race, Social Movements

Geographical Area:

Mauritania

Current Project:

Making up a people – Ethnogenesis among the Haratin of Mauritania

The project engages with the Mauritanian Haratin’s (Hassaniya-Arabic-speaking Blacks of slave origin) struggles for emancipation and citizenship in a post-slavery society and explores the thesis of an ethnogenetic process in this context. Whereas the Haratin category in the hassanophone (Bidhan) milieus of the western Saharan region traditionally refers to a specific social identity within a hierarchically stratified, kinship-based society, namely that associated with (recently) manumitted slaves (said to be of “Black African/pagan origin”, contrary to the “Arab/Muslim” origins of the elite strata), local activists claim that the Haratin should be recognized as a distinct “ethnic” or “national” community (distinct from the “Black African” ethnicities of the Wolof, Soninké and Halpulaaren and from the hassanophone “Arab-Berber” Bidhan, with whom they are traditionally associated). I want to explore the societal processes and larger political contexts that led to the formulation of these claims, interrogate their discursive framing, and investigate how they are received by different groups within Mauritanian society. The conceptual framework relies mainly on social constructivist notions of ethnicity and the heuristic possibilities they entail for a comprehensive view of the local sociopolitical context. In this sense, the project aims at producing an ethnographic account of the discursive and performative dimensions of contemporary Haratin identity in Mauritania, combined with an in-depth analysis of the historical processes involved in the development and articulation of an “ethnic consciousness” among the Mauritanian Haratin.

For this purpose, I will conduct multi-sited qualitative ethnographic fieldwork in several research locations in Mauritania. Ultimately, I want to integrate my empirical findings into a larger historical and comparative perspective on processes of group formation in the context of colonialism, (post)slavery, and postcolonial state- and nation building. Beyond this theoretical debate around the creation and transformation of collective identities the research will contribute also to academic and non-academic debates on histories and contemporary realities of slavery and race in North Africa and the West African Sahel.

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Research Interests:

Human Rights, Children's Rights, Gender Equality, Community Development, Social Work

Geographical Area:

Malawi and Ghana

Current Project:

State obligations in addressing climate change-induced child labour: an investigation of child labour legal frameworks enforcement in Malawi and Ghana

My thesis seeks to investigate why climate change-induced child labour persists in Malawi and Ghana even though there is a vibrant legal framework that is meant to tackle the problem. Specifically, I am interrogating the role of community-based structures in the protection of children from climate change-induced child labour. Given the complexity of the problem as well as its linkage with climate change, I will do this by applying social legal research methods to explore possible solutions outside the legal frameworks, institutional processes and procedures. In this study, I hypothesize that the normative framework has little to do with the lived reality of the families and children towards whom the obligations expected in instruments such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the ILO standards, and the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child are directed. I propose therefore to look at structures within communities to see whether the normative, institutional and procedural requirements from the formal system can be grounded there.

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Research Interests:

Uganda, Kenya, D.R. Congo

Geographical Area:

Mobility, Political Mobilization, Elections

Current Project:

Moving towards Power? Mobilities within Political Mobilization in Uganda, Kenya and Eastern DRC

Political mobilization is a key element of winning elections in our increasingly mobile world. Thereby, the term political mobilization already suggests that mobility is an important aspect of elections, while elections are decisive distribution mechanisms for power. Currently however, there is only limited knowledge on how mobility really affects mobilization. Likewise, the interplay of mobility, mobilization and power during processes of mobilization has received little attention. It is known however that both mobility and mobilization are relevant for the production of political power. Likewise, political power is known to be important for mobility as well as mobilization. If mobility therefore indeed does affect political mobilization, this of course raises questions on how it does so and which consequences high or low mobility has for gaining political power.

In an attempt to bridge the gap, this project aims at investigating the role of mobility within the political mobilization for elections in Uganda, Kenya and Eastern Congo. To achieve this its objective will be to identify the potential to be mobile, also called mobility capital, those mobilized for political purposes, and the mobile elements in mobilization techniques. The focus lies on politicized mobile groups like motorcycle taxi drivers. Furthermore, the effects of mobility driven mobilization in elections will be evaluated. Examining these factors allows the evaluation of the role of mobility on power relations in the empirical settings and makes it possible to reflect on how this role influences governmental policies on mobility.

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Current Project:

Pursuing Order on Sudanese Hinterland Roads: An Ethnography of Travel Communities

Transportation in Sudan is undergoing a state of transition. Huge sums have been invested in the construction of new roads within and outside urban centres during the oil boom of the past decade. This process has created a dual road regime in the country where paved roads serve urban centres in parallel with the distinguished trans-rural Sudanese hinterland roads. The Forty Days Road, an exemplification of the latter type, comprises several routes that split into unsur-faced tracks and lanes linking western and central Sudan. The road poses a constant challenge for vehicles and passengers. Lorries spend much of the journey in isolation and depend greatly on their navigators’ skills. Exposed to the will of nature and political instabilities in Darfur, the  ravel community is constantly involved in innovation, from appropriating vehicle bodies to constructing social networks along the road.

By enquiring into the spatial meanings and practices at stake, the study seeks to find the order that is built on the dialectical relation between uncertainty and innovation on the road.

The study is part of the chair of Anthropology’s larger research project “Roadside and Travel Communities – Towards an Understanding of the African Long Distance Road”.

Further information (publications)

Current Project:

Female Identity between Passivity and Agency, Contemporary Fiction by Ugandan Women Writers

The dissertation analyses selected Ugandan women novels with the aim of ascertaining the development and modification of female identities. The writers use their literature to advocate for an acknowledged status for women in their country by stressing the difficulties which women have to cope with. The narratives represent common problems for women, for example male physical and psychological dominance as well as gaps in the current family and clan security nets, which are worsened by greater problems, such as wars, diseases (HIV/Aids) or poverty. The authoresses place the female characters in detailed depictions of the social system of Uganda. Digesting daily life in literature, the writers create female characters in the novels which are confronted with diverse aggravated circumstances and show completely different ways of dealing with these problems. While some remain passive and incapable of dealing with life, others react with agency and manage to generate a change for the better. In this way, the writers wish to create the readers’ awareness and to give the voiceless a voice.

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Research Interests:

Contemporary and Modern Visual Art, Art History, Postcolonial Theories, African Modernisms, Institutional Art collections and archives in Africa

Geographical Area:

Nigeria

Current Project:

New Sacred Art – Das Gesamtwerk Susanne Wengers im Kontext der nigerianischen Moderne

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Research Interests:

African Sociology, Decolonization, Social Theory, Violence and Gender in Africa, Industrial Sociology

Geographical Area:

South Africa

Current Project

A Sociological Understanding of the Minibus-Taxi Industry in South Africa: Informality, Patriarchy and Violence

My projects looks at the three overlapping/intersecting issues in the minibus taxi industry in South Africa which include conflict, violence and gender. The two central issues for this thesis are gender and violence. This is so because the minibus taxi industry is one of those sites of patriarchy. Women are struggling to operate within this industry that is characterised by violence and patriarchy. Unlike existing studies, conflict and violence in this proposed study are not reduced to ‘taxi wars’. What is being investigated is the ‘everyday violence’ in its multidimensional form – ‘structural, systemic, symbolic, verbal, cultural, organisational and normative violence’. The hypothesis of this study is that patriarchy, if looked at from a gender perspective, is an inherently violent structure of power, and its manifestations might be one of the key reasons why women are struggling to enter and operate successfully in this male-dominated industry. Conceptually and theoretically, the proposed thesis will draw from the decolonial school of thought which enables diagnosis of systemic and institutional violence, including patriarchy. The proposed thesis will also pay attention to what Cedric J. Robinson (1983) termed racial capitalism and its patriarchal labour regimes. This is important because it forms part of the overarching systematic and structural terrain within which the minibus taxi industry emerges. Therefore, the overarching objective of the study is to investigate everyday violence in the minibus taxi industry, with a focus on how violence affects and shapes the gender dynamics. Subsequently, the main research question of the proposed study is: what forms of conflicts and violence haunt the minibus taxi industry and how do these forms of violence affect women who own and drive taxis in South Africa?

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Research Interests:

Human Rights

Geographical Area:

Tanzania

Current Project:

Practicability of the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights in Protecting the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Tanzania: Case Studies of the Hadzabe and Maasai

There is not in place a uniform definition of the term “collective human rights” at least in the African human rights instruments. However, these rights have been contextually referred to be relevant for certain communities or groups of people with a common shared interest or identity.

The research on the applicability of the African regional human rights law at the national level in Tanzania has been preferred to contribute knowledge to the field of human rights in Africa. The study focuses on the recent practice of peoples’ rights provided for under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 1981 herein referred to as “the Charter”. The specific rights in question are peoples’ rights to equality, existence and self-determination, free disposal of wealth and natural resources, economic, social and cultural development, peace and security and general satisfactory environment favourable for development respectively. The research seeks to answer an overriding question as to whether peoples’ rights stated in Charter are instrumental in promotion and protection of indigenous peoples’ rights in Tanzania, drawing specific examples from the Hadzabe and Maasai communities.

This research involves both desk and empirical research. Desk research entails visits to the libraries and relevant documentation centres as well as the online resources. As to the empirical research, the researcher intends to employ structured and semi-structured interviews to obtain relevant information from the legal experts, officers in the governmental and non-governmental organisations and representatives from the selected Hadzabe and Maasai communities.

In the end, the researcher expects to have established in details, the foundation for the inclusion of peoples’ rights in the Charter and their relationship with the indigenous peoples’ rights; explained indigenous peoples’ insights on the relevancy of peoples’ rights to their own communities, described the status quo of Tanzania’s fulfilment of her domestic duty as a member of the Charter to promote and protect (indigenous) peoples’ rights in the country and finally, the study intends to provide viable recommendations as to the best practice in fulfilment of such duty.  

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Current Project:

Ein lebendiges Archiv afrikanisch(-diasporisch)er dekolonialer In(ter)ventionen: Kulturproduktion, Akademie und aktivistische Kulturvermittlung

European expansion and hegemony since 1492 has constituted a profoundly consequential event – both for the history of Europe/the West and that of the nations of the “global South” formerly subjected to European colonial rule. This historically unique process, given its global scope and duration, has had formative influences on the social, political and economic systems, and has thus influenced the areas of science, culture, literature and philosophy of the formerly colonised societies. Pursuing the question of how Africans and People of African descent used literary practices and theoretical discourse to respond to the European master narrative of modernity, civilisation and progress aimed at legitimising colonialism and racism will open up a heretofore negated perspective of Europe and raise awareness for the entangled (his)stories of the two continents. My research interest goes beyond a simple revision of the perspective that views Africans and people of African descent in Europe and the Americas merely as colonised or discriminated passive participants of European modernity: Viewing Europe through the prism of African and African-diasporic authors and theorists also makes it possible to see the many positions towards and interpretations of modernity which originated in Africa and its diasporas themselves, and how these have contributed to modernity in the West.

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Research Interests:

Since 2009 – under the working title: Undoing Architecture – and driven by the spatial politics of Johannesburg I have generated and published a substantial body of artistic work and scholarly writing. This work sits at the core of my PhD. The research encompasses various fields, including art, architecture, urban studies, public space and photography.

Geographical Area:

Johannesburg, South Africa

Current Project:

Undoing the undoings of the Johannesburg Art Gallery: For the museum yet to become

There is currently still a relative dearth of scholarship on the contemporary African urban condition. In this context I believe there exists an excellent opportunity, using the intersection between art, architecture and urban(ist) disciplines, to pry open new and relevant readings on the emergent dynamics of African cities, and the role of architecture and space within these cities. A deep artistic reading of spatial constructs in the cities of the South, offers the promise of challenging the entrenched neo-liberalist attitude overly defining the North, and the West (threatening to choke possibilities for other models to emerge in the Global South). With this substantial research gap in mind, I have situated my artistic research primarily in, and base it on, both the persistent (post1994) and newer spatial anomalies to be found in the city of Johannesburg.

Over almost a decade I have engaged intensely and consistently in a form of artistic practice which essentially uses architecture against itself. I refer to this mode of working as ‘Undoing Architecture’. It serves as the conceptual framework for my inter-disciplinary practice, and relies on a self-reflexive entanglement of thinking, art-making, curating, teaching and writing.

Architecture, the discipline in which my original tertiary training took place, is implicitly inter-disciplinary. In contradiction to this ostensible dynamism it largely tends to play itself out as an incredibly slow, self-assured and relatively uncritical discipline, generally only poorly suited to deal with the complexities, of particularly urban challenges, of life in the 21st century contemporary condition. In the context of my PhD studies at BIGSAS, which focus on the striated context of the city of Johannesburg, I would plan to interrogate the limits and possibilities of architecture by ‘undoing’ these, using the discipline of art to do so.

Much of my practice has grappled with the expression and translation of line, boundary and territory, within and between Johannesburg’s multiplicities of liminal conditions and uncomfortably unequal adjacencies. I want to use the PhD to critically self-reflect on, and situate my artistic/architectural/teaching practice as a relevant approach towards reading and re-reading selected post-1994 Johannesburg everyday conditions; coupled with the more, or less, consciously spatio-political practices accompanying these conditions.

The productively deforming and transforming moves I am able to achieve via the conceptual framework of ‘Undoing Architecture’ raise critical issues around:

• the generally unquestioned conventions which govern a hierarchical disposition of spaces within buildings;
• the power relationships which exist between these spaces and buildings;
• and the absolutist often western morphologies of architecture at large.

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Research Interests:

Business and Corporate Ethics, Economics of Religion, Christianity in Africa, Pentecostalism and Charismatics, Religion and Politics, Christian Theology, Biblical Exegesis

Geographical Area:

Ghana

Current Project:

Entrepreneurship and Prosperity Gospel. A Business and Corporate Ethical Perspective on Neo-Pentecostal/Charismatic Economy in Ghana

The research is exploratory in nature. It has seven Neo-Pentecostal/Charismatic churches, their pastors and their ancillary philanthropic and profit generating institutions such as educational setups and social service agencies as subject of study. The churches, all headquartered in the Accra metropolis of Ghana, include the International Central Gospel Church (ICGC), Lighthouse Chapel International (LCI), Royalhouse Chapel International (RCI), Action Chapel International (ACI), Perez Chapel International (PCI), Global Revival Ministries (GRM) and Harvest Chapel Ministries (HIM). Focusing on these churches as religious-economic enterprises and their pastoral agents and institutional managers both as entrepreneurs and as ethical leaders, the work will dedicate a special attention to internal entrepreneurial structures of the churches and their para-institutions and to the message of prosperity that serves as a success-factor in the NP/C religious-economy. Consequently, the work will rest on the three hinges of church economy, ethical concepts and ethical conduct.

In the project, I will seek to answer questions bordering on all that is entailed in Neo-Pentecostal/Charismatic (NP/C) entrepreneurship in Ghana and the ethical concepts contained in and produced by the economic message and activities of the churches. Postulating that NP/CCs do not only have normative ethics but likewise their own economic ethics, a central objective of the research is a pursuit of a Business and Corporate “Ethic” that could be viewed not only as springing out of the economic actions of the selected churches and their leaders – the so-called ethics of doing –, but also as specific and unique to Neo-Pentecostal/Charismatic Churches, so that one could speak of Neo-Pentecostal/Charismatic Business and Corporate Ethics.

As an empirical research that applies a mixed methodology, the work will rely on qualitative data sourced from interviews, literature and media content analysis and from diverse ethnographic studies including participatory observation and online ethnography. With the research towing the line of the so-called empirically informed ethics and with economic ethics boiling to the three core factors of honesty, persistency and consistency (cf. Boatright 2014, Tanner et al 2010), the work will use a quantitative tool to assess these three factors in the economic and ethical conduct of the churches, their pastors and para-institutional managers. Purpose of this is not to prove how ethical or unethical the economy of the churches is, but rather how robust and significant the discovered ethical concepts are in the entrepreneurship of churches in the NP/C domain.

With this work, I hope to contribute to scholarship on African Pentecostalism and Charismatics from Business and Corporate Ethical point of view, shedding light on the ethical motivation and challenges in Neo-Pentecostalism/Charismatics in Ghana today.

* Boatright, J. R. (2014). Ethics and the Conduct of Business (7th ed.). Essex: Pearson. Tanner, C., Brügger, A., van Schie, S., & Lebherz, C. (2010). Actions speak louder than words: The benefits of ethical behaviors of leaders. Zeitschrift für Psychologie/Journal of Psychology, 218(4), 225-233.

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Research Interests:

Intercultural Communication, Pragmatics

Geographical Area:

Southern Cameroons in the defunct British Nigeria (curently Northwest and Southwest Regions of The Republic of Cameroon)

Current Project:

Power and Identity in Colonial Letters: The Case of Southwest Cameroon

British Southern Cameroons was administered by Britain as a League of Nations Trustee Territory. The territory was seized from Germany and handed to Britain as part of WW1 settlements. The then German Kamerun was split between France and Britain, with France taking about 4/5th and Britain the rest, which it called British Southern Cameroons. This research is a critical analysis of the discourse of identity and power in colonial correspondences written between 1916 and 1961 with regards to the then British Southern Cameroons. It aims to identify power and identity categories discussed by the colonised and the colonisers in the archival data collected, the discursive strategies of these authors, and the accompanying social consequences in the colonised regions. The findings will be relevant for understanding how colonial societies worked, how the contact of colonial and non-colonial knowledges, practices and interactions took place, were co-constructed or challenged, and how British colonisation still affects the contemporary Northwest and Southwest regions of the Republic of Cameroon.

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Research Interests:

Religious Studies, Slavery, Poverty, ICT, Open Science, Cognitive Justice

Geographical Area:

Niger

Current Project:

Penser et faire le développement au Niger : Le rôle des acteurs islamiques locaux

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Research Interests:

African and Afrophone Literatures, African Languages, Cognitive Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Ecocriticism, Ecolinguistic, Feminisms, Popular Arts (HipHop and Rap), Political Protest, Postcolonialism

Geographical Area:

Senegal

Current Project:

Towards a Fluid Ecosophy: Conceptualisations of WATER on the Senegalese coast

In my dissertation, I aim to explore the perception of WATER on the Senegalese coast from an ecolinguistic and a double language (comparative and contrastive) perspective. I will explore and compare how the cognitive-semantic domain of WATER is represented in the discourses of Wolof speakers, French speakers of Senegalese origin, and French residents living in the same area.

I aim to answer two sets of questions. The first group of questions is concerned with conceptualisations of WATER, and asks which conceptualisations are shared and which differ among the three groups (Wolof speakers, French speakers of Senegalese origin, and French residents). The second set of questions operates at the level of discourse and aims to explore the consequences of the conceptualisations in regards to perceptions of the environment, including evaluations of change and definitions of problems.

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Current Project:

Artisanal Gold Mining in Um Badir, Sudan

Research Interests:

Circulation of Information/Information Flow, Crisis and Risk Communication, Study of Events (Health and Political Crisis), Uncertainty, Epistemology, African studies

Geographical Area:

Guinea

Current Project:

Unexpected Regime Change and Military Transition in the Republic of Guinea: Information Flow, Uncertainty and Ambiguity

This thesis project is part of the debate on the reconfiguration of African studies. To contribute to this reflection, this research project analyzes exceptional and unexpected situations in which clear explanations and answers to pressing questions are not easily available. As a case study, it concentrates on the seizure of power by the military in the Republic of Guinea. This incident is illustrative of these unpredictable situations. The empirical objective of this work will be to study the way in which information circulates in the current context of uncertainty in the Republic of Guinea on the one hand, and to analyse the interactions between the information circuits, the uncertainties around the phenomenon, the ambiguities of the actors, and the power relations. The aim is also to conduct a methodological and theoretical reflection on the role of the researcher in the production and circulation of information. To contribute to a reconfiguration of African studies, this reflection questions and compares different systems of thought and communication (scientific and non-scientific) on their capacity to produce certainties in the face of unexpected events.

The approach is based on the development of an analytical framework based on the circulation of information to understand social phenomena (exceptional and unexpected). It combines historical, ethnographic and qualitative sociological methods to:

• understand the circulation and the multiple paths of information as well as its moments of attenuation, transformation, deviation or disappearance;
• highlight the uncertainties, ambiguities and power relations that take shape through the circulation of information.

In the end, this work provides a reflection on the role of the social sciences in the production of knowledge in so-called "African studies".

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Current Project:

The Cultural and Social Hermeneutics of Death in Morocco

Current Project:

Tracing Karakul in Postcolonial Practices and Landscapes

Research Interests:

Parenting & Parenthood (Motherhood, Fatherhood), Gender, Future Making, Kinship, (dealing with) Uncertainty

Geographical Area:

Tanzania

Current Project:

The Work of Bringing up Children. Parental Practices in Times of Uncertainty in East Africa

All around the world, parenthood and the eventual outcomes of parental work are highly context-dependent and characterized by multiple uncertainties. In circumstances marked by additional economic and social uncertainty, the work of bringing up children increases in difficulty and the efforts of parents to create better futures for and through their children become significantly more complex.

Resting on this premise, my PhD project explores the issue of ‘making a living’ in times of uncertainty from a new angle, namely, that of parents of children and adolescents in post-Structural Adjustment sub-Saharan Africa, thus expanding previous perspectives on navigation and future making. Additionally, given that there are obvious gaps in the research and literature on parenting and parenthood – specifically a bias for motherhood – I broaden gendered perspectives on parenting, parenthood, and parental aspirations, by using a joint approach and considering the parental work of both female and male actors. Building on my previous work on maternal navigation in Zanzibar, my research is guided by the overall question of how people who parent experience and deal with uncertainty.

Based on Esther Goody’s influential work, the project approaches parenting as a practice that is compounded of different tasks which can be redistributed to different people within a kinship network and that aims at guiding children into a successful and effective adult status. Both male and female actors, as well as ‘biological’ and ‘social’ parents can fulfil, share, and delegate parental roles. These parental practices represent an important way that kinship and belonging are made and manifested.

Secondly, parenthood is understood as strongly influenced by gendered and normative images that influence the distribution, execution, and valuation of parental tasks and roles. As previous approaches have often taken a focus on either father- or motherhood or have implicitly equated parenthood with motherhood, it is necessary to untangle the gendered practices and norms that influence parents’ actions to understand how they mutually constitute each other. In this context I also explore the role of social, religious, and political institutions in the (re)production of the gendered norms of parenthood.

Finally, my project combines considerations about parenthood with debates about uncertainty in African contexts, which so far have mainly focused on young, mostly male actors in urban areas. Parents navigate uncertainty in order to cope with the present ('getting by'), but also to secure a future for themselves and their offspring ('getting on'); a practice presumably involving much higher and complex stakes than the individualized efforts of relatively unattached youth.

I will investigate these questions and dynamics in a total of twelve months of episodic anthropological field research in the city of Lindi in south-eastern Tanzania, which promises to be an interesting case study as a place currently in transition due to infrastructural and economic changes over the last few years and the near future. My main research methods are participant observation, social network analysis and qualitative interviews, guided by an exploratory, inductive and - above all – relational methodological approach and taking place in three main settings, namely families, institutions (NGOs, state institutions, religious institutions) and the public sphere.

Current Project:

Histories and Memories of Transatlantic Returning

Current Project:

Sustainable bioenergy and biofuel potentials from agricultural crops and residues in Uganda and Tanzania

Biofuel and bioenergy production from agricultural crops and residues are frequently discussed issues in Europe as well as in developing countries. Main counterarguments are expulsion of small-scale farmers, conversion of forests and idle areas, land grabbing, competition between food and fuel. However, providing special conditions allowing sustainable production, both energy sources can make contributions to strengthen the national energy supply and help to reduce import costs for fossil energy sources and CO2 emissions.

Tanzania and Uganda, both developing countries with rapidly growing populations and a lack of fossil energy sources and energy supply, demonstrate huge potential for electricity and fuel generation from agricultural crops and residues. In order to understand the development in the bioenergy and biofuel sector of Uganda and Tanzania, the research seeks to answer the following questions: Which types of bioenergy and biofuel developments in Uganda and Tanzania offer sustainable production at a local level? Which stakeholders are influencing the bioenergy and biofuel sector at the national level? Which differences appear in the policy progress and perception of biofuel and bioenergy in the two countries?This study therefore intends to fill this important gap by investigating two main research questions: Firstly, it will look at what explains variation across space in the nature and intensity of violent youth activities in Africa. Secondly, it will look at how the networks of violent youth, political parties and party leaders are created and sustained. The Greed – Grievances theories and the Selective Violence theory will be utilized for theoretical framework of the study. The nature of the research design is mixed research as it will utilize quantitative and qualitative data such as datasets, multiple sources of information and interviews for Comparative and Network Analysis of the study.

Research Interests:

Religious Plurality, Multiculturalism, Peace Building

Geographical Area:

Niger

Current Project:

Gouvernance de la pluralité religieuse au Niger : rôles des associations interreligieuses

Inter-religious activities represent a place of encounter between people who may or may not belong to the same religious tradition, and offer an opportunity to observe the interactions that occur. Set up in Niger by NGOs, these inter-religious associations are mainly involved in promoting peaceful cohabitation and conflict prevention. These associations operate throughout the country to the point where the State is trying to make them a tool for the management of religious plurality through inter and intra religious dialogue.

What do these associations tell us about the transformations of the Nigerien religious landscape resulting from the new religious situation and the ways of managing the plurality that it induces? As part of a socio-anthropology of religion, this research aims to show how religious differences are mobilised in the service of living together, as well as the challenges that this initiative faces.

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Research Interests:

Social Movements, Race, Racism, Capitalism, Diaspora

Geographical Area:

United States of America, Germany, Transnational

Current Project:

Black Lives Matter: Emerging Forms and Subjectivities of Activism in St. Louis, Missouri

This project concerns the ongoing Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) from the perspective of participants in the Network for Black Lives in St. Louis, Missouri. On the one hand, my research aims to focus on the everyday lives of activists and draw connections to the political economy of activism this urban neoliberal landscape. On the other hand, the project focuses on the re-signification, mobilization and enactment of race, with a specific focus on negotiations around blackness. Finally, the project is envisioned as engaged action research where the academic output will be supplemented by journalistic writing and relevant research with my interlocutors.

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Research Interests:

Land and Natural Resources, Political Economy, African Politics

Geographical Area:

Tanzania

Current Project:

Tracing Visions of Socio-ecological Transformation and their Ethical Deliberation in Tanzania: The Case of Land Futures

My research focuses on conceptions of land use, particularly ontological conflicts over sustainable land use plans as competing visions of bioeconomy in Tanzania. At the height of the land rush, sustainable land use plans are presented by the government and international organizations as laudable policy aspirations. However, there is a significant body of literature that views the rush to land use planning as an indicator of often indirectly experienced effects of an ongoing and incomplete primitive accumulation (Blustein et al, 2018; Walwa, 2017; Huggins, 2016; Peluso and Lund, 2011). I explore how these bioeconomy discourses and practices (in the name of planning, conservation and productivity) have been interpreted, understood, contested or/and translated into popular understandings in Tanzania.

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Research Interests:

Literatures in African Languages, more specifically focused on Swahili poetry and novels. Swahili, Swahili Literature, Poetics, Literature, Literary Stylistics, Languages and Cultures, Discourse Analysis, Linguistics, Bantu Languages, Bantu Linguistics, Arabic Language and Linguistics, Sociolinguistics

Geographical Area:

East Africa, Indian Ocean

Current Project:

Zanzibari Swahili Poetic Imaginaries and Networks

As part of the University of Bayreuth’s Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence my research will focus on the multi-layered co-presence and circulation of verbal arts in relation to narratives, imagery, and sound travelling the Indian Ocean. In line with the cluster project, literary works are not conceived as neatly delineated units, but as internally multiple and dynamic configurations in relation to other literary works and artworks. The main question, which feeds into the cluster’s wider interest in practices of worlding, is: Which multiple world(s) do literature and other artworks inhabit, imagine and construct?

The aim of the Prof. Dr. Clarissa Vierke case study, to which my PhD research will contribute, is to examine how popular Swahili poetry and songs relate to the broader Indian Ocean. Although Swahili expressive cultures have been recurrently characterized as shaped by a multitude of influences, there has been little investigation of how Swahili poetry and music have actually incorporated elements from elsewhere, for example India and the Middle East. My part in the project will focus on Swahili poetry and song lyrics in Zanzibar and Oman, and their entanglement through back and forth migration and, more recently, social media.

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Research Interests:

Human Rights, International Law

Current Project:

Möglichkeiten der Bindung transnationaler Unternehmen an Menschenrechte aus völkerrechtlicher Perspektive. Eine Untersuchung mit dem Fokus auf afrikanische Gaststaaten und deutsche Gesetzesinitiativen

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Research Interests:

Literature, Film, History

Geographical Area:

Cameroon

Current Project:

Le cinéma allemand au Cameroun d'Entre-Deux Guerres : Analyse d'un Révisionnisme colonial en images

In the wake of waning enthusiasm for the colonial project, film became one of several tools deployed by the pro-colonial elite during the Weimar period to promote colonialism. This project examines the presentation in images and, therefore, in discourse, of colonial revisionism in a selection of films produced between 1927 and 1937 to determine the strategies used for relaying German propaganda in favor of Cameroon’s retrocession.

Drawing on historical, discursive, ideological and political analyses of these films, as well as through an examination of film techniques and processes, this project will address the following: What were the underlying issues and production mechanisms of German films made in Cameroon after the Versailles Conference? How were Cameroon and her inhabitants perceived and depicted by the German collective imagination? What technical devices were used to interpret the "colonial revisionist" discourse? Did the films made in Cameroon help strengthen the Colonial Idea?

Existing scholarship on colonial or African cinemas tends to focus on the relationship between colonialism and film production before turning to national cinemas. The only in-depth study of German colonial film remains Furhmann’s Imperial Projections, which focuses on the period from 1904 to the end of WWI. For this reason, this project is unprecedented not only in its temporal and regional focus, but also for its epistemological approach, drawing on historiographical survey instruments, film construction and technique, as well as semiology and postcolonial theories in order to better understand the role of German cinema in the colonies.

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Current Project:

The Creation of Environmental Movements with Feminist Alliances: Survival Mechanism of Rural Women

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Current Project:

The Politics of Infant Formula Regulation: Kenya in Comparative Perspective

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Research Interests:

Development Economics, particularly the Economics of Education, Demography and Regional Integration

Geographical Area:

Sub-Saharan Africa, East Africa

Current Project:

Four Essays in Development Economics and Regional Economic Integration

The research anticipated in the dissertation is focused on a quantitative (empirical) analysis of economic development in Africa. I will produce four individual research papers which aim at estimating the causal effect of specific developmental policies and programs of African economies, on both an aggregate-, and on an individual level. The main task will lie in the identification of viable settings for causal inference, the compilation of comprehensive datasets, as well as the subsequent estimation of causal relationships, employing modern econometric methods. My research will contribute to the interdisciplinary research project “MuDAIMa” conducted under the Cluster of Excellence EXC 2052 “Africa Multiple”. MuDAIMa investigates the memberships and affiliations of (Anglophone) African economies’ in multiple, competing, regional economic communities (RECs). As part of this agenda, my research will try to investigate the impact of existing institutional arrangements of African economies. The initial project of the dissertation explores the effect of Free Primary Education policies (FPE) on women’s fertility in three countries of the East African Community (EAC), namely Burundi, Kenya and Rwanda.

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Research Interests:

Youth Development, Youth Mentoring, Education, Social Exclusion and the Youth, Marginalisation and the Youth, “at-risk Youth”, Youth Inclusion, Socio-economic Development, Non-profit Organisations, Youth Policy, Social Policy, Poverty

Geographical Area:

Zambia

Current Project:

Towards Theory Building: An Exploration of Experiences and Perceptions Associated with Youth Mentoring Practice in Southern Africa. A Grounded Theory Study in Zambia

The majority of disadvantaged young people the world over lack positive role models, and meaningful relationships with supportive adults within their immediate families and communities, which promote young people’s wellbeing. Youth mentoring is one of the most renowned social interventions, especially in the Anglo-Saxon countries, where it continues to grow. There is also evidence of its presence in other parts of the world, including Africa. However, there seems to be limited literature to support youth mentoring practice in Africa, particularly Zambia. Defining youth mentoring is also a challenge to researchers due to its flexible nature and, thus, its use in diverse contexts for a variety of reasons. Thus, this study will be based in Zambia, a context where youth mentoring activities seem evident but may not have been scientifically explored.

Considering these challenges and, consequently, the research question: what experiences and perceptions do mentors and mentees associate with youth mentoring practice in Zambia? A qualitative constructivist grounded theory approach seems to be most suitable, as there seems to be no existing theory available to explain the processes of youth mentoring in Zambia. Being an emerging method, this approach will allow the research process to begin with the empirical world and develop inductively in trying to understand mentors and mentees’ experiences, meanings, and actions within their contexts, as information will continue to develop gradually, and knowledge continue to advance. Through its interpretive methods, this approach will aim at gaining detailed, in-depth and situated knowledge about the phenomenon of youth mentoring in Zambia.

Therefore, using the constructivist grounded theory methodology, the researcher will explore the daily experiences and perceptions that mentors and mentees associate with the phenomenon, youth mentoring, in the Lusaka and Copperbelt provinces of Zambia. Being a constructivist grounded theory study, the following research objectives will guide and direct the research process:

• To explain youth mentoring from a Zambian perspective and contribute to existing global debate;
• to construct theory/concepts that may contribute to a better understanding of youth mentoring in Zambia and its potential as an intervention to reduce discrimination for disadvantaged youth, especially among policymakers and youth development practitioners;
• to present findings that may contribute to the developing and strengthening of the existing practice of youth mentoring in Zambia.

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Current Project:

Voices on race and power in the humanitarian sector. A critical historical sociology of Médecins Sans Frontières, c. 1990s to 2000s

Research Interests:

Democratic Transition, Regime Consolidation, Cultural Policies, Identity Building and Nationalism in Post-Arab Spring Countries

Geographical Area:

Northern Africa (especially Tunisia and Morocco), Mali, Yemen

Current Project:

Kulturpolitik in Tunesien, Marokko und Mali nach dem Arabischen Frühling – Förderinstrument für Stabilität?

By combining cross-case and within-case comparisons, my study will try to provide some new theoretical insights into the interdependence and mutually reinforcing effects of cultural policies and domestic stability. I will do so by studying the cultural policies in three different countries which have all been affected by the Arab Spring in 2010/11. The countries examined are Tunisia, Morocco and Mali. To collect the necessary qualitative data, I will take a mixed methods approach using in-depth content analysis of media reports, archive material and offical documents as well as semi-structured interviews with experts and relevant actors on the ground. For the sake of practicability, I will limit myself to the analysis of three main categories of cultural policies, namely the treatment of religious questions, the treatment of ethnic and linguistic questions, and the treatment of material and immaterial cultural heritage.

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Research Interests:

Migration and Development, Urbanization, Urban Governance, Neighborhoods and Citizen-led Development, Urban Poverty and Inequalities, Political Participation and Collective Action, Participatory Governance, Urban Social Movements

Geographical Area:

Ghana

Current Project:

Internal Migration: Neighbourhood Associations and its Consequences on Political Participation in Urban Slums in Ghana

The thesis explores the nexus between internal migration and political participation in Ghana. While the linkages between internal migration and socio-economic development on both origin and destination and its impact on the well-being of actors have been extensively studied, how the phenomenon influences the participation of actors in politics remains relatively unexplored. The dominant internal mobility in Ghana is north-south migration, in which rural dwellers relocate on a temporal and permanent basis into urban slums in the south. In these slums, migrants live under conditions of precarity and lack of basic amenities and have to negotiate with authorities and sometimes bend the rules and resist forceful evictions through protest and demonstrations. Despite the increasing attention scholars have paid to internal migration in Ghana, how migrants employ political participatory tools to resist evictions and demand development in their communities is largely unaccounted for in the literature. The thesis illuminates this critical blind spot. The key objectives of the study are first and foremost to explore the current dynamics of north-south migration in Ghana. Secondly, to explore how migrants in urban slums navigate the challenge of basic amenities using conventional and non-conventional forms of politics. Thirdly, examine the everyday politics and collective actions of migrant slum dwellers. Fourthly, critically engage the relationships and nuances between slum dwellers and authorities and finally to explore how urban slums could be made more liveable through a bottom-up approach of participatory governance.

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Research Interests:

Large-scale Mining and Infrastructure Projects, Business-Society Relations, Low-status Knowledge (Transnational Professionals), Technical Zones, China-Africa

Geographical Area:

Guinea, Senegal, Kenya

Current Project:

Frictional encounters? Governing and contesting Chinese industrial mining projects in Guinea

Could we still speak of Chinese actors’ engagement in Africa as the same monolithic ‘new phenomenon’ featured in academic work produced from the late 2000s? Chinese non-state actors are often deemed to be politically embedded, treated as extensions of the Chinese state. However, as time passes by, Chinese project operators (companies) gradually gain memberships in other transnational and local networks, and Chinese professionals accumulate what Valverde calls ‘low-status knowledge’. Low-status knowledge is defined as common views and beliefs held by practitioners, articulated in routine practice (Valverde, 2003).

I shall discuss how changing conditions, such as multiple membership and low-status knowledge, might impact existing translation from headquarters and technological zones to overseas projects (Barry 2006). The concept ‘boundary object’ will serve as the empirical entry point. It refers to the standardized and ad hoc classifications (of things and people) in everyday work life (Star 1990, Bowker and Star 2000). By observing how boundary objects organize and are organized by work practice, this study will help better understand potentially diversified business-society relationship around Chinese projects in Africa.

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Current Project:

Egypt as a transitional area for the spread of the Arabic language in Africa

Research Interests:

Law, African Human Rights System

Current Project:

Claiming LGBTQI+ rights through the African human rights system – Analysis of normative and procedural frameworks

This thesis discusses and answers the question on how to best utilize the normative and procedural frameworks of the African human rights system in order to protect and strengthen LGBTQI+ rights. It does this by analysing substantive rules, institutions and their procedural frameworks at the international, regional and sub-regional levels. This question is important because LGBTQI+ rights in Africa are a very topical issue that is regularly and globally discussed in the scientific community. There have been legal and socio-legal publications which however have been fallen short in terms of regionally owned and grounded analysis. The few times in which the role of the African human rights system in strengthening the rights of LGBTQI+ people has been discussed, this has focused on warnings against the direct involvement of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, depicting this central pillar of the African human rights system as a problematic forum which could engender backlash instead of highlighting possible paths. However, other possibilities of the normative and procedural frameworks, which offer prospects, are routinely neglected. The dissertation will therefore engage in detail with the opportunities given by the system in place to build legal and political pathways towards the promotion and protection of LGBTQI+ rights.

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