AFRISEM CONFERENCE: CALL FOR PAPERS

AFRICA’S PLACE IN A GLOBALIZING WORLD: REIMAGINING GOVERNANCE, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ART AND CULTURE

Date: April 03 (Fri), 2020, Venue: Evanston, Illinois

In his concept of “Flows,” Arjun Appadurai (2000) observed that in today’s globalizing world, things – “ideas and ideologies, people and goods, images and messages, technologies and techniques” – are constantly in motion and that globalization is an inherently disjunctive process that produces inequalities, injustices and problems with governance. It is in this broad understanding of globalization – the expansion and intensification of linkages and flows of people, goods, capital, ideas, and cultures across national borders – that we interrogate the position of Africa.

Our broader questions include but are not limited to:

  • What space does Africa occupy in a globalizing world?
  • Is there an African perspective on how to do science, innovation, economics, or governance?
  • Do African experiences contribute to the elaboration of global assemblages of power, infrastructure, knowledge production, or cultural innovation?
  • Does Africa remain a social laboratory in which great powers expand their economies or experiment with new techniques of governance and population control?
  • Can Africa be its own center of innovation?
  • And can Africans speak to something that is more than African-provincial?

 

The papers may engage with the following themes:

  • Techniques of governance on the continent at the national, regional or community level
  • Global migration, mobilities, movement
  • Infrastructure projects & nationalism & (foreign) interventionism
  • Science and research on and off the continent
  • Art and articulations of cultural identity

 

Papers: Accepted papers will be organized into panels, with each presenter allotted 15 minutes and time for discussion and Q&A.

Posters: Poster proposals are open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Submission guidelines:

  1. Abstracts should be no more than 300 words
  2. To submit, click this link or copy into your browser: https://forms.gle/wvZ9ZCzHYNS9tSZo9

Submission deadline: February 15, 2020
Questions? Email: Afrisem@u.Northwestern.edu

Appadurai, Arjun. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination” in Public Culture2000, 12(1): 1- 19.

Read the full article at: https://www.africanstudies.northwestern.edu/graduate/afrisem/afrisem-conference.html