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:
- Abstracts should be no more than 300 words
- 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 Culture, 2000, 12(1): 1- 19.
Read the full article at: https://www.africanstudies.northwestern.edu/graduate/afrisem/afrisem-conference.html