Collaborative Research Group Africa in the World
Africa in the World - Rethinking Africa’s Global Connections
This AEGIS-CRG aims to build on the richness of knowledge on Africa’s global connections that is already available within the AEGIS network and beyond. The debate about Africa’s changing relations with the world has rapidly evolved over the past few years. The initial emphasis on China’s role in Africa has given way to a more diversified approach, acknowledging that other players have also become important as they not only challenge global power constellations, but also help to reconfigure power constellations and redistribute resources at the local and regional levels – with repercussions for the global level as well. There is a need for a more in-depth reflection on what these new developments mean from the vantage point of Africa. While the continent appears to be central to many debates on the so-called multipolar or polycentric world, Africa is still too often considered merely as a site where multipolarity is played out, while the ways in which Africa and Africans are co-shaping the contemporary world are largely ignored. The AEGIS CRG offers a forum for debate and reflections on some of the larger questions, inlcuding:
- In which way do diverse African actors deal with opportunities and challenges related to current global restructuring, how do they try to enhance their economic or political positions?
- Which new hierarchies of values and stratification are produced in Africa by the circulation of people and ideas, the fusion and syncretisation of images and artefacts?
- Which impact does this have on migration and for images of a “better life”, for Africans, but also for people from other continents who now discover Africa as a destination, among other things to escape environmental hazards or unemployment constraints in their home countries ?
- What is the historic long-term perspective of these developments, how are they embedded in longer-term traditions of economic and cultural exchange between African and other actors and regions?
With a series of events and related publications, and exchange and discussion of new findings and developments between its members and with others, the CRG wants to contribute to the production of knowledge on Africa’s role in the current era of global restructuring.
Contact
Dr. Mayke Kaag (African Studies Centre, Leiden University), m.m.a.kaag@asc.leidenuniv.nl
Dr. Stefan Schmid (Goethe University, Frankfurt), s.schmid@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Upcoming events
Panels at the ECAS 9 conference in Edinburgh, 11-14 June 2019
Convenors: Mayke Kaag and Stefan Schmid
ANTH54: African Global Travellers: (dis)connections, policies, and imaginations
This panel explores the ambitions and experiences of Africans, not in their quality of receiving global tourists but as global travellers themselves, including those who only travel virtually, their actual travel being hampered by visa restrictions, lack of means, and/or the right connections.
Presenters:
Ada Allotey (Accra): The Journey to have an American 'Jackpot Baby': The Experiences of Ghanaian Women Solo Travellers
Susann Baller (Dakar): West African political leaders travelling the world (1950s-1960s): between diplomatic exchange and globetrotting
Marlene Gärtner (Konstanz): "You should be able to speak the language of the global development goals". - Young Cameroonians negotiating mobility between institutional master narratives and local imaginations
Ute Röschenthaler (Mainz): Moving or staying? Traders navigating between promising destinations and complicating policies
ECON35: Tourism in Africa: new hopes, old stereotypes?
This panel investigates the role of tourism in the economic development of African states and communities, and the social benefits and problems this produces, as well as the marketing strategies of African states in emerging tourist markets and encounters with these new categories of clients.
Presenters:
Walter E.A. van Beek (Leiden): 'Bubble dynamics': a theoretical approach of African tourism
Ding Yuan (Shanghai), Ching Lin Pang (Antwerb): The gaze of the dragon: Africa through the eyes of Chinese tourists
Lydia Timona (Leipzig): Effects of tourism on Conservation and socioeconomic development: A case of Lamu Heritage Site
Linus Kalvelage, Javier Revilla Diez (Cologne): Global connections, local development? Capturing value from tourism GPNs in Namibian conservancies
Fikirte Andargie (Addis Ababa): National Parks Governance: Understanding Local Community, Tourism and Conflict Nexus in Ethiopia: Case Studies of Awash National Parks
Daniel Ruhweza (Kampala): Real of Imagined? A critical analysis of the role of the Uganda Tourism Industry in contributing to sustainable development of affected communities
Jennifer Scheffle (Bayreuth): Cultural Tourism in the Kalahari: Sustainable Income-Generation through the Display of Cultural Heritage?
Damilola Agbalajobi (Ife Ife): Citizens of Tourism: Tinapa Resort, Political Subjectivity and the Construction of Transregional Subject
Past events
Destination Africa. Contemporary Africa as a global meeting point
Leiden, 22-23 March 2018
The newly established AEGIS Collaborative Research Group (CRG) ‘Africa in the World – Rethinking Africa’s Global Connections’, will organize the ‘Destination Africa’ conference as its inaugural activity, during which this idea of contemporary Africa as a global meeting point will be explored. Important questions include the ways in which people in Africa perceive this new influx and how they navigate, negotiate, engage, and possibly struggle to strike a balance between their own interests and those of the ‘newcomers’, including their evaluation of questions concerning integration, and the distribution of profits and resources. The conference also aims to shed greater light on the motivations, interests, negotiation strategies and navigating practices of those who see Africa as a destination. Finally, it will be important to put these current global encounters on African soil in a historical perspective.
The call for papers closed on 1 October 2017. Read the call for papers.
More news on the conference programme will follow soon.
Panel at ECAS 7 in Basel , 29.6. – 1.7. 2017
CRG Africa in the World: Global Village, African City. How to read Africa's changing global
29 June, 2017 at 14:00
Convenors
Mayke Kaag (African Studies Centre)
Stefan Schmid (Goethe University Frankfurt)
This panel, organized by the AEGIS CRG 'Africa in the World' aimed to bring together a collection of papers covering diverse aspects of how the African city and its inhabitants are part of, and co-shape, the Global Village.
Papers presented:
- Jan Beek (Goethe University Frankfurt): Selling promises and justifying fraud: Asian MLMs in Nairobi
- Matthias Gruber (Goethe-University): Driving the hectic City. Everyday mobility of Asian migrants in Johannesburg
- Abdourahmane Seck (University Gaston Berger): Jeunes, urbains, mondialisés et musulmans au Sénégal.