ASC seminar by Tom Lavers A growing literature highlights the pursuit of 'double-digit growth' and industrialisation within the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Party's (EPRDF) 'developmental state' model. Yet economic transformation has never been the sole focus of the EPRDF's thinking. Rather, the distributional implications of development have been a central concern ever since the party came to power in 1991 and even beforehand during the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front's...

ASC seminar by Roseanne Njiru In Kenya, marriage is a significant contributor to adult HIV infections. Global public health acknowledges the relationship between gender inequalities and HIV in marriage. However, behaviour change interventions to reduce the marital HIV ‘risk’ in Kenya have emphasized individual-level sexual behaviour change and, in recent times, accelerated biomedical solutions in the drive towards ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030. The social and structural realities that, for...

ASC seminar by Teresa Almeida Cravo Abstract: This talk presents a critique of aid discourses of success and failure as the basis for intervention in Africa, using Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau as case studies. By questioning why such discourses emerge, how they evolve and what their implications are, I seek to contribute to constructivist theories of international relations and development, whilst also offering an analysis of how this instrument of global governance has played out in the two...

ASC seminar by Dan Hodgkinson, Luke Melchiorre and Marcia Schenck. Dan Hodgkinson, Luke Melchiorre and Marcia Schenck launch the Africa special issue: Student activism in an era of decolonization. 'The articles collected in this special issue, and first presented at a workshop entitled 'Student Activism Reconsidered' at the University of Oxford in July 2016, seek to develop understandings of African student activism during this critical period by revisiting postcolonial Africa's first...

ASC seminar by Olumide Popoola and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf. For the last seminar of Michaelmas Term, we were joined by author Olumide Popoola and publisher Bibi Bakare-Yusuf for an interview with Olly Owen on Popoola's new book, 'When We Speak of Nothing' and the bigger vision of Cassava Republic Press, a Nigerian publishing house which aims to generate the 'African archival future.' Book abstract: Best mates Karl and Abu are both 17 and live near Kings Cross. It’s 2011 and racial tensions are...

ASC seminar by Oliver Owen (Oxford) This ongoing research showcases oral history work with surviving Nigerian veterans of the British Army's 81 and 82 Divisions who fought the Japanese in the jungle war in Burma. It foregrounds their memories and interpretations of the experience, and uses popular culture of the period, particularly soldiers' songs, as part of a public engagement project. It also highlights two legacies of war service: The institutionalisation of the postcolonial military,...

ASC seminar by Edith Ojo (Brighton based arts freelancer) & Nicola Stylianou (MoDa, Middlesex University) The Fashioning Africa project at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery (2015-2018) aimed to develop a new collection of African dress from 1960-2007. This was an area where existing British museum collections were weak to the point of virtual non-existence. The project was innovative in other ways too, because, as a collaboration between the Museum’s World Art (formerly ‘Ethnography’,...

ASC seminar by Yusuf Kajura Serunkuma (Makerere University) Exploiting the craft and aesthetics of popular culture—music, poetry, paintings, monuments, coffeehouses, fliers, flags, popular narratives, national celebrations, cultural sites, book fairs, everyday practices such as vehicle tinting—through recent ethnography in Hargeisa (March-October, 2015), literary and discourse analysis, this study examined the ways in which Somaliland nationalism is imagined and mobilised after the 1991 civil...

ASC seminar by Yusuf Kajura Serunkuma (Makerere University) Exploiting the craft and aesthetics of popular culture—music, poetry, paintings, monuments, coffeehouses, fliers, flags, popular narratives, national celebrations, cultural sites, book fairs, everyday practices such as vehicle tinting—through recent ethnography in Hargeisa (March-October, 2015), literary and discourse analysis, this study examined the ways in which Somaliland nationalism is imagined and mobilised after the 1991 civil...

ASC seminar by Florence Bernault (Sciences Po)

ASC seminar by Florence Bernault (Sciences Po)

ASC seminar by Judith Byfield (Cornell University). Byfield offers a riveting narrative of the unexpected convergence of interest between educated Christians and market women in forming the Abeokuta Women's Union in Nigeria, setting this in a wider context of gendered political mobilization in post-WWII Nigeria.

Prof Yemi Osinbajo inaugurates the ASC's new International Advisory Board with a lecture on 'The Challenges of Human Development in 21st Century Africa'. On 12 October 2018, the African Studies Centre inaugurated an International Advisory Board to further links between the Centre, and institutions and organizations on the continent. As part of the event, Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, delivered the lecture recorded here. We very much look forward to working with members of the...

Suad Musa kicks off a new term of ASC seminars by launching her new book. Al-Hakkamat Baggara women hold an instrumental position in rural Sudan, wielding agency, social and political power. This book uncovers their significant, but widely overlooked, role during the war in Darfur from the 1970s, and into today’s continuing conflict. The author examines, in depth, the influence they exercised through composing and reciting poems and songs and through informal speech and other symbolic acts...

Booklaunch of Democracy in Africa which provides the 1st comprehensive overview of the history of contemporary democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Speakers: Professor Nic Cheeseman, Oxford University; Professor Stephen Chan OBE, SOAS; Dr Phil Clark, SOAS. Chaired by Professor Catherine Boone, LSE. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and...

Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International, gives the 2015 Annual Lecture for the African Studies Centre.

Joint Seminar of the African Studies Centre and Reuters Institute. Speakers; Catherine Gichuru (Editor, Nairobi Star, Kenya), Winston Mano (Westminster, editor, Journal of African Media Studies), Nic Cheeseman (African Studies, Oxford), Alexandra Reza (IR, Oxford), Chaired by David Levy (Reuters Institute, Oxford)

Simon Turner, Aalborg University, Denmark, gives a talk for the African Studies Centre Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two exceptional spaces, namely among Burundian refugees living clandestinely in Nairobi and living in a refugee camp in Tanzania, the article argues that displacement can be about staying out of place in order to find a place in the world in the future and is therefore closely linked to temporarily and temporariness. I suggest that the term dis-placement described this...

Roundtable discussion looking at the ongoing crisis in South Sudan Chair: Jason Mosley, Chatham House and African Studies Centre, Speakers: Annette Weber, SWP Berlin, Douglas Johnson, author of "the Root Causes of Sudan'd Civil Wars, Peter Biar Ajak, Cambridge University, Discussant: Dr Ahmed Al-Shahi, Middle East Centre, Oxford University

Danny Hoffman, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington, gives a talk for the African Studies seminar series Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Wale Adebanwi, Associate Professor, African American and African Studies, University of California-Davies, gives the 2013 African Studies Annual Lecture. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Markus Hoehne, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, gives a talk for the Horn of Africa seminar series workshop 'Post-transitional' directions in the Somalias on 30th April 2013. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Part of the Post-transitional directions in the Somalias, Horn of Africa Seminar Series workshop. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Part of the Post-transitional directions in the Somalias, Horn of Africa Seminar Series workshop. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/

Part of the Post-transitional directions in the Somalias, Horn of Africa Seminar Series workshop. Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/