Events & Issues
Conferences & Call for Papers
– In Collaboration with Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, Nigeria
Theme: Religion, The State and Global Politics
Date: Monday July 3 – Wednesday July 5, 2017 (Arrival Sunday, July 2, 2017)
Venue: Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, Sokoto, Nigeria,
Description: This conference will seek to decenter narratives of religion and politics produced by scholars and policy-makers in the Global North by encouraging intellectual collaboration and production from within and with a focus on Africa and the African Diaspora. It will contribute to contemporary discourse on religion, the State, and Global Politics, in order to illuminate Africa’s position in global religions, international policy, and national development and identity formation.
In the past, experts on religions and politics have largely engaged topics such as missionary activities, colonialism, and the spread of religion in Africa, as well as questions of cultural survival or defeat. In Western societies, policies and narratives regarding religion are often produced under the assumption that the Church and the State remain fundamentally and ideologically separate. Meanwhile, the connections between religion and state are becoming increasingly relevant worldwide. The global community is being confronted with violent terrorism, which is often tied to organized religion, wrongly or rightly by the media, the State, politicians, and international government and non-governmental organizations. Therefore, in the contemporary geopolitical landscape, state policymakers and scholars of politics, state formation, international relations, and globalization can hardly ignore issues of religion, raising questions of religious freedom, tolerance, violence, and oppression. In light of the oversimplified, popular rhetoric surrounding religion and state policy, scholars and policymakers are tasked to think conceptually and empirically about the role of religion.
Lead Paper Presenters:
1) Professor Abdelkader Tayoub, University of Cape Town, South Africa
2) Professor J. D. Gwamna Nasarawa State University, Keffi, Nigeria
3) Professor Tunde Bewaji, University of West Indies, Jamaica
4) Professor Seyni Moumouni, Abdou Moumouni University, Niamey, Niger Republic
5) Professor Hameed Adama, University of Guandere, Republic of Cameroon
Information: The conference will take place from July 3-5, 2017 at the University Auditorium, main campus of Usmanu Danfodiyo University, Sokoto, Nigeria. Arrival is Sunday, July 2, 2017 and Final Departure is Thursday, July 6, 2017.
Abstracts should be sent to the following email addresses: 1) mbunza@hotmail.com, mbunza66@gmail.com 2) dasylvaus@gmail.com, shina73_1999@yahoo.com
– Would you like to be a published poet?
Huza Press, in collaboration, with Jalada Africa and Africa Writes (UK), will host a 2-day Poetry Workshop and would like to work with 60 young Burundian poets below the age of 25. The workshop will explore the dreams and aspirations of young Burundian refugees in Kigali. The selected work will be edited and published as a collection in French and English and launched during the Africa Writes Festival (UK) in 2017. Learn more about how you participate in the Kigali leg of the tour here: http://www.jalada.org/festival/kigali/
-Things come together
Fiammetta Rocco | February/March 2017
A new wave of African novelists, who write about the experience of migration, is gaining international recognition. Fiammetta Rocco reports on their rise/advance of $1m for any novel is extraordinary; when the book is an unfinished first novel by a young, out-of-work immigrant from Cameroon, something big is happening. Imbolo Mbue (above), whose “Behold the Dreamers” came out recently, is part of a wave of new literature from Africa, much of it written by immigrants to America. “I wanted to write about what it’s like to be working class,” says the author, who was employed in market research in New York until she lost her job in the financial crisis. “To be struggling with poverty, to be barely getting by in America./ together wanted to write about what it’s like to be an immigrant. I wanted to write about me.”
For more details, follow the following link: https://www.1843magazine.com/culture/things-come-
-Multiplier effect: the African PhD students who will grow African research
Alex Buxton | 21 Feb 2017
Taskeen Adam and Richmond Juvenile Ehwi are part of a PhD programme that’s enrolling five African students per year for five years, to help train world-class researchers for Africa. “Africa needs a million new PhD researchers over the next decade.” It’s a huge figure. Professor David Dunne uses it to explain the scale of need in Africa for a new generation of scholars who will pioneer sustainable solutions to many of the continent’s challenges. “There are world-class academics in Africa,” he explains, “but not enough to train and mentor all the young researchers that Africa needs to maintain and accelerate its progress. This is where Cambridge and other leading international universities can help, by making expertise and facilities available to help bridge this mentorship gap.”
Read the story in this link: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/multiplier-effect-the-african-phd-students-who-will-grow-african-research
NEW BOOKS كتب جديدة
– Healthcare Policy in Africa [سياسة الرعاية الصحية في أفريقيا]
Author: Jean-Germain Gros
Language: English
Jean-Germain Gros argues that healthcare policy should be the black box rather than the black hole of African Studies. By this he means that policy should be decoded so its secrets can be laid bare, rather than treated as an impenetrable mystery. To this end, in the book, as well as in the interview, Gros uses a variety of methodological approaches to explain/explicate the relative roles of agency and institutions in the history of healthcare policy in Africa. The book’s central thesis is that healthcare policy does not take place in a vacuum, and it fills an important gap in the scholarship by examining the impact of factors including debt relief, conflict, humanitarianism, brain drain and globalization on policy affecting and affected by the health and wealth of Africans.
Publisher: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016
– In The Color Of My Skin: Poems [في لون بشرتي: أشعار]
Author: Emmanuel Fru Doh
Language: English
In this collection, Doh straddles the Atlantic with voices that doubt, question, and lament the black predicament; voices that evoke the wisdom of Africa’s cultural values in a manner reminiscent of the continent’s orality. Like the echoing of the talking drums in the forests and the savannahs, these voices acknowledge the challenges and vexing truths of the hour: the plight of a people that have been buffeted repeatedly by waves of invasion, deceit, and betrayals, yet against which onslaught they remain standing, frighteningly tall in dignity and integrity.
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon, 2017
http://www.langaa-rpcig.net/
– For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State
[في محبة الرسول: اثنوغرافية دولة السودان الاسلامية]
Author: Noah Salomon
Language: English
Noah Salomon arrests the concept of the Islamic State away from its contemporary stereotypical life by offering a rich and dazzling account of state power and formation in the Sudan. Contesting recent arguments about the impossibility of an Islamic State, Salomon explores the social life of an attempted Islamic State in multiple and often unexpected locations of everyday life. What emerges from his brilliant and ferociously multilayered analysis is an account of the political irreducible to the structure of the nation-state, permeating varied discursive, institutional, and affective registers. In our conversation we talked about the idea of doing an ethnography of the state, colonial and NIF projects of civilizing religion in Sudan, fundamentalization of knowledge, affective citizenship, and hagiography as political critique. This sure to become a classic should be read by all.
Publisher: Princeton University Press 2016
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