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December 2015
The Historical Ecology of Malaria in Ethiopia: Deposing the Spirits James McCann The Center for Ideas and Society presents a book talk with James C. McCann, Professor of History, Boston University. Malaria is an infectious disease like no other: it is a dynamic force of nature and Africa’s most deadly and debilitating malady. James C. McCann tells the story of malaria in human, narrative terms and explains the history and ecology of the disease through the science of landscape change. All malaria is local. Instead [...]
Find out moreJanuary 2016
Trevor R. Getz Slave to Wife: Women who Domesticated Empire in the Gold Coast, 1874-1890 Trevor R. Getz, Professor San Francisco State University Department of History Director, Initiative for Public Humanities Slave-trading cases are key sources for the history of the Gold Coast Colony and Protectorate. Court transcripts, reports, and correspondence reveal that the institution of slavery was one 'trouble spot' around which local society rearranged itself under the new laws and landscape of power brought by colonial rule, and that the opportunities and limits [...]
Find out moreApril 2016
Why Minorities/Women/Migrants Are Now Central to New Kinds of Research with Big Data Panel Presentations by Sharon Traweek (UCLA), Diane Yu Gu (UCLA), Reynal Guillen (UCR), Luis Felipe R. Murillo (Harvard), and Jarita Holbrook (University of Western Cape, South Africa). Download presentation abstracts from bigdata.ucr.edu Sponsored by the UCR Center for Ideas & Society, Science Studies and African Studies and the Departments of Anthropology and Physics and Astronomy. Learn more about the Science Studies series and Developing African Studies series. Download flyer
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Resource Extraction and Racial Orders in Post/Colonial Ghana Jemima Pierre, Ph.D., Associate Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology University of California, Los Angeles If colonial rule in Africa depended upon a racial hierarchy that simultaneously consolidated supposedly “tribal” (ethnic) difference and white racial and cultural and political supremacy, what happens to this structure at the end of formal colonial rule? Following this, what does it mean to explore racial formations in our analyses of decolonization and the African postcolony? In this lecture, I use [...]
Find out moreMay 2016
Chibok Syndrome and Beyond: Necropolitics, Biopower and the Pathologies of Weaponized Faith in Nigeria Peyi Soyinka-Airewele Professor, Department of Politics, Ithaca College The horrific terrorist abduction of 276 schoolgirls from their government secondary school in Northeastern Nigeria, catapulted the previously obscure town of Chibok into international limelight. For a while, that act of violence gripped the global imagination and transformed the homegrown “Bring Back our Girls” (BBOG) protests into a global mobilization that even featured Michelle Obama bearing a BBOG sign. Ironically, the rallying power [...]
Find out moreDecember 2016
Seeds of Memory: Botanical Legacies of the African Diaspora Please join us for a talk with Judith Carney, Professor in the Geography Department, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at University of California, Los Angeles. This talk highlights the role of the transatlantic slave trade for the circulation of African plants, animals, and natural knowledge in the Atlantic World. Emphasis is on the significance of slave ships for their circulation and the New World sites where the species were established. Slave ships carried African foodstaples [...]
Find out moreFebruary 2017
Dialogism, Reflexivity, & Collaboration: A Conversation 2:00-3:30 Film screening and Q&A in INTS 1128 3:45-5:15 Talk in INTS 1113 The conversation will focus on dialogic theory and method in linguistic, anthropological, and musical research. Examples where dialogism meets both the research demands and ethical issues of reflexivity and collaborative process will be presented and discussed across textual, audio, and film media. About the film J.C. ABBEY, GHANA'S PUPPETEER 55 minutes; in English, Ga, Twi, Ewe, and Fante Subtitle Options: English, Italian, French J.C.ABBEY, GHANA’S PUPPETEER [...]
Find out moreMarch 2017
Young French Muslim Women Conduct Hijrah Migrations from Marseille to the Muslim World This talk explores the onward migrations being carried out by young Sunni-identified women from Marseille, France, towards their parents’ home countries in North Africa and also the Gulf States. Based on long-term ethnographic research with diasporic youth from Marseille’s northern housing projects, I detail the matrix of circumstances leading highly pious young women, in particular, to depart Marseille in their early twenties. I discuss how social media networks prove essential, furthermore, in [...]
Find out moreMay 2017
Deborah Mindry, UCLA Research Anthropologist UCLA Center for Culture and Health Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences NPI-Semel Institute for Neuroscience Dr. Mindry draws on research conducted in South Africa, Uganda, and Malawi to examine why reproductive health care is still falling far short of meeting the reproductive rights and needs of PLHIV. She examines the benevolent authoritarian discourses shaping the development of policies to deliver reproductive care and the gendered discourses and practices shaping services for PLHIV. She asks, what does it mean to [...]
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This presentation challenges long-standing notions of sexuality as stable and context-free--as something essential, cultural or biological, that individuals discover about themselves. Rather, Donald L. Donham argues that historical circumstance, local social pressure, and the cultural construction of much beyond sex conditions the erotic. The paper makes this argument in relation to the centuries-old European conversation about the idea of the fetish, applied to a highly unusual neighborhood in Atlantic Africa. There, local men, soon to be married to local women, are involved in long-term sexual [...]
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