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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]