Month: April 2016

Deadline: 15th of July 2016

Date: 17 – 28 October, 2016
Venue: Dakar, Senegal

 

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce its 2016 Child and Youth Institute that will be held for two (2) weeks, from 17 to 28 October 2016. The institute is one of the components of the Child and Youth Studies Programme and is aimed at strengthening the analytic capacities of young African researchers on issues affecting children and youth in Africa and elsewhere in the world. The institute is designed as an annual interdisciplinary forum in which participants can reflect together on a specific aspect of the conditions of children and youth, especially in Africa.

Objectives

The main objectives of the Child and Youth Institute are to:
1. encourage the sharing of experiences among researchers, civil society activists and policy makers from different disciplines, methodological and conceptual orientations and geographical/linguistic areas;

2. promote and enhance a culture of democratic values that allows to effectively identify issues facing children and youth on the African continent; and

3. foster the participation of scholars and researchers in discussions and debates on the processes of child and youth development in Africa.

Organization

The activities of all CODESRIA Institutes centre on presentations made by African researchers, resource persons from the continent and the Diaspora and participants whose applications for admission as laureates have been successful. The sessions are led by a scientific director who, with the support of resource persons, ensures that the laureates are exposed to a wide range of research and policy issues. Each laureate is required to prepare a research paper to be presented during the session. The revised versions of such papers will undergo a peer review to ensure that they meet the required standard for publication by CODESRIA. The CODESRIA Documentation and Information Centre (CODICE) will provide participants with a comprehensive bibliography on the theme of the institute. Access to a number of documentation centers in and around Dakar will also be also facilitated. The CODESRIA Child and Youth Institute will be held in French and English through simultaneous translation.

African Futures and the Futures of Childhood in Africa

The theme of 2016 child and youth institute is “African futures and the futures of childhood in Africa”, and explores the interface between the future aspirations of children and versions of African futures in order to develop insights into how children are both living embodiments and prospective agents of social transformation in African societies. Its point of departure is the idea that children’s images of the future are important for the present understanding of childhood. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, the institute seeks to elucidate the generational implications of “development” to children’s lives, rights, opportunities, entitlements and transitions. It is envisioned that children’s individual aspirations not only intersect with collective expectations of families and communities but also inform and are informed by futurity and contingency of national development. The institute will attend to children’s every day lived experiences of learning, labouring, care and socialization while simultaneously locating these experiences in intersecting axes of history, power, spaces, politics and social structures beyond the “local” environment. In so doing, participants will not only excavate the archeology of childhood but also – through a dialectical understanding of futurity in child development and national development – push the boundary of childhood studies further.

Dominant perspectives on child development and economic development have a legacy of being both normative and western. Western constructions of childhood, especially childhood as a period of innocence and vulnerability where children must be protected from the adult world, have been exported to Africa through colonialism, mass media and development aid. Several programs for African children like schooling and welfare interventions are also rooted in ideas of globalized modernity in which the child was previously located. Yet, research shows how the global model of childhood has failed to describe African children’s lived experiences and realities. Economic development, too, is a “western invention”. Although development is seen as desired end point for all societies, in practice, the hegemonic narrative is that of modernization whereby Africa should emulate the trajectory of the western world: commit to neoliberal market economy, have democratically elected representatives, give education to the young, bring an end to the suffering of the poor, and promote gender equality and rights of minorities. The paradox is that the very things which African countries are unable to achieve because historical circumstances and global power structures prevent them from doing so are used as preconditions and signifiers of development.

A key dimension of child development is the care, socialization and education of children. Education and the “future generation” are inextricably tied. The Sustainable Development Goals have re-scripted the global development agenda, including governments and donors’ involvement in provision of social services, yet, are in many ways a continuation of the modernization paradigm. Investment in human capital formation – conceptualised only in the limited sense of schooling and acquisition of credentials – are widely advanced by international organizations as a panacea to poverty reduction and improvements in the rights of children. However, although the detachment of African children from informal ways of learning and knowing has long been recognised; the “scholarization” of knowledge and erosion of traditional socialisation continues to represent fundamental crisis in social reproduction. Indeed mass schooling shapes the way African children envision their life worlds and futures: fulfilling socioeconomic and cultural expectations, while simultaneously charting individual and collective possibilities for present and anticipated life.

Child development has profound implications both for the future of childhood and for crafting alternative visions of the future by African societies. This is not the least because children play important role as makers and breakers of complex systems of social reproduction. Although childhood is a temporal event – understood as a stage of life before one takes up full adult roles and responsibilities – African children fulfil adult-like roles and responsibilities in the here-and-now by choice, instigated choice or force, as well as through training, apprenticeships, and education. Millions of African children work, migrate and live independently, head households, impact and are impacted by violence as well as make significant decisions that not only shape their daily lives and future life chances but also of those around them. These children “mature” early because of poverty, epidemiological problems, limited schooling, and their responsibilities inside and outside their communities. In this sense, futurity for children is closely entwined with daily existence and intergenerational relationships embedded in care and nurturance within family collectives and wider society. Yet the challenges faced by children also reveal ideologies of national development, in particular the assumption on how, where and by whom the burden of social reproduction is to be borne out and under what circumstances. Furthermore, although many countries in Africa have had considerable success in economic development and relative social stability over the past decades, the ways in which childhood has evolved in these contexts and how children position themselves in the continent’s futures are not explored fully.

The 2016 child and youth institute focuses on how African children place themselves with respect to aspirations, rights, entitlements, and imaginations in Africa’s futures. The institute provides the spaces to evaluate current research and scholarships on the myriad of ways in which children’s understanding of the future might pinpoint social change as well as ideologies and practices of child development and national development. This presupposes revealing how daily social, cultural and economic lives of children not only reflect interdependent realities of socialization and skill acquisition but also how agents of development, for example, formal schooling represents a different, narrower, albeit globalized, model of education. Questions that participants can address include but are not limited to the following:

1. What is the significance of schooling for sustainable livelihoods and national development? How does informal learning shape the life chances and imagined futures of young people? How do young people navigate the gap between educational aspirations and uncertain realities shaping transitions into adulthood?

2. What are the roles of children in building peace and social stability in Africa? How does children’s current state of life explains and is explained by wider societal changes and trajectories?

3. What forms of local and community knowledge can be mobilised to cope with climate change and environmental degradation? How can development be made responsive to produce citizens that are locally sensitive and globally competent?

Participants in 2016 child and youth institute are encouraged to develop critical thinking on children’s contributions to daily and generational reproduction, the purpose of education, gendered perspectives and experiences as well as how formal schooling and informal education can be used to empower the future generation in Africa. From methodological points of view, examining children’s role in crafting the future not only calls for the need to explore their life worlds from their perspectives but also from the vantage point of “other generations”. Paper proposals need to provide fresh perspectives that weave together the themes of childhood, national development and the future, analyzing the unfolding historical geographies and contexts within which children’s lives are mutually constituted. Using children’s lives as a lens to understand social transformations, it is expected that participants will explore and discuss aspects of cultural, political, economic and emotional dynamics operating in Africa, and the ways these dynamics reflect, shape and enable us to re-imagine Africa’s futures. Explaining social contexts are particularly pivotal in order to: a) demonstrate how opportunities, constraints, realities, and life chances of young people vary across space, and b) contribute to critical commentaries on the homogenizing, exoticizing, and particularizing tendencies of research on African childhoods. Participants are also challenged to tease apart the tension between global processes and the localized experiences of African children in order to theorise child development as an important but missing aspect of debates around sustainable development.

Coordination

The 2016 Child and Youth Institute will be directed by Prof. Tatek Abebe of the Norwegian Centre for Child Research, Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology. As Director of the Institute, Prof. Tatek Abebe will:

• Assist with the identification of resource persons who will lead discussions and debates during the institute;

• Participate in the selection of laureates;
• Design the course for the session, including specific sub-themes;
• Deliver a set of lectures and conduct a critical analysis of the papers presented by the resource persons and the laureates;
• Submit a written scientific report on the session.

In addition, Prof. Tatek Abebe will edit the revised versions of the papers presented by the resource persons and assess the papers presented by laureates during the Institute with a view to submitting them for publication by CODESRIA.

Resource Persons

Lectures to be delivered during the session are intended to offer laureates an opportunity to advance their reflections on the theme of the Institute. Resource persons should therefore be senior scholars or researchers who have published extensively on the theme, and who have significant contributions to make to the debates on it. They will be expected to produce lecture materials which would stimulate laureates to engage in discussion and debate around their respective lectures and the general body of literature available on the theme.
Once selected, resource persons must:

• Interact with the Director of the Institute and the laureates to help the latter readjust their research questions and their methodological approaches;
• Submit a copy of their course materials for reproduction and distribution to participants no later than one week before they deliver their lectures;
• Deliver their lectures, participate in debates and comment on the research proposals and the papers of the laureates;
• Review and submit the revised version of their lecture notes or research papers for publication by CODESRIA not later than two months following their presentation at the Institute.

Laureates

Applicants should be PhD candidates or scholars in their early career with a proven capacity to conduct research on the theme of the Institute. Intellectuals active in the policy process and/or social movements and civil society organizations are also encouraged to apply. The number of places offered by CODESRIA at each session is limited to ten (10). Non-African scholars who are able to raise funds for their participation may also apply for a limited number of places.

Application for resource persons

Applications for the position of resource person should include:
1. An application letter;
2. A curriculum vitae;
3. Two (2) published papers;
4. A proposal of not more than five (5) pages in length, outlining the issues to be covered in their three (3) proposed lectures, including one on methodological issues;

Applications for laureates

Applications for the position of laureate should include:
1. One duly completed application form in word format;
2. An application letter;
3. A letter indicating institutional or organizational affiliation;
4. A curriculum vitae;
5. A research proposal not more than ten (10) pages including a descriptive analysis of the work the applicant intends to undertake, an outline of the theoretical interest of the topic chosen by the applicant, the relationship of the topic to the problematic and concerns of the theme of the 2016 Child and Youth Institute ;
6. Two (2) reference letters from scholars or researchers known for their competence and expertise in the candidate’s research area (geographic and disciplinary), including their names, addresses, telephone numbers and email addresses;
7. A copy of the passport.

Submission of Applications

All applications should be sent electronically to: child.institute@codesria.sn.

For specific questions, please contact:
CODESRIA CHILD AND YOUTH INSTITUTE
Tel.: (221) 33 825 98 21/22/23
Email: child.institute@codesria.sn

Call for Proposals: Child and Youth Institute

Application Form

Deadline: 31 May 2016

Dakar, 22 to 27 August 2016
Interdisciplinarity in Area Studies: Basic and Applied Research

 

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and The Centre for African Studies Basel (CASB) call for applications for the 2nd CODESRIA/CASB Summer School in African Studies and Area Studies in Africa.

The Summer School sets out to stimulate and consolidate interdisciplinary approaches in research on Africa, but also on other regions of the world undertaken from within the African continent. It focuses on African Studies as an instance of area studies and seeks to identify themes that are theoretically, conceptually and methodologically relevant to the reflection on the intellectual challenge of Africa as an object of knowledge and its contribution to general scholarship while inquiring into the relevance of the findings to African approaches to other regions. The goals of the Summer School can be broadly defined in the following manner:

• The Summer School allows PhD students, under the guidance of senior scholars, to engage critically with new theoretical, conceptual and methodological developments in African Studies and Area Studies in Africa in general and make them relevant to their work;

• The Summer School stimulates PhD students to reflect on the potential relevance of knowledge on Africa to the task of improving our theoretical, conceptual and methodological tools both for the disciplines as well as for interdisciplinary work;

• The Summer School fosters among PhD students a sense of belonging to a community of scholars in pursuit of knowledge and scholarship;

• The Summer School encourages junior scholars to work towards carving a space for African Studies or Area Studies in Africa in general in the broader field of scholarship and in this way helping to place Africa right at the centre of knowledge production.

• The Summer School serves to identify young scholars who wish to develop or finalise a PhD-project in the field of African Studies and Area Studies in general and to further support them in their pursuit of their career goals.

The Summer School is offered with the generous support of the Oumou Dilly Foundation (Switzerland) in cooperation with CODESRIA and aims at strengthening the links between the community of scholars organized in the CODESRIA community and scholars from the African Studies community in Switzerland.
 
Concept: Basic and applied research

The forthcoming CODESRIA/CASB Summer School in African Studies and Area Studies in Africa will address the prevalent demand – implicit or explicit – that knowledge produced on Africa (as on other regions in the so-called developing world) should be practically based, solution-oriented, relevant for development. It will focus on conceptual challenges this may entail.

It is generally agreed that this knowledge produced on Africa has been shaped, on the one hand, by the unequal nature of relations between Africa and the West and, on the other hand, by critical reactions that have created room for African voices to question the legitimacy of this knowledge. An enduring problem in knowledge production about Africa has been the question concerning the purposes which should be served by such knowledge. It is true that scholarship has rendered the continent visible while at the same time the properties which have been associated with what has come to be understood as Africa have shaped the scholarly ability to describe reality. Much discussion over the study of Africa has centred both on the extent to which knowledge of the continent has been truthful (Apter; p’Bitek; Robinson) and also on the role of the power of representation in the constitution of our idea of Africa (Mudimbe; Hountondji). While earlier critical voices sought either to deny scholarship produced outside of the continent primacy over the definition of what constitutes knowledge of Africa and how it can be adequately retrieved (p’Bitek; Eze), later scholars have focused more on the damage which such knowledge caused to the general perception of the continent (Mudimbe; Wiredu, Mbembe).

The discomfort which has accompanied African reactions to knowledge about Africa generated vigorous intellectual activity that has shaped the production of knowledge on the continent. The reaction to foreign representations of the African continent and its life-worlds has laid the ground within the boundaries of which much intellectual activity on the continent – but also by the intellectual African diaspora – has taken place. It has been more than half a century of critical scrutiny of knowledge about Africa produced within paradigms that are not necessarily sensitive to the lived experience of Africans. Mainly on account of this it appears important to shift the focus slightly away from the substantive scholarly issues entailed in these intellectual exchanges into more practical issues pertaining to the functions of research.

Research on Africa is expected to yield knowledge that is relevant to development. This is an uncontroversial expectation when viewed against the background of the massive developmental challenges faced by African countries. Research cannot afford to ignore what is going on in the world and must seek to be relevant by committing itself to addressing the problems afflicting countries and peoples in the real world. There are however problems with this view. In fact, it is one thing to gather data, analyse it and draw conclusions from it and another to apply the implications of the findings to the real world. The practical task of implementing research, i.e. drawing policy implications from it and working out the practical policies which will address problems in the real world, has been a major challenge to researchers and practitioners alike not only in the developed world, but also in the developing world. This is particularly acute within the social sciences where practical orientation in the sense of applied research is not easy to establish. As more and more research funding privileges projects which have an exclusively applied research orientation the problems with the relevance expectation deserve to be addressed in a more forceful, but systematic manner.

Conceptually, the challenge of implementing research results can be understood as the problem of making a clear distinction between conceptual problems and practical problems. In most research projects this distinction tends to be taken for granted, but experience shows that matters are more complicated on the ground. While practical problems refer to the challenge of finding a solution to a known problem which needs to be addressed, e.g. how to ensure that an anti-corruption law is understood and implemented by the police force in order to protect citizens from arbitrariness, conceptual problems refer to what we need to know in order to understand a problem, i.e. whether the sense of insecurity felt by citizens is caused by the absence of anti-corruption legislation. Policy recommendations can easily flow from research that addresses practical problems; they can hardly be derived from conceptual problems. Practical problems call for solutions whereas conceptual problems call for understanding. Blurring these distinctions has led in practice either to placing demands on research which it cannot meet or to the very real impossibility of translating results into practice on account of the fact that research was conceived as one which addressed conceptual problems.

The purpose of the learning event is, therefore, to raise the awareness of research partners from Africa to these difficulties while at the same time working out ways of making research relevant to development challenges. The main elements of the learning event are five one-day workshops that will address these challenges along the following lines:

• Research design: Conceptual problems vs. practical problems
This unit introduces participants to fundamental epistemological issues around the production of knowledge by making a distinction between basic research (conceptual problems) and applied research (practical problems).

• Analytical design: Formulating problems
This unit elaborates on the nature of basic research by exploring the ways in which it can be understood as research which helps to formulate problems for which there may already be solutions or, at any rate, which require solutions to be worked out.

• Practical design: Formulating solutions
This unit is the counterpart to the previous one (formulating problems) and focuses on the process of identifying problems for which solutions can be worked out.

• Policy design: How solutions work in the real world
The focus of this unit is on the political, economic and social conditions which must be met for a solution to be effective.

• Evaluation design: Checking the relevance of research
This unit introduces participants to the important task of drawing up criteria to ascertain the extent to which the implementation of research results can be used to improve research design.

The expected outcome of the Summer School is a deep theoretical and practical understanding of the difference between basic research and applied research as well as the development of the ability to translate research results into practical action in the context of African Studies and Area Studies in general.

Experts

Elísio Macamo (Summer School Director), Associate Professor of African Studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland)

Ralph Weber, Assistant Professor of European Global Studies at the University of Basel (Switzerland)

Jean-Bernard Ouédraogo, Directeur de recherche au CNRS/EHESS (France), Rédacteur en chef de la revue Method(e)s ;

Nkolo Foe, Professeur titulaire en philosophie à l’Ecole supérieure de Yaoundé I, Cameroun

Format

The Summer School will be structured in such a way that each thematic issue will form the focus of a workshop. The first two thematic issues, namely (1) research design and (2) analytical design are theoretical in orientation. They will deal with texts addressing issues in the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences. The remaining three thematic issues, namely (3) practical design, (4) policy design and (5) evaluation design are practical, hands-on blocks which draw from participants’ own research projects, country profiles and institutional backgrounds to translate research results into policy action.

Already in advance, the participants prepare written input based on their own research as well as on readings. During the course they form workgroups preparing inputs for and playing an active role in the different sessions.

Application & Registration

The summer school is open for PhD students enrolled at an Institute of Higher Education in any country. We encourage the application of PhD students enrolled in African and Swiss institutions. Travel, accommodation and meals during the summer school will be provided for participants enrolled at institutions in Africa.

Participants will be selected on the strength and merits of:
1. One duly completed application form;
2. A cover letter;
3. A five-page application in which they explain:(a) what they are working on, and (b) how their work relates to the topic of the Summer School;

In addition, applications must be supported by a CV and two letters of recommendation.

Please submit your application as PDF to area.studies@codesria.sn (until 31 May 2016).

 

Application Form

Call for Applications: 2nd CODESRIA/CASB Summer School in African Studies and Area Studies in Africa