Year: 2020

The kudu horn is recognised as one of several traditional ways of summoning distant villagers to attend a community gathering in Africa. Crafted from this basic construct of a kudu horn, came the vuvuzela, a modern day version if you will. Well celebrated at the 2010 World Cup soccer, the vuvuzela gained international recognition and soon became the symbol of African football something the world has never forgotten.

Thabo Mbeki African School of Public and International Affairs: Time for Africa to again blow its horn

Date: 25th September 3pm

The full monograph Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation can be read here

Radical Disenchantment’ with Fadi Bardawil -Poster Final

4 September 2020 | 10:00 am – 12pm (CAT/SAST) |
Online Seminar Zoom link: htps://zoom.us/j/99768946836?pwd=TzRTVmNzQmVpUzU5dmhud0JtVk1rQT09

Archie Mafeje Memorial Lecture – LAND AND AGRARIAN REFORM IN SOUTH AFRICA: Lessons from other parts of the continent

AFRICAN ASSOCIATION FOR JAPANESE STUDIES (AAJS):
3RD ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL (ONLINE) CONFERENCE ON JAPANESE STUDIES IN AFRICA
Theme: Environment, Technology and COVID-19
Date: October 6th & 7th, 2020
Submission deadline: August 28, 2020

The African Association for Japanese Studies (AAJS) is an international organization dedicated to promoting scholarship in the comparative fields of African-Japanese interests. The association, in partnership with the Embassy of Japan, academic institutions, and other organizations, has maintained scholarly agenda intended to stimulate critical understanding of the convergence between African and Japanese literary cultures, histories, developments, economy, and politics. The objectives are achieved through conferences, seminars, workshops, colloquiums, and publications. To further advance academic dissections of the connections, the association organizes an annual conference on Japanese studies in Africa.

The theme for AICJSA 2020 is Environment, Technology and COVID-19

It is deliberately not delimited to encourage critical perspectives, adopting disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. As a theory, the environment manifests dimensions of nature, human relations, and other force dynamics. Current socio-political, economic and the new normal arising from the COVID-19 pandemic are realities that make discourse on environment vital as the current generation faces the task of, redeeming human existence, saving the planet, earth, and the future. Beyond ecology, the theme appeals to the contexts, backgrounds, platforms, origins, principles, and policies that shape life and the forces they produce. Does it not become urgently necessary for scholarly endeavors to pay attention to the evolutionary processes leading to their impacts on humanity? We may consent to environmental determinists that human activities are informed and inhibited by environmental conditions.

This year’s conference promises to be one of the leading African-Japanese international conferences geared towards generating innovative, ground-breaking as well as cutting edge advances in the emerging global environmental studies.

Therefore, we encourage scholars, critics and policymakers to approach the themes from different perspectives, theoretical frameworks, analytical procedures, and social contexts relevant to their fields. Academics, professionals, and policy-makers are invited to submit proposals for conference panels and papers. Proposals should not be more than 200 words.

Call for Panels and Papers: The call for papers and panels is now open. The deadline for submission is 28th August 2020.

Submissions are invited on the following sub-themes. Proposals may also focus on related issues.

• Eco-criticisms in Contemporary Environmental Studies
• Environment: Past, Present and Future
• Evolution of Man’s Relationship with Nature
• Environment: From Invincibility to Vulnerability
• Shift in Perception of Nature and the Role of Humanity
• Apocalyptic Warnings Amid Natural Crisis
• The Shaping Power of Environment in Developmental Studies
• Environment as the Melting Pot: Re-thinking People, Culture, Literature as a Product
• Micro and Macro-Contextual Analysis in Afro-Japanese Studies
• Future Casting: Using Environment as a Predictive Formula
• Objective Correlative in Literary Plot Development and Messaging
• Gendered Environment: Politics, Subjectivity and Exclusion in Climate Change Politics
• Ecocriticism in Contemporary Cultural Forms
• Nature, the Environment and New Media
• Anime, films and Cartoons as Contemporary Redefining Ecocritical Media
• 21st Century Social Environment
• Japan and Africa: Past, Present and Future Outlook
• Government Policy and Environment in Japan and Africa
• Foreign Policy Atmosphere for Effective Engagement
• Implications of Culture and Tradition
• Evolutionary Practices in Japan and African
• Digital Metamorphosis and the Challenge of Change
• Global Competition and the Challenge of Environmental Policies
• Global Climate Change: Responsibilities, Risks and Rewards
• Climate Outlook in Africa and Japan
• Cultural Norms in Response to Covid-19 Pandemic
• Beyond Covid-19: the New Normal and the New World
• The Digital Environment in the Age of Pandemic
• Innovations and Interventions Across Disciplines in the Pandemic Environment
• Decoupling Global Economy: Prospects for Asian-African Relations
• Globalization versus Nationalism Now
• Protectionism and Populism
• Technology, COVID-19 and the New Normal
• Evolving Narratives and the Vision of the Artist
• Propaganda versus Truth in the Age of Covid-19
• Literature and the Pandemic World

Proposals should include a title, an abstract not more than 200 words, name of presenter (and that of co-presenter, if any), institution or organization, and email address. Submit abstract for the 2020 online conference here: https://forms.gle/LZX72XLDr7beyZf7A before 28th August 2020. The submission shall be acknowledged and assessed by the Abstract Committee. Notification of acceptance will be communicated from 31st August to 11th September 2020.

Conferences Outcomes

Papers from the conference shall be published in the subsequent edition of Studies in Transnational Africa and Japan (STAJ).

2020 CALL FOR PAPERS

With more than 500 political leaders and leading pro-democracy institutions from around the world, CODESRIA is a signatory to a joint declaration warning that democracy is under threat and must be defended.

Join the movement!

https://www.idea.int/news-media/multimedia-reports/call-defend-democracy

The struggle for women’s participation in public affairs and the political life of their countries as equal actors has been an enduring feature of the entire period since independence in Africa.

From being integral players in the mass mobilisation and campaigns, both civic and armed, that ushered the countries of the continent to independence, women were subsequently to be relegated to the margins of the state and nation-building efforts that were embarked upon by a succession of regimes soon after national political freedom from formal and direct colonial rule had been won. Across the continent, women and their concerns were consigned to a residual category in various aspects of national life on arguments that ranged from the outrightly outrageous, unedifying, and embarrassing to the patently ignorant, mischievous, and frivolous.

These arguments purported invariably to explain why women could not be entrusted with public responsibilities and roles as full and equal participants and citizens. They continue to be deployed even to this day, more than six decades after the first African country became independent and despite a massive campaign of awareness underwritten by women and their organizations. Though mostly packaged and justified on grounds of culture, tradition, and religion, the arguments in fact reflect and bear the hallmarks of an embedded patriarchy and the relations of power woven into it that have always instinctively privileged men over women in politics, the economy and society.

Over the years since independence, it has been the historic responsibility of women to exercise agency and organize themselves and others to try to contest and overcome marginalisation, discrimination, stigma and domination. They have done so to building local and global alliances and using a variety of strategies and tactics. Within individual countries, despite an unevenness of organizational capacity and results obtained, many have worked alone and together to mobilise opinion and action in order to push the case and leverage opportunities for better and greater voice, presence, and participation in the public domain and in decision-making. Through the various women’s organizations they created to press for change towards a more inclusive system of governance in which they are able and enabled to play an equal role, successes were registered in forcing open the door of patriarchy even if progress has remained slow and uneven within and across different countries. From spirited and sustained campaigns in support of the education of the girl-child and against such harmful “traditional” practices as female genital incision and breast pressing to intense advocacy for a greater gender diversity in public administration, the formal/organized private sector, and party politics, indefatigable struggles were waged to tame and overcome the worst forms of patriarchy.

As it pertains specifically to their political participation, the thrust of much of the struggles waged by successive generations of women over the years has been, in an incremental manner, first to overcome total exclusion and cynical tokenism and then strive towards winning a seat by right at the table of decision-making with full powers and on equal terms. Arguments deployed to justify locking women out of political participation, including the notion that the place of the “decent” woman is in the house—were confronted head on with counter-arguments demonstrating just how political the personal also is. The idea that women are only good for adding colour to and entertaining audiences at political rallies with dances or being lined up on election day to vote as directed by political barons was roundly challenged as was the resort by male political leaders to offering token appointments to women in a bid, mostly cynical, to satisfy appearances but not necessarily change anything in relation to the asymmetries of power that exclude and penalise women. As counterarguments, women’s rights activists lost no opportunity to note that the male domination of politics in Africa has fed political violence and instability and corruption and mismanagement, among many other ills that have plagued the continent since independence. Suggestions have been made frequently enough that women, if opportuned, might just do a much better job than the male politicians.

Campaigns for political reform and change waged domestically in various countries by women and their organizations were also extended to the regional and international levels using all available platforms and opportunities. Particularly significant in this regard were the platforms offered by the United Nations (UN) family of organizations, the African Union (AU) and the various African Regional Economic Communities. From the 1994 Cairo UN Population Conference to the 1995 Beijing Conference to the AU’s 2003 Maputo Conference and the 2008 SADC summit, decisions were adopted on these various platforms and occasions that boosted the campaign by women for greater and more equal political participation as much in local affairs as in continental and global affairs. The UN Millenium Development Goals and their successor Sustainable Development Goals were deliberately leveraged too to advance the local and global causes for women’s equality. Thus, it was that a spate of policy commitments and conventions came to be adopted and which, today, despite their limitations, serve as a useful framework for measuring and assessing progress within and among nations. Some of the targets set at the Beijing Conference and those included in such outcome documents as the AU’s Maputo Declaration and the SADC Gender Protocol have, thanks primarily to the efforts of women themselves, been refracted back into domestic political and policy processes and taken further, with success in some instances, towards a “50-50” and “Zebra” agenda for the equal participation of women. The gender equality aspirations of women, including their better representation in parliament, have also been written into the national constitutions of several countries and become embedded in the policy practices of the AU and the RECs.

There is no doubt that, today, Africa boasts a growing number of countries where the representation and participation of women in politics has registered significant progress, with Rwanda standing out as one of the very best performers on a global scale. Rwanda is not alone; Kenya, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa are among the countries that have also registered and even sustained major progress. However, despite the progress that has been made, few will doubt that much more remains to be done even as efforts need to continue to be invested to ensure that the progress registered is not reversed and the women who enter into decision-making institutions are empowered to play their role in full. It is here that this research project has been deemed necessary as a contribution to both achieving a better understanding of the dynamics of women’s political participation and contributing to its further deepening and advancement. The need for such a project is further underlined by the unspoken but widespread assumption that a huge proportion of women in political office function mostly as “flower girls”, to use a Kenyan parlance, who merely serve “decorative” purposes in places such as parliament whilst religiously doing the bidding of the party, the political godfather, or the president.

The project aims, at a broad level, to undertake an assessment of the extent to which women who have gained a significant entry into institutions of power and decision-making have been effective in advocating and advancing the agenda of women’s equality in Africa. More specifically, the project seeks to :

a. Better understand the motivation and agendas that propel women who participate in politics and succeed in winning an entry into the mainstream of the political processes and institutions of their countries;
b. Examine the interfaces, if any, between the agendas of the women in politics and the specific goal of advancing the equality of women in society generally and political decision-making in particular;
c. Explore the dominant influences on women in active political positions that shape the choices which they make as actresses alongside other players in the governance system;
d. Assess the connections between the broader societal and citizen concerns articulated by the women in active political and decision-making and the advancement of the interests of women; and
e. Identify similarities and differences in the political engagements and gender equality agendas of directly elected and nominated female members of parliament with a view to drawing comparative observations about their performance.

Prospective participants in the project are invited to submit an abstract of not more than two pages clearly outlining the specific component of the objectives of the research they wish to engage with and how they intend to do so. Authors of abstracts accepted will be invited to develop full papers for further consideration. Preference will be given to abstracts and papers that are grounded in solid field work and backed with empirical data. Out of the papers, a book on the contemporary politics of women’s participation in Africa will be published and a set of policy recommendation will also be issued separately for use in further refining policies and campaigns.

DEADLINES :

• Abstracts will be received up to 15 July 2020.
• The draft papers of authors of shortlisted abstracts will be required by 30 September 2020.
• Final revised papers for peer review and publication will be expected by 30 October 2020.

PARTNER ORGANIZATIONS:
Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA) and the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA)

CONTACTS:
All abstracts should be sent by email to: c.yafika@idea.int with a copy to executive.secretary@codesria.org.

SPEAKER:
Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a philosopher based at Columbia University. His talk will refect on a new co-authored dialogue between himself and the Africanist anthropologist Jean-Loup Amselle, In Search of Africa(s): Universalism and Decolonial Thought (2020).

Number of visits: 609

The Other Universals consortium will be hosting a series of online seminars over the next few months. These talks will draw on political and aesthetic archives of emancipatory projects of the global south. They will examine radical traditions and ideas of expansive citizenship that have emerged in the colonial and postcolonial modern. Particular focus will be on idioms of difference, which defne insider and outsider, majority and minority, how these emerged, were negotiated and transcended.

18th June 3 PM SAST (GMT+2)

• Ethiopia @ 16:00 EAT (UTC+3)
• Ghana @ 13:00 GMT (UTC+0)
• Uganda @ 16:00 EAT (UTC+3)
• Lebanon @ 16:00 EEST (UTC+3)
• Barbados @ 09:00 AST (UTC- 4)
• US East Coast @ 09:00 EDT (UTC-4)

Register by June 14th to: otheruniversalsproject@gmail.com

www.chrfagship.uwc.ac.za