Tomorrow (20 May): Senegambian Rhythmic Traditions, Embodied Knowledge, and Adaptation

Senegambian Rhythmic Traditions, Embodied Knowledge, and Adaptation

Lamine Sonko and King Marong

Date & time: Thursday 20 May 2021, 3.30–5pm

Location: Kingsland Room, Level 6, ANU School of Music

In this research seminar, Lamine Sonko and King Marong will reflect on their longterm engagement with embodied knowledge of ancient rhythmic traditions in West Africa, as well as current research exploring the adaptation of traditional music, dance, and theatre in contemporary Australia. The seminar will include a discussion and live music demonstration.

Lamine Sonko is a composer, director and multi-instrumentalist, originally from Senegal and living in Australia since 2004. In his artistic practice he draws on traditional wisdom to create inter-disciplinary & multi-sensory arts experiences inspired by his cultural background as a Gewel (hereditary cultural role). His role as a Gewel is to be a keeper and communicator of history, customs, rituals and sacred knowledge through music, dance and oral storytelling. Through his work he has defined new ways to present and re-imagine the traditional African, contemporary and classical synthesis of music and theatre. As a composer he has arranged and recorded award-winning music including two compositions for Grammy Award-winning album ‘Winds of Samsara’ (2015). He has composed and directed large scale works including the Boite Millennium Chorus ‘One Africa’ (Arts Centre Melbourne) and has presented and performed throughout Australia and internationally.

Born in The Gambia, King Marong has been performing professionally since the age of 12. King developed his skills in the coastal fishing village where he grew up surrounded by the griots (hereditary musicians) and international musicians who were his mentors for Senegambian drumming and cultural priorities. In his late teens he formed his band Kunta Kinteh and consequently toured The Gambia, Senegal, UK and Europe. King has since built an international reputation as a master of many African drumming styles on instruments such as the Djembe, Boucarabou, Doundoun and Sabar, performing and teaching percussion to students from around the world.

 

Performance in the Studio – West African Percussion

ANU School of Music
Wed 19 May, 6–7.30pm

Join Gambian master percussionist, King Marong, Senegalese multi-instrumentalist, Lamine Sonko, music technology convenor Professor Samantha Bennett, and musicology convenor Dr Bonnie McConnell in ANU’s world class recording studio for a special performance/recording exploring Gambian and Senegalese culture.

Please note places are strictly limited to 25.

Click for details and registration.

God, Development, and Technology Transfer: Mediated Ethics between Chinese and Ethiopians

Dr. Liang Chen
Australian Centre on China in the World
Thursday, 22 April 2021, 4.00pm5.30pm

Online and in person, China in the World seminar rooms (Building 188), Fellows Lane, ANU

Details and link to registration here.

Abstract The rolling out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and overseas projects provides a window to examine the intercultural dynamics between Chinese expats and local communities. Ethiopia, an East African country, has become a strategic partner of China and hosts a growing population of Chinese developers, business people and workers. In this contact zone, assumptions and misassumptions, tentative adjustments, and reevaluation of Chinese and local communities’ relations are abundant to the extent that any culturalist explanation is insufficient to grapple with the Chinese’s evolving ethical experience. This study shows how the Chinese and Ethiopians relate to one another ethically in different contexts and why the boundary between them becomes explicit or less so.

Bio Dr Liang Chen’s research interests involve migration, urbanisation, and intercultural encounters in China and Africa. He has been studying the trans-continental business network of African expatriates in China, the Chinese working in Ethiopia, and Afar pastoralists’ urbanisation in Ethiopia and Djibouti since 2016. He is currently visiting the School of Culture, History, and Language of ANU.

Truth and Reconciliation: South Africa and Victoria

Date and time: Thursday 08 Apr 2021, 1–2pm

Speaker: Ibrahim Abraham 

Event series:  Freilich Research Network Event

Location: online zoom webinar, register here

Victoria’s recently announced Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) draws inspiration from the famous TRC initiated in South Africa in 1995. Both initiatives endeavour to reveal historical truths and heal broken and unjust relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous communities. Whereas South Africa’s TRC was limited to political violence taking place between 1960 and 1994, excluding the broader sweep of South African history, the willingness of Victoria’s TRC to investigate events as far back as European colonization makes it a conceivably more radical and potentially more contentious initiative. Offering an overview of South Africa’s TRC, drawn from the presenter’s forthcoming book, this lunchtime talk will also draw out some of the likely similarities and differences between the South African and Victorian initiatives, and highlight some of the challenges inherent in any TRC, including the implicitly religious nature of narratives of confession and reconciliation, and the difficulty of finding a common moral language in diverse societies.

Ibrahim Abraham is the Hans Mol Research Fellow in Religion and the Social Sciences in the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University, and a former Convenor of the Freilich Project for the Study of Bigotry. His book Race, Class and Christianity in South Africa: Middle-Class Moralities will be published by Routledge in 2021.

Register here

Books that Changed Humanity: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

Date and time:  Friday 19 Mar 2021, 5.30–6.45pm

Speakers:  Dr Ibrahim Abraham (Humanities Research Centre, ANU)

Location:  Zoom (registration required)

Series:  Books that Changed Humanity

Dr Ibrahim Abraham explores this controversial masterpiece of post-apartheid South Africa at the turn of the twenty-first century. Disgrace is the novel that not only earned Coetzee (another) Booker Prize but guaranteed him the Nobel Prize awarded in 2003.

Register here.

Decolonizing the University: Conversations across the Creek

Friday, 09 October 2020, 1–2pm, Online webinar (registration required)

Arguing that the institution of the university has been broadly complicit with colonialism, the call to “decolonize” universities and academic practices has been heard across the world, from Cape Town to Oxford to Canberra. But what exactly does it mean to “decolonize” the university or to “decolonize” science or the humanities? This webinar will present a range of views on decolonization and the university by scholars from across the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities, focusing on local and global challenges to prevailing academic practices.

Conversations Across the Creek is an initiative of the Humanities Research Centre and the Research School of Chemistry. These events provide a space for continuing dialogue among scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars, with the aim of stimulating and unearthing collaborations across the university and between the university and the community.

Register here

Speakers

Dr Ibrahim Abraham (Humanities Research Centre)
Dr Karo Moret Miranda (School of History)
Ms Maeve Powell (Crawford School)
Mr Sam Provost (Fenner School)

The Individual Deprivation Measure South Africa Country Study Results

Helen Suich, Senior Research Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy (ANU)

The Individual Deprivation Measure, or IDM, is an individual-level, gender sensitive measure of multidimensional deprivation—it measures deprivation at the individual rather than household level, and is designed to discern differences in the experiences of poverty between men and women. The IDM program was a partnership between the ANU, the International Women’s Development Agency and the Australian Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade. The ANU led a studies in Indonesia in 2018 and in South Africa in 2019. The IDM programme ran between 2016 and 2020, and related research is being taken forward as the Individual Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty at ANU.

In South Africa, 14 dimensions of deprivation were measured (shown in the figure below). Some of these are already partially covered in some existing surveys (e.g. food security and access to drinking water), but the IDM includes a range of economic and social aspects which are not usually covered (e.g. the relationships, clothing and footwear and voice dimensions). Further, several IDM dimensions include aspects beyond that which is typically assessed. For example, the work dimension covers not only issues around paid work, but also includes themes on unpaid domestic and care work and on the double labour burden that can arise when both paid and unpaid work are done.

The South African country study had two parts:

  • a national-level main sample, that interviewed 8,652 individuals, 16 years and older;
  • a purposive sample that interviewed 826 individuals with disabilities and their household members (2,311 individuals in total), in Gauteng and Limpopo provinces.

There are a wide range of resource available for those who are interested in the results of the survey and the methods used for the analysis.

A revised analysis of the data was undertaken, using slightly different methods, and a series of briefing notes and documentation was produced. There are six briefing notes, describing the results for the main sample, as well as the analyses by gender, by age group, by disability status and by rural/urban locality. The sixth summarises the South African country study and the revised data analysis methods. Accompanying documentation includes reports describing the revised methods in detail, as well as providing all of the revised results. A comprehensive report published in May 2020 summarises the initial analysis of both the main sample and the purposive sample, which is available here.

There is also a series of videos, one summarising the South African country study, one for the overall results of the main sample, based on the revised analysis methods, and one each describing the results by gender, age, rural/urban locality and disability status.

A launch of the report was held in early August 2020, with Australia’s High Commissioner to South Africa, Ms Gita Kamath, and the Resident Coordinator of the United Nations in South Africa, Nardos Bekele-Thomas, which you can watch below.

 

 

ANU Africa Network

Featured

This website was established in 2013 by David Lucas, and renovated and relaunched in 2020 as part of a project to increase awareness of Africa and African studies in the ANU and the ACT, funded by the Australian Government’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Another outcome of that project was a major research report, published in August 2021, African Studies at the Australian National University and in the Australian Capital Territory, analyzing the past, present and future of the study of Africa at the Australian National University and the wider Australian University sector.

The major innovation on this updated website is the creation of the ACT Africa Expert Directory which lists experts on Africa from institutions around the ACT, primarily the ANU. We will continue to curate this list, offering a key resource for media, government and non-government organizations seeking expert facts and opinions on Africa. Individuals can request to be added to the list by contacting the website managers.

Another notable addition is the expanded directory of PhD theses on Africa produced in the territory’s universities, a solid measure of the vitality of the study of Africa in the city of Canberra.

Reviewing these directories, it is revealing to note that the vast majority of research on Africa is produced by disciplinary experts (environmental scientists, economists, demographers, etc.) rather than area studies experts. This means that the study of Africa is woven into the fabric of the research culture of the ANU and the ACT’s other universities in ways that are not necessarily apparent.

 

AFSAAP 43rd Annual Conference – University of New England – 03-05 Dec 2020

AFRICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION OF AUSTRALASIA AND THE PACIFIC

43rd Annual Conference

“Youthful Optimism for Africa”

University of New England, Armidale, NSW

03-05 December 2020

 

Call for Papers

The African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific (AFSAAP) calls for proposals for preorganized panels, roundtables, thematic conversations, and individual papers for its 43rd annual meeting to be held at the University of New England (UNE), Armidale, NSW, December 3-5th 2020.

If COVID 19 permits, there will be a physical conference at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW. If not, and for anyone who is not able to travel, there will be a ZOOM facility for presenting your papers and getting feed-back (UNE has more experience with distance education than any other Australian University).

60% of the population of Africa is under 25 – [sadly, this proportion may even increase if many older people die of COVID 19]. Whilst you are welcome to submit abstracts on any African topic you choose, we are encouraging you to think about youth and a brighter future.

We would welcome suggestions for panels. There will certainly be panels for peace/conflict, Afro-feminism, and environmental issues.

The deadline for abstracts is 01 September 2020. Abstracts should be 300 words maximum and cover question, methodology, findings. Paper presenters will be allowed 20 minutes for presentation plus 20 minutes for questions.

AFSAAP Postgraduate Day

A special feature of AFSAAP Conferences is our work with post-graduate students. PhD and other post-graduate students who submit a thoughtful abstract and wish to participate in the post-graduate day will be assigned an AFSAAP member with experience in their area as a mentor to help them work on their paper. Post-graduate work on African topics in Australia can be a rather lonely experience and it is good to be able to turn to a friend who can give you advice on how to get your ideas into shape and where you should be heading. December 3rd is post-graduate day and will be devoted to presentations in a warm and encouraging setting. Those presenting their work on that day will also be encouraged to submit their finished papers to a special post-graduate ARAS edition.  Details forthcoming.

Abstracts of proposed papers, panels and roundtables should be sent by to Professor Helen Ware at: vice-president@afsaap.org.au

A preliminary program will be announced in October 2020. Registration and conference fees must be paid before the start of the conference.