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ANU Africa Network
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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.
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August and September Events
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August 14: “The Good Migrant: Gender, Race, and Naturalisation in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa and Australia,” Rachael Bright (Keele University, UK). https://history.cass.anu.edu.au/events/rachel-bright-keele-good-migrant-gender-race-and-naturalisation-early-twentieth-century
August 16: “‘Just Exhaustion!’: Motherhood, Work, and Human Capital Investment in Senegal,” Kathryn E. McHarry (University of Chicago). https://africanetwork.weblogs.anu.edu.au/2019/08/13/just-exhaustion/
23 August: “Becoming a Wrestler on the Outskirts of Khartoum, Sudan.” Paul Hayes (ANU) 3-5pm, Milgate Room, Level 2, A.D. Hope Building (#14) https://africanetwork.weblogs.anu.edu.au/2019/08/14/becoming-a-wrestler/
23 August: Linguistics seminar – “After Shaka: IsiZulu language in ideology and social history,” Judith Irvine, 3:30pm, Basham Seminar Room, BPB Level 1.
https://slll.cass.anu.edu.au/events/coedl-linguistics-seminar-judith-irvine-after-shaka-isizulu-language-ideology-and-socialAugust 28 (AM): “Dual Exposure: Transcendental Harm in the Islamic Ontology of Pollution in Tunisia.” Siad Darwish (ANU). https://archanth.cass.anu.edu.au/events/dual-exposure-transcendental-harm-islamic-ontology-pollution-tunisia
August 28 (PM): Film screening: “Sculpting the Spirits,” a documentary on the Bijagós Islands of Guinea-Bissau. 4pm-6pm, The Tea Room, Ground Floor of the Banks Building (#44). https://africanetwork.weblogs.anu.edu.au/2019/08/26/film-screening-sculpting-the-spirits/
September 03 (lunchtime): “The International Criminal Court: Fighting Impunity or Failing Africa?” Matthew Neuhaus (Australian Ambassador to the Netherlands). https://freilich.anu.edu.au/events/upcoming (full details announced soon)
September 03 (evening): “Putting Africa Back into the Politics of British Decolonisation,” Deryck M. Schreuder (ex-UWA and WSU). https://bellschool.anu.edu.au/node/7176
September 04: “Fighting Ebola: Achieving Positive Social and Health Outcomes in Emergencies,” Presenters from ANU, Harvard, etc. https://www.anu.edu.au/events/fighting-ebola-achieving-positive-social-health-outcomes-in-emergencies
September 04: “Three Minute Thesis” final, feat. Ibidolapo Adekoya (Research School of Chemistry). https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/anu3mt-3-minute-thesis-competition-final-2019-tickets-60389227806
September 05: “Australia and Africa: a new friend from the South?” Nikola Pijović (Queen’s University, UK). https://nsc.crawford.anu.edu.au/news-events/events/14981/australia-and-africa-new-friend-south
September 09: “Prosecuting South Africa’s Apartheid-Era Crimes: Helping or Hurting Reconciliation?” CANCELLED
September 20: “Maxine Beneba Clarke (editor of Growing Up African in Australia) in conversation with Zoya Patel” https://africanetwork.weblogs.anu.edu.au/2019/08/26/maxine-beneba-clarke-in-conversation-with-zoya-patel/
September 27: “Human Rights in the Age of Inequality: Xenophobia, Exclusion and the Myth of the Strong Leader,” Kostis Karpozilos and Dimitris Christopoulos (Panteion University, Greece) https://freilich.anu.edu.au/events/upcoming
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“Becoming a Wrestler on the Outskirts of Khartoum, Sudan”
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Date and time: Friday 23 August, 3–5pm
Speaker: Paul Hayes (PhD Candidate in Anthropology, ANU)
Location: Milgate Room, Level 2, A.D. Hope Building (#14), ANU
This post-fieldwork seminar examines the bodily practices and related material culture of young men in Khartoum, Sudan, who practice ‘Nuba wrestling’, a combat sport indigenous to Sudan. Based on 12 months of collaborative photography and first-hand sporting apprenticeship with wrestlers, I attempt to understand the magnetism of the sport through its concrete corporeal practices and material relations. I analyse the wrestlers’ material and bodily repertoires, not only for what they might mean as symbolic rituals or communicative signs, but also for what they do to the wrestler-subject. Through a microphysics of becoming a wrestler, I show how the doing of ‘corporeal-matter-in-motion’ leads to the creation of a specific being: an uneasy subject, caught between Sudan’s nascent pan-ethnic neoliberal modernity, and the racist vestiges of the Sudanese Islamist state.
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“Just Exhaustion!”: Motherhood, Work, and Human Capital Investment in Senegal
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Date &Time: Friday 16 August, 3pm-5pm
Location: Milgate Room, A.D. Hope Building #14, Australian National University
Abstract: Over the past two decades, the Senegalese state has reimagined national commitments to care for children and families as a politics of investment. Senegalese families today have unprecedented state support for their children following the creation of Senegal’s national early childhood care and education system in 2000. Case des Tout-Petits centers offer an array of public education and child welfare activities, including heavily subsidised preschool for children aged three to six. Development specialists, education theorists, and feminists have widely argued that affordable childcare helps “relieve” women of unpaid domestic work and “empower” them to pursue opportunities outside the home. Why, then, have many Senegalese mothers claimed that little children are now more exhausting than ever? This talk explores the problem of women’s fatigue by investigating how human capital investment projects like Senegal’s preschool system complicate motherhood in unexpected ways. Rather than presume that motherhood inherently entails forms of work, the presentation examines how attempts to naturalise motherhood into mothering work are negotiated and contested, with broader implications for how anthropologists might theorise neoliberal interventions into family life.
Speaker: Kathryn E. McHarry is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on global childhood policymaking and post-millennial transformations of age, care, and labor in Africa. Her dissertation, Entrepreneurs of the Future: Speculative Care and Early Childhood Education in Senegal examines the politics of human capital interventions and the economisation of family life.