ANU Africa Network

The ANU’s Research and Innovation News (March 2018) has reported that Bonnie McConnell has ‘been funded over $250,000 by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and Medical Research Council for the project ‘Developing a Community Singing Based Intervention for Perinatal Mental Health in the Gambia’.

An abstract of Dr McConnell’s article from the July 2017 issue of Ethnomusicology reads as follows:

‘Kanyeleng fertility society musicians have become an integral part of health promotion programs in the Gambia. Health workers have embraced kanyeleng performance in the name of making their programs more participatory and therefore more effective in combating persistent health problems.’

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/ethnomusicology.61.2.0312

Dr McConnell also presented a paper at the annual African Studies Association of Australasia and the Pacific Conference held at University of South Australia in November, 2017. Her Abstract is from the conference website

https://afsaap.org.au/conference/adelaide-2017/

African Popular Music, Politics, and Belonging in Australia – Bonnie McConnell, School of Music, The Australian National University
Australian political and media discourse frequently presents African cultural difference as a
problem that prevents people of African descent from integrating into Australian society.
While research has drawn attention to the problem of negative representations of Africans
in Australian society (Nolan et al. 2011), the cultural strategies that African Australian
communities use to challenge these representations have not been adequately explored.
This research examines two African Australian cultural festivals as important sites of self representation and political action, challenging the negative representations of African
Australians in the media. Drawing on ethnographic research with musicians and festival
organisers in Sydney and Melbourne, I examine the way African Australian performers
negotiate and communicate notions of history in order to articulate a sense of place and
belonging. I show that popular music in particular provides a powerful site for negotiating
multi-layered identities and plural histories, challenging one-dimensional representations of
African Australian people. By focusing on popular music, this research seeks to draw
attention to “hidden histories” (Hall 1990) of African Australian communities, as well as
cultural strategies for maintaining a sense of coherence in the face of displacement and
disjuncture.

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/sudanese-ambassador-speaks-against-african-gang-reporting-20180214-h0w2zg.html

The above link reports a statement by Dr Baroudi, who became Ambassador for the Republic of Sudan in 2017, when he described an exhibition that opened on Monday at the Embassy.

“Sudan is seeking all the time for the common interests on a bilateral basis,” he said.

“That means if Sudan has good relations with Russia it doesn’t mean it should have bad relations with US and in this context also Sudan is seeking to have good relations with Australia in the international arena.”

Part of changing the way Australians see the country is an exhibition of Sudanese art and artefacts at the embassy in O’Malley, which will be opened on Monday night. A ceremony celebrating the inauguration of the embassy will include a Sudanese band and Sudanese cuisine. The exhibition includes a recreation of a traditional marriage ceremony, photos of the pyramids in Sudan dating back to the Kush era and other Sudanese artefacts. The ambassador and his wife, who made some of the artworks, are encouraging members of the public to visit the exhibition during business hours.”

Speaker: Professor Helen Ware (UNE)
Date & time
Thu 15 Feb 2018, 12:00pm to 1:00pm
Location
Seminar Room A, Coombs Bldg #9, Fellows Road, ANU

“But How Many Actually Died ? Counting Civilian Deaths in Recent Wars”
This seminar covers two areas. The first is a 10 minute introduction to The Demography of Conflict based on the author’s new chapter for Beginning Population Studies (3rd Edition) demonstrating how changes in the nature of warfare since the end of the Cold War have altered both the demography and geography of war. The second is a 30 minute discussion of one of the most politically controversial areas in demography: the numbers of deaths of the military on the battlefield, versus direct deaths of civilians from military violence, and the ‘excess’ civilian deaths which occur as an indirect result of war. Whilst it has become a worn-out cliché to say that recent wars have produced more civilian casualties than military deaths during fighting, the actual ratio is much contested. Estimates of the percentage of ‘excess’ deaths due to indirect mortality as a proportion of all deaths due to war vary from 30% to 95% (Wise 2017). This presentation endeavours to untangle some of the mysteries involved in determining levels of ‘excess’ mortality, including why it is that francophone demographers include babies who were never born among the victims of war.

Helen Ware is Foundation Professor of Peace Studies at the University of New England. As a humanitarian and former Australian diplomat she regrets the current belief that slanting the statistics of war may be acceptable in a good cause. As a demographer trained by the late Professor Jack Caldwell at ANU, she has a special interest in the demography of peace and war on which she has written a chapter for Beginning Population Studies which is in part the basis for this seminar.

https://demography.cass.anu.edu.au/events/how-many-actually-died-counting-civilian-deaths-recent-wars