Events

About the Workshop

Hosted by Johns Hopkins University, and in collaboration with the Institute of African Studies at Carleton University and the Humanities Research Center at the University of Dar es Salaam, this event will bring together a dynamic group of senior graduate students and scholars, with an emphasis on emerging scholars, to re-examine and re-imagine the place of media in forging dynamic identities, communities, social structures, and futures across the African continent.

Building on new histories of media, this workshop will explore two central methodological questions. First, how do scholars from within the humanities and social sciences access and imagine what constitutes print culture, media, digital and oral history to produce new understandings of the relationship between pasts, presents, and futures? In part, this question constitutes a call to re-imagine archives as varied forms of media which exist in multi-lingual (isiZulu, Yoruba, and Kiswahili, for instance) and multi-material spaces (textile, images, oral traditions, living objects, and performance). Second, how do new archives produce novel understandings of public cultures and audiences, social and political organizing (from gendered and sexual lives to anti-colonial and decolonial strategies and movements), mobility and belonging, health and healing, environmental phenomenon and crisis, and modes of governance or authority building practices prior to and in 21st century? By new archives, we mean innovative methods for re-reading media, and/or new analytical tools for re-thinking what can constitute an archive across disciplinary boundaries.

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