May 16, 5:00 PM: No Condition is Permanent?: Permanence, Flux, and Mobility in Contemporary Africa

African Studies Workshop Student Conference Distinguished Lecture Charles Piot, Duke University - Migration Stories: The US Visa Lottery & Global Citizenship May 16th, 5:00 PM Classics 110 1010 E. 59th St. Conference Keynote Beth Buggenhagen, Indiana University - Potentiality and Impermanence: Photography & Economic Uncertainty in Dakar May 17th, 5:00 PM Wilder House 5811 S. Kenwood Ave. Conference May 17th, 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM Wilder House 5811 S. Kenwood Ave. The question of permanence, of how to create continuity and belonging, has long been an implicit topic of study in Africanist anthropology. Older anthropological theories presupposed continuity in their analyses of African sociality, even as their ethnographic accounts revealed flux and instability. In breaking with these theories, contemporary anthropology understands permanence as both fragile and elusive. Reinterrogating the question of permanence—asking how it is imagined, actively produced or its absence exploited—opens up conceptual space for a more subtle reading of continuities and forms of belonging as well as ruptures and re-imaginings of sociality in contemporary Africa. Analyses of the emergence, maintenance or unsettling of stability are crucial to scholarship of Africa in all disciplines. In Madagascar and South Africa, Chinese firms are reshaping social, political and infrastructural landscapes through new investments and extraction policies. Whether in the wake of civil wars, or in response to perceived social problems, NGOs have long sought to intervene in processes of social reproduction, raising the issue of how populations achieve or contest cultural and social continuity over time. In post-conflict countries such as Angola a tenuous political stability appears to have been achieved, producing new ideas about what a desirable politics is for a cohesive Angolan nation-state. In contrast, in Kenya, violence after the 2007 presidential election shook many Kenyans' confidence in the permanence of the nation-state, raising the question of whether ethnic belonging was in fact a more durable form of membership. Problematizing permanence raises the following questions: For Africans on the continent and abroad what does permanence mean? What does it look like? What do we find in its absence? Instability? Uncertainty? Mobility? Is permanence always a sought after condition? How is it constituted and how is it undermined? How does its production or destabilization affect imaginations and understandings of belonging? How are the production of space and place linked to changes in the possibilities for permanence and its understanding? Are new understandings of permanence being created precisely through the very phenomena often associated with instability? This conference seeks to address the above-mentioned questions by inviting the submission of papers that investigate the topic of permanence.

Starts: May 16, 2013
Ends: May 17, 2013
Time: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM

See:http://africanstudies.uchicago.edu/news/african-studies-workshop-student-conference