Description:

Graduate students are invited to gather for presentation, discussion and dinner.

Presenter: Mariam Taher, Anthropology
Talk: Gendered Mobilities and the State in Siwa, Egypt

Abstract: How exactly do norms of gender segregation interact with an expansionist state surveillance apparatus? Is Siwa men's control over 'their women' a way of keeping the state at arm's length, preserving an internal domain they may not access, or do their actions in effect undergird and expand the explicitly masculinist military expansion of the Egyptian regime? In this talk, I provide an overview the location of the Siwa oasis at Egypt's territorial and national margins. I then discuss how my fieldwork over summer 2019 is helping me to think through gendered mobilities. That is, how men and women are differently positioned vis-a-vis the Egyptian regime's encroachment, and how their differential positions can serve to simultaneously restrict and expand the reach of the state into Siwi economies and everyday life.

Presenter:  Lamin Keita, Political Science
Talk:  Youth and Protest: How #Gambia Ended Decades of Autocratic Rule

Abstract: The role of youth in protest in the Gambia was pivotal in changing the political environment in the Gambia. Far from being just reaction in response to the rising socioeconomic problems (e.g. cost of food) or the result of violent political efforts of former President Yahya Jammeh’s opposition, the events of the 2016 election—and the role of youth in these events—are deeply rooted in Gambia’s history of authoritarian regime. The grievances expressed by youths were symbolic of larger societal problems. The protest illustrated a pattern of continuous youth involvement in Gambia’s political arena. This study used extensive interviews in the Gambia and other forms of primary and secondary sources. This study will contribute to the growing literature on the role of youth activism to change the entrenched authoritarian regime through non-violence election in the Gambia, across Africa, and beyond.

Presenter: Bright Gyamfi, History
Talk: Ghanaian Intellectuals and the Global Development of the Study of Africa

Abstract: This presentation will focus on my summer archival research at the Dakar-based African Institute of Economic Development and Planning (IDEP). IDEP, created by the United Nations in 1962 and staffed by prominent Ghanaian academics including Tony Obeng and Cadman Atta Mills, played an important role in knitting together a type of pan-Africanism that took both Africa and its diaspora seriously as a terrain of political and intellectual action. IDEP’s Ghanaian staff helped orient the institute’s research toward regional economic development and the struggle for liberation in the southern parts of the continent. These intellectuals worked with other Marxist activist scholars to shift what had otherwise been the relatively conservative aims of IDEP, using it to criticize the unequal economic relations between the West and Africa.