SPONSORED BY THE KANSAS AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER
ORGANIZED BY GLENN ADAMS, PSYCHOLOGY CHRISTINA LUX, KASC
Cover Photo: Alexandria Library, by Dallas75
2012
With additional questions, contact: Glenn Adams, adamsg@ku.edu
KASC Bailey Hall, Rm. #208 1440 Jayhawk Boulevard University of Kansas Lawrence, KS 66045 kasc@ku.edu
GRADUATE RESEARCH WORKSHOP April 6, 2012 Alcove G, Kansas Union University of Kansas
PROGRAM 8:45-9:00
Coffee and Introductory Remarks
9:00-10:30 Panel 1 Chair: Christina Lux, Assistant Director, KASC, KU
2:30-2:40
Break
2:40-4:55 Panel 4 Chair: Katie Rhine, Assistant Professor, Anthropology, KU
Mary Mba, French and Italian, KU “The Myth and Cultural Construction of Madness in Myriam Warner Vieyra’s Juletane and Mariama Ba’s Un chant écarlate”
Patrick Asingo, Political Science, KU “The Dilemma of Uninformed Survey Respondents: ‘Do I Guess or Do I Admit that I Don’t Know?’”
Heather Aldersey, Education, KU “Intellectual/Developmental Disability in Urban Congo: The Construction of Personhood”
Abdul Musa, Library and Information Systems, Emporia State “Diffusion and Use of Information for Sustainable Consumption of Gasoline for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Northern Nigeria: A Situational Small World and Cognitive Constructivist Approach”
10:30-10:35
Break
10:35-12:05 Panel 2 Chair: Byron Caminero-Santangelo, Associate Professor, English, KU Kundai Chirindo, Communication Studies, KU “Barack Obama and the African Idea”
John Clune, History, KU “The Informational Program: International Officers Experience American Military Education”
Dustin Crowley, English, KU “Building a Refuge: Farah’s Sense of Place in Links” 12:05-1:00
Lunch at Impromptu Café
1:00-2:30 Panel 3 Chair: Peter Ojiambo, Assistant Professor, AAAS, KU Hilary Hungerford, Geography, KU “French and British Colonial Water Systems in West Africa” Erika Kraus, AAAS, KU “Beyond (Bio)Diversity: Cultural Forestry”
** All sessions will be held in Alcove G, Kansas Union.**
ABSTRACTS The Myth and Cultural Construction of Madness in Myriam Warner Vierya’s Juletane and Mariama Ba’s Un chant ecarlate Mary Mba, French and Italian, KU
Barack Obama and the African Idea Kundai Chirindo, KU Department of Communication Studies
This paper is a chapter of my dissertation and studies the cultural, mythical, religious and traditional constructions of women’s madness in Africa. In Africa, madness is believed most of the time to be caused by witchcraft, sorcery or spirit possession as well as other manipulations by ancestral spirits. This tendency of Africans to “blame” external forces whenever something does not seem right has caused some Western critics to view Africans as self-absorbed and morally lazy Thus this chapter will trace the invention of madness through the ages and show the influence that mythology, religion and other Western ideas have had on the African belief system as well as show similarities in ideas and concepts of madness in both the West and in Africa in view of showing that it is not only Africans who have this tendency, but Westerners as well. This chapter is particularly important as it will not only define madness but also lay the foundations for the chapters that will follow in which I will expand and show how these believe system are applied and made manifest in some sub – Saharan African novels.
The search for new ways of thinking about Africa has been ongoing since the end of colonialism’s heyday in Africa fifty years ago. Though the zenith of European occupation of Africa lasted less than a century between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, the legacy of colonialism has endured into the twenty-first century through the production of knowledge about the continent. Against this background, this study argues that the discourse of Barack Obama articulates a forceful counterstatement to traditional conceptions of Africa. In some ways, the discourse of and around Barack Obama presents an Africa freed from the colonial imagination. To register this vision of Africa, my inquiry poses and answers the following questions: What representations of Africa are implicit in the discourse from and about Barack Obama?; In what ways do the representations of Africa conform with and deviate from established ways of thinking about Africa?; What do the representations of Africa in Obama’s discourse imply for his relationship to Africa?; What are the implications of this study for the study of the rhetoric of and about Africa?
Intellectual/Developmental Disability in Urban Congo: The Construction of Personhood Heather Aldersey, Education, KU The study of disability across cultures recently has emerged as a key area of interest in the social sciences in which scholars of disability have analyzed how society identifies and classifies people with disabilities and how people with disabilities are subjected to discrimination. Much of the scholarship has focused upon populations wherein there is an established governmental system of both diagnosis and rights and entitlements to support; however, studies of the experiences and approaches of persons with disabilities in contexts wherein the state is absent are rare and can provide different insight into the identification, discrimination, and societal inclusion of people with disabilities. In this presentation I will discuss my proposed dissertation research which will utilize qualitative research methods to study the construction of personhood and societal integration of people with Intellectual/Developmental Disabilities (IDD) in urban Democratic Republic of the
Congo (DRC).
To detail the different conception of Africa presented in the discourse of Obama, I will analyze both his and other relevant discourse. The study analyzes invocations of Africa in discourse about Obama. This involves presentations of Africa in media coverage of Obama both at home and in Africa particularly at key moments e.g. during Obama 2006 trip to Africa; during and immediately after the 2008 Kenyan elections; during the emergence of the birther movement; and in the run up to his first presidential trip to Africa.
Building a Refuge: Farah’s Sense of Place in Links Dustin Crowley, English, KU
French and British Colonial Water Systems in West Africa Hilary Hungerford, KU Department of Geography
I propose to present an abridged version of a chapter of my dissertation, which applies geographic theories of place to the novels of Nuruddin Farah. Investigating the role of place in these novels goes against conventional criticism on Farah’s work, which typically takes a poststructural/postmodernist form. Most critics have understood a work like Maps as Farah’s attempt to utterly disrupt the artificial concept of the nation because place concepts like the nation tend to equate “a people” with “a place” in homogeneous and essentialist ways. The inside/outside framework suppresses what Fanon calls the “historical nature” of identity, which is always necessarily fluctuating and unstable. At the same time, the complete rejection of notions of place that often accompanies poststructuralism and poststructural postcolonialism fails to account for the material impact of social, cultural, and environmental history which makes places more than just mental constructions or cultural imaginaries.
I want to build on my dissertation research on water in Niamey by comparing French colonial systems of water distribution in cities with similar British systems. I want to know whether colonial rhetoric of direct rule (French) or indirect rule (British) manifested in the water infrastructure in different ways. I will compare French colonial water systems in Niamey and Dakar with British colonial systems in Lagos and Accra. I seek to understand if colonial water systems were the same across French and British territories in West Africa, and what legacies they hold for contemporary cities today.
By applying geographic theories of place to Farah’s work, however, we can see him not rejecting place altogether, but providing alternative representations of place that correct the abuses of nationalism. In Maps and Links, he develops a cosmopolitan sense of place that is not defined by essentialism but by dynamic, historical place-based interactions; that is not isolated and strictly delineated, but connected outward to other places; that is not a “free play” of subjectivities and discourses, but grounded and specific. Rethinking Farah’s use of place has implications for imagining ways to re-establish some sense of the Somali nation—to rebuild a necessary sense of collectivity after the collapse of the nation-state, but a collectivity that embraces difference and dynamic place-connections as constitutive parts of the nation.
Beyond (Bio)Diversity: Cultural Forestry Erika Kraus, KU Department of African & African-American Studies Sacred forests in West Africa are dynamic areas constructed and maintained through a network of social institutions. These particular wooded areas serve as physical and spiritual protection and serve as space for initiation to adulthood and religious authority. In the sphere of resource conservation, sacred forests are ideal pockets of established vegetation in desperate need of protection from the human communities who live near and around them. Does international pressure to preserve these sacred sites for their biodiversity change the community’s perception of them? How does a change in the management status of the grove –from local to national or international – affect the population’s use of it as a sacred place? Some examples of such change are in the Lama Forest of Benin, and the Osun-Oshegu UNESCO forest in Lagos, Nigeria. This paper presents the misconnections between the local community and international development actors. This work covers the practices of the people who sanctify the woods, Green Development Theory (Adams, W.M. 1995), as well as the intentions and implementations of the United Nations’ World Heritage sites and REDD/REDD+ program. Understanding the cultural differences in the perceptions of natural resources will contribute to the overall improvement of natural resource conservation on grassroots levels.
The Dilemma of Uninformed Survey Respondents: “Do I Guess or Do I Admit that I Don’t Know?” Patrick Asingo, Political Science, KU Study after study has shown that most people lack pertinent information, and while sufficient attention has been paid to the impact of lack of information on political behavior, very scanty attention has been paid to its effects on how respondents answer survey questions. For instance, even very weird survey responses are usually taken at face value. Yet, when respondents give ‘don’t know’ response, most scholars are reluctant to treat it as admission of lack of information needed to answer that particular question, thereby implying that survey respondents are somehow infallible. Consequently, we know little about how uninformed respondents resolve the dilemma that confronts them when they lack requisite information to provide correct answers to a question. To fill this void, the study tests a logic regression model built on 2005 Afrobarometer survey data for Kenya to address the question: What influences the uninformed respondents’ decision to either give guessed response or admit that they ‘don’t know’ the answer to a particular survey question in a face-to-face interview. Diffusion and Use of Information for Sustainable Consumption of Gasoline for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Northern Nigeria: A Situational Small World and Cognitive Constructivist Approach Abdul Musa, Library and Information Systems, Emporia State Africa is among the most vulnerable regions to climate change (Boko et al., 2007). Climate change is a major threat to development in Africa (Gemenne, 2011; Lecocq & Shalizi, 2007). The vulnerability of African countries to climate change was highlighted in the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2001). The concerns of climate change in Africa are water (UICN-BRAC, 2007), agriculture (Brown & Funk, 2008; IPCC, 2007), health (Costello et al., 2009; Olago et al., 2007; Maïnassara et al., 2008), ecosystems and biodiversity (Thuiller et al., 2006), forestry (Kowero, 2011), and coastal zones (Boko et al., 2007; IPCC, 2007; World Bank 2007). Mitigating and adapting to change requires public participation; and effective participation entails having an informed populace to make the connections between issues that may appear unrelated on the surface. When people are ignorant about an issue it is difficult for them to make connections to see the
wider picture. Unfortunately climate change literacy is a major problem in Africa. Therefore how to transfer knowledge on sound environmental behaviors for achieving sustainability to the millions of non-literate Africans is a major concern. My research aims to explore how non-literate people make sense of information on sustainable consumption of gasoline for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Elfreda Chatman’s small world theory and Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality theory will provide the context and background for my study. Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making theory, Kulthau’s information search theory and Jean Piaget’s theory of cognitive constructivism will provide the theoretical frame and methodologies for my study. The research will be valuable to international donor agencies, community based organizations, and non-governmental organizations working in the area of environmental knowledge transfer.
NOTES The Informational Program: International Officers Experience American Military Education John Clune, History, KU From its beginning, the Ghanaian military has been a laboratory of international influences. Education and socialization has occurred in transnational spaces at staff colleges and advanced technical schools around the globe. Ghanaian participation in overseas military training sometimes represented a national commitment to internationalism; sometimes it implied exclusive strategic alignment. From an external perspective, Ghana’s history of military rule obscures any organizational improvements international military training professed to inspire. Yet officers in all ranks received training in basic and advanced military sciences from an array of international sources. This project attempts to evaluate how individuals, elites and non-elites alike, who were routinely exposed to extra-national training, internalized external military values. Concentrating on the period of Ghana’s military rule (1966-1992), I will examine how international encounters in education, training, and operations altered the Ghanaian military’s perception of itself within society and Ghana’s perception of its military as an instrument of regional strategic influence. This project completes a deficiency in the history of military rule in Africa by dissecting the large-scale political trend of coups d’état and military rule in Ghana’s history from the individual experience of participating in military training and education programs worldwide. I intend to compare the rationale for Ghana’s choices to consume international military assistance with other nations’—most often American—perspectives for providing it. As a result, I hope to evaluate the long-term impact that transnational encounters caused by military exchanges had on Ghana’s military socialization.