From hechtg at umich.edu Tue Sep 8 15:14:27 2015 From: hechtg at umich.edu (Gabrielle Hecht) Date: Tue, 8 Sep 2015 09:14:27 -0400 Subject: [Sugarman] CFP: Message-ID: <56626768-3C49-4955-929F-B95527914B84@umich.edu> Dear WISER and UM colleagues: Below and attached, please find the CFP for our Mellon-funded workshop next 11-14 July in Durban, South Africa, on Technology Studies in Africa. We warmly welcome proposals from anyone in our communities, including those already attending the Toxicity workshop on 7-8 July. We look forward to receiving your proposals no later than 5 October. Please do follow submission instructions carefully to ensure that we have all necessary information in one place. Best, Keith, Sarah, Paul, and Gabrielle Gabrielle Hecht Professor of History , University of Michigan 2015-16: Mary I. and David D. Hunting Family Fellow, Institute for the Humanities In defense of email hygiene: http://emailcharter.org Technology Studies in Africa Mellon Workshop July 11-14, 2016 ? Durban, South Africa What happened to the study of technology in Africa? When African studies first took off as an academic field, economic historians, archaeologists, and other scholars paid significant attention to technological artifacts and technological change. To be sure, some treated African technologies as metonyms for backwardness, while others limited themselves to linking raw material extraction and human exploitation in Africa to the industrial success of Europe and North America. Other scholars, however, explored technologies as purveyors of power, containers of culture, and instruments of social dynamics. The rich literature on precolonial metalworking is a case in point. Yet as African studies expanded ? as colonial and postcolonial archives opened, as oral history became academically respectable, as gender and ethnicity became objects of critical study ? studies of technology occupied a smaller and smaller place in the field. With the growing commitment and ability to understand African societies on their own terms, the material textures of those societies fell into scholarly obscurity, even (in some instances) disrepute. Over the last 10-15 years, the tide has begun to shift again. Scholars trained in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) have looked to the African continent for new approaches to epistemology and ontology. Medical historians and anthropologists have attended increasingly to the role of artifacts in health and healing. STS-infused approaches to political economy have integrated African places and people into studies of commodities such as groundnuts, skin lighteners, or uranium. Media technologies, especially radio, have attracted attention as instruments of nationalism, war, and liberation. Historians have re-interpreted the role of guns in colonial times, analyzing their complex political and cultural lives within African polities and between Africans and European settlers. Renewed attention to mobility as a major theme within African studies has led scholars to examine the instruments and infrastructures of transport. Indeed, infrastructure has become its own topic, both within and outside of African studies. The mania for materiality that has overtaken the humanities makes it impossible to ignore technology in any study of culture. Taking stock of these developments, this workshop aims to extend the frontiers of technology studies in Africa. We welcome contributions oriented around theoretical themes (such as infrastructure, materiality, technopolitics, mobility, communication, user innovation, and technical knowledge) as well as those focused on empirical topics (such as digital governance, energy production, mineral extraction, war and conflict, food cultivation, cellular telephony, waste management, or tourism). Standard conference talks and read-aloud papers are banned. Instead, we welcome creative proposals for other presentation formats, including (but not limited to) the following: 6-minute Pecha-Kucha talks (20 slides, 20 seconds each, advanced automatically so you can?t digress); we hope to have one or two sessions dedicated to this format. discussion sessions based on pre-circulated drafts (of articles, dissertation or book chapters, or book proposals) structured discussions of thematic flashpoints (for example, you and a partner might offer to lead an hour-long discussion based on 2-3 readings) sessions to discuss short videos (documentaries, interviews, video collages designed to spark discussions) demos of ?digital history? and its uses in teaching, at any level Feel free to discuss your format ideas with one of us before submitting them. Proposals should describe your topic and proposed format, in a maximum of 250 words (including the title). Please submit these to pne at umich.edu by Monday, 5 October 2015. Keith Breckenridge, WISER,keith at breckenridge.org.za Sarah Duff, WISER, Sarah.Duff at wits.ac.za Paul Edwards, University of Michigan, pne at umich.edu Gabrielle Hecht,University of Michigan, hechtg at umich.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: STSMellonJuly2016.pdf Type: application/pdf Size: 89467 bytes Desc: not available URL: -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From drpeters at umich.edu Tue Sep 22 15:30:36 2015 From: drpeters at umich.edu (Derek Peterson) Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 09:30:36 -0400 Subject: [Sugarman] A request Message-ID: Dear colleagues: We are putting together an annual report for Mellon concerning the work accomplished in 2014-15 under the U-M/Wits collaboration. Could you please send me, within the next two or three days, the titles of any publications (in print or forthcoming) that have arisen out of our program of activity? We are casting the net quite broadly; even work that is single-authored, but related somehow to the themes of our collaboration, would be welcome. Many thanks, Derek --- Dr. Derek R. Peterson Professor of History & African Studies University of Michigan tel: (+1) 734 615 3608 www.derekrpeterson.com From drpeters at umich.edu Wed Sep 23 16:29:47 2015 From: drpeters at umich.edu (Derek Peterson) Date: Wed, 23 Sep 2015 10:29:47 -0400 Subject: [Sugarman] CFP: African Print Cultures, 20-23 June 2016 Message-ID: <56F98682-C09A-4229-9D57-7DCAC282D8B7@umich.edu> Dear Wits and Michigan colleagues: Below is a CFP for a Mellon-funded workshop on ?African Print Cultures?, to be held outside Johannesburg from 20 to 23 June 2016. This is intended to be quite a small-scale occasion. We are particularly interested in having proposals from graduate students who are working in (or are interested in working in) this area. Proposals are due to the addresses given below by Monday, 5 October 2015. Yours, Derek Peterson & Isabel Hofmeyr ** African Print Cultures ** 20-23 June, 2015 Johannesburg, South Africa Scholars have generally read newspapers as a conveyance for data or as an means by which to index the changing tides of public opinion. In this workshop we will engage with news-making as politically and culturally constitutive work. We want to bring into view the editors and publishers who financed the press, set agendas, and produced the news. In the absence of ready-made audiences, African editors had to create interest groups. They used the techniques of their trade?cutting-and-pasting, summarization, citation, excision, juxtaposition?to make connections and draw linkages. Newspapers were therefore the forcing-houses for new political solidarities. They were also the hosts for new forms of addressivity. They were the incubators for the creation of literary genres and the genesis of new African voices. Here we want to focus on the choices that editors made as they recruited audiences; on the itineraries that journalists embarked upon as they identified and composed news; on the literary experiments that newspapermen sponsored as they looked for new voices with which to speak. Our aim, collectively, is to develop a comparative approach to the history of newspaper journalism in Africa. We are particularly interested in mapping out the networks of textual exchange that linked southern Africa?s newspapers with newspapers in east and west Africa. Our starting-place will be a new book, shortly to appear on the University of Michigan Press, entitled _African Print Cultures: Newspapers and their Publics in the Twentieth Century_ (ed. Derek Peterson, Emma Hunter, and Stephanie Newell). The book largely focuses on the newspaper industries of Anglophone East and West Africa. In the workshop we hope to open up a comparative conversation about the newspaper industry in southern Africa. The following scholars have committed to attending this workshop: From Wits: Hlonipha Mokoena, Bhekizizwe Peterson, Brenda Mhlambi, & Isabel Hofmeyr From U-M: Judy Irvine, Stephanie Santana-Bosch, Kelly Askew, & Derek Peterson From UCT: Khwezi Mkhize From the University of Pretoria: Corinne Sandwith & Archie Dick From the United Kingdom: Karin Barber (Birmingham), Emma Hunter (Edinburgh) & Leslie James (Birmingham) Participants will compose pre-circulated papers for discussion. As one focus of the workshop is concerned with the materiality of print, we would encourage presenters to incorporate examples of pages and cuttings in their presentations. We encourage graduate students and colleagues interested in participating in this occasion to submit a one-page proposal to us by Monday, 5 October 2015. Isabel Hofmeyr, > Derek Peterson, > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: