Amber Murrey
University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, Faculty Member
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American University in Cairo, Sociology-Anthropology, Faculty MemberBoston College, African & African Diaspora Studies Program, Department Member, and 3 more add
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Natural Resources, Political Geography, Postcolonial Geography, Feminist Geography, Political Ecology, Africana Studies, and 36 moreDecolonial Thought, Critical Race Studies, Structural Violence, Pan Africanism, Central Africa, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Black radicalism, Critical Ethnography, Postdevelopment Theory, Militarism and militarization, Resistance (Social), Cameroon, Cote D'Ivoire, Oil Pipelines, Land Grabbing, Slow Violence, Slow Scholarship, Fast Capitalism, Military Industrial Complex, Decolonizing Methodologies, Chad, Sociology of Violence, Rural Geography, Everyday Resistance, Postcoloniality and decolonization, Women and Gender Studies, Non-Western Political Thought, Claude Ake, Thomas Sankara, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Frantz Fanon, NGOs (Anthropology), World Bank, Exxonmobil, Politics of Place, and Marxist political economy edit
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A decolonial political geographer with interests in environmental justice, resistance studies, and social change, Dr.... moreA decolonial political geographer with interests in environmental justice, resistance studies, and social change, Dr. Amber Murrey is an Associate Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. She is the editor of "A Certain Amount of Madness": The Life, Politics and Legacy of Thomas Sankara (Pluto Press, 2018) and has authored more than a dozen articles and chapters on the dynamics of power, resistance and wellbeing within extractive projects; decolonial and experimental methodologies; (non)violence, coloniality and the politics of knowledge. Before joining the faculty at Oxford's School of Geography & the Environment, Amber held academic posts at Boston College, Clark University, the American University in Cairo and Jimma University, Ethiopia. edit
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Patricia Daley, Patricia Noxolo, Horace Campbell, Joan Bryant, Richard Powell, Patricia McFaddenedit
Research Interests:
Human Geography, African Studies, Development Economics, Development Studies, Sustainable Development, and 13 morePedagogy, Political Geography, Decolonial Thought, Critical Race Theory, Anti-Racist Education, Social Justice Education, Antiracist Education, University of Oxford, Radical Pedagogy, Decolonizing Education, Queering development, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Thomas Sankara, Epistemic Disobedience, and Decolonizing Pedagogies & Research
People’s narratives of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and pipeline actors emphasise the uneven exercise of power through which structural violence is effected and experienced. Working from these narratives, I offer a theoretical... more
People’s narratives of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and pipeline actors emphasise the uneven exercise of power through which structural violence is effected and experienced. Working from these narratives, I offer a theoretical re-articulation of structural violence as (i) tangible through the body, (ii) historically compounded, (iii) spatially compressed and (iv) enacted in a globalised geopolitical nexus by actors who are spatially nested within a racialised and gendered hierarchy of scale.
Drawing from critical interdisciplinary work on violence, my theory of a triad of divergent indexes of structural violence includes: infra/structural violence, industrial structural violence and institutionalized structural violence. The particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power within structural violence, local socio-political contexts and the epistemologies through which power is conceived (in this case I consider epistemologies of la sorcellerie, or witchcraft) inform resistance practices; I illuminate key operations (within geographies characterised by high levels of infra/structural violence) within the spatial practices of power that influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be quiet, spontaneous and/or labour-based. I conclude with a discussion of the political and intellectual value of academic work on life and being amid structural violence, emphasising the need to move beyond the invisible/visible dichotomy that has often informed intellectual work on structural violence.
Drawing from critical interdisciplinary work on violence, my theory of a triad of divergent indexes of structural violence includes: infra/structural violence, industrial structural violence and institutionalized structural violence. The particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power within structural violence, local socio-political contexts and the epistemologies through which power is conceived (in this case I consider epistemologies of la sorcellerie, or witchcraft) inform resistance practices; I illuminate key operations (within geographies characterised by high levels of infra/structural violence) within the spatial practices of power that influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be quiet, spontaneous and/or labour-based. I conclude with a discussion of the political and intellectual value of academic work on life and being amid structural violence, emphasising the need to move beyond the invisible/visible dichotomy that has often informed intellectual work on structural violence.
Research Interests:
Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Gender Studies, Development Studies, Violence, and 27 moreEthnography, Political Ecology, Agrarian Studies, Rural Development, Resistance (Social), Cameroon, Neoliberalism, Pipeline, Political Geography, Post-Development Theory, Political Ecology (Anthropology), Authoritarianism, Decolonial Turn, Decolonial Thought, Feminist Political Ecology, Structural Violence, Oil and Gas Pipeline, Decolonizing Methodologies, Dissent, Political Power, Decolonial Feminism, EXTRACTION, Oil Extraction, Rural studies, Everyday Resistance, Resistance Studies, and Slow Violence
Thomas Sankara (1949–87) was one of the most important anti-imperialist leaders of twentieth-century Africa. This book examines Sankara’s political philosophies and legacies and their relevance today. Contributors analyze his synthesis of... more
Thomas Sankara (1949–87) was one of the most important anti-imperialist leaders of twentieth-century Africa. This book examines Sankara’s political philosophies and legacies and their relevance today. Contributors analyze his synthesis of Pan-Africanism and humanist Marxist politics, as well as his approach to gender, development, ecology, and decolonization.
Research Interests:
Social Movements, Human Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics, Black Studies Or African American Studies, African Studies, and 32 moreAnthropology, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Visual Studies, Political Theory, Marxism, Black/African Diaspora, Leadership, African History, Political Science, Revolutions, Africa, Militarism, Social Justice, Colonialism, Protest, Pan Africanism, Cultural Memory, Black feminism, Social movements and revolution, Lenin, Imperialism, Anti-imperialism, Burkina Faso, Sankara, Food Justice, Anti-Militarism, Anti-Colonialism, Marxism-Leninism, European Debt Crisis, Black Radical Thought, and Thomas Sankara
Working in the subfields of postcolonial geographies of responsibility and Black and African Geographies, my analysis centers on Cameroonian political resistance and practices of worldmaking. From January 2016 to August 2023, political... more
Working in the subfields of postcolonial geographies of responsibility and Black and African Geographies, my analysis centers on Cameroonian political resistance and practices of worldmaking. From January 2016 to August 2023, political activists ex- perienced a set of difficulties: A wariness and oftentimes hostility to France’s continued support for the authoritarian state, dismissals by state representatives that dissenters were “externally supported,” and misappropriations of the anti-imperial man- tel by government representatives. Over the preceding several decades, the state fostered a political environment antagonistic toward Cameroonians of the diaspora, and this was instrumentalized in the widespread dismissal of activists as foreign, foreign- backed, or foreign-influenced. Activists were hesitant but sometimes strategically prepared to call upon transnational groups for attention and political action against repression and violence in Cameroon. In the context of the state’s appropriation of an anti-imperialist ideology, I argue that transnational solidarities must be attuned to and integrated with local politics in Cameroon. Making sense of popular debates regarding (anti)imperialism, (anti)intervention, and transnational solidarity in conditions of authoritarianism matters for political debates across the African continent.
Research Interests:
We are witnessing a proliferation of new critical scholarship on the manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of removal and value-making through... more
We are witnessing a proliferation of new critical scholarship on the
manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with
extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of
removal and value-making through exploitation and misappropriation.
Theorising within decolonial Black feminisms, we respond to the
metaphorization of extraction by (re)asserting the need for persistent
analysis on the material and embodied effects and consequences of
extractivisms. That is, the specific processes, logics, ideologies, and
relations of extractivism recast lands, labours, ecosystems, and bodies,
and particularly the bodies of women of colour. This helps to ensure the
concept does not become figuratively empty and abstracted in politically
and analytically debilitating ways. Drawing on more than a decade of
research with communities entangled within and targeted through
extractivism along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and the extractive-tourist coastline of Panama, we mobilise a conception of ‘extractive
logics’ to refer to the unnamed, unquestioned, often contradictory,
foundational epistemic frameworks that permit the seemingly-permanent
structures and relations of removal, destruction, and dehumanization.
We analyse documents from the Chad-Cameroon oil consortium, which
projected and calculated the economic ‘costs’ of the pipeline’s triggering
of an increase in rates of HIV/AIDS in adjacent towns and cities,
alongside the entanglement of capitalist extraction with the medical
neglect of Black labourers in Panama. Doing so demystifies the ways that
racial and gendered violence are sanctioned and even premeditated
within extractive logics. We hope that our work challenges some of the
methodological nationalism so common within the scholarship on
extraction, and brings extractive processes across disparate South-South
and black geographies into conversation, activating a cross-fertilization
of research across otherwise distinct geographies and geographical
refrains. We conclude with reflections on the imperatives for and
(im)possibilities of decolonial research against extractivism.
manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with
extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of
removal and value-making through exploitation and misappropriation.
Theorising within decolonial Black feminisms, we respond to the
metaphorization of extraction by (re)asserting the need for persistent
analysis on the material and embodied effects and consequences of
extractivisms. That is, the specific processes, logics, ideologies, and
relations of extractivism recast lands, labours, ecosystems, and bodies,
and particularly the bodies of women of colour. This helps to ensure the
concept does not become figuratively empty and abstracted in politically
and analytically debilitating ways. Drawing on more than a decade of
research with communities entangled within and targeted through
extractivism along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and the extractive-tourist coastline of Panama, we mobilise a conception of ‘extractive
logics’ to refer to the unnamed, unquestioned, often contradictory,
foundational epistemic frameworks that permit the seemingly-permanent
structures and relations of removal, destruction, and dehumanization.
We analyse documents from the Chad-Cameroon oil consortium, which
projected and calculated the economic ‘costs’ of the pipeline’s triggering
of an increase in rates of HIV/AIDS in adjacent towns and cities,
alongside the entanglement of capitalist extraction with the medical
neglect of Black labourers in Panama. Doing so demystifies the ways that
racial and gendered violence are sanctioned and even premeditated
within extractive logics. We hope that our work challenges some of the
methodological nationalism so common within the scholarship on
extraction, and brings extractive processes across disparate South-South
and black geographies into conversation, activating a cross-fertilization
of research across otherwise distinct geographies and geographical
refrains. We conclude with reflections on the imperatives for and
(im)possibilities of decolonial research against extractivism.
Research Interests:
Political Economy, Black/African Diaspora, Political Ecology, Health Geography, HIV/AIDS, and 10 moreCritical Geography, Political Geography, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, Decolonial Thought, EXTRACTION, Extractive industries, Disposability, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Racial capitalism, and Black Geographies
In this intervention article, we cultivate an anti-colonial critique of the ideational genealogy and conceptual materialisation of the social licence to operate (SLO) in the extractive industries in order to open a conversation about the... more
In this intervention article, we cultivate an anti-colonial critique of the ideational genealogy and conceptual materialisation of the social licence to operate (SLO) in the extractive industries in order to open a conversation about the racialised and colonial logics underlying its enactment and discursive practices. SLO functions to restrict the emergence of imaginary political potentials within communities impacted by extractive projects. We focus on the role of academics and social science researchers within and beyond the space of the university in engineering, shaping, and promoting dominant SLO frameworks, and endorsing the power and mythology of SLO. We do so in conversation with decolonial orientations that simultaneously analyse the colonial logics within corporate practice and galvanise epistemic justice beyond colonial and epistemic extractivism. The university, as a site for the refinement and promotion of hegemonic concepts like SLO, is an important space for post-extractive struggles.
Research Interests:
Human Geography, Economic Geography, Social Sciences, Political Geography, Epistemic Justice, and 6 moreNatural Resource and Environmental Economics, Natural Resource Extraction, Oil Extraction, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Decolonial and Anticolonial Research, and Science and Technology Studies
In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015–2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In... more
In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015–2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In both cases, resistance was met with pervasive state-initiated and corporate-sanctioned internet shutdowns and disruptions. I situate these techno-political practices within the longue durée of coloniality to argue that the state suspension of internet connectivity is a form of infrastructural harm; an intentional violence made socially and structurally possible by the colonial configurations of infrastructure. My analysis draws from five years of digital ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork, including thirteen months in Jimma, Ethiopia and nine months in Yaoundé, Cameroon. I mobilise a decolonial praxis that unmasks practices of authoritarian control within global racial coloniality, and seeks to foster cross-fertilisations of struggle and resistance praxis.
Research Interests:
Social Movements, African Studies, Digital Divide, Development Studies, Ethiopian Studies, and 11 moreSocial Media, Cameroon, Political Geography, The Internet, Authoritarianism, Infrastructure, Protest and resistance, Digital Infrastructure, Resistance Studies, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and Infrastructural Violence
We are most grateful to Christine Noe, AbdouMaliq Simone, Maano Ramutsindela and Stefan Ouma for their deliberate, richly historical and geographically astute insights on defiant scholarship in Africa. AbdouMaliq Simone re-emphasized the... more
We are most grateful to Christine Noe, AbdouMaliq Simone, Maano Ramutsindela and Stefan Ouma for their deliberate, richly historical and geographically astute insights on defiant scholarship in Africa. AbdouMaliq Simone re-emphasized the complexities within the varied tapestries of university education in Africa, saturated as it is within mosaic political traditions and contestations. Christine Noe addressed the intimate impasses of defiance, urging us to reconsider the micro-practices of quieter forms of intellectual defiance in African universities. Maano Ramutsindela provoked us to more fully articulate the unique relevance of African geographical thinking within defiant scholarship in African universities. Stefan Ouma raised the potential pertinency of our intervention, given that we teach and work at one of the world’s most colonial institutions, and recognizes the important and historical research networks and institutions long operating on the continent. We cannot respond fully to each point raised. But we hope that these interactions, graciously published in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, might be taken holistically to ignite a generative conversation for the fostering of anti-racist and decolonial political geographies of Africa. In this response, we will address four uncertainties and contestations within the long, collective struggle to rupture the colonial uni-versity: 1) differentiated risk and danger, 2) the relevance of Africa within decolonial imaginaries, 3) anti-racism and global anti-blackness in the understanding of Africa, and 4) transdisciplinarity within defiant geographical thought.
Research Interests:
Cultural Geography, Area Studies, African Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Colonialism, and 12 morePolitical Geography, Anti-Racism, Anti-racist feminist theory, Decolonial Thought, Race and identity in post-apartheid South Africa, South African geography, Decolonial Feminism, Decolonizing Education, African Feminisms, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, African geography, and Epistemic Disobedience
Scholars of resistance have long identified and differentiated the distinctive features, contours, and boundaries of resistance in social life. However, some have characterised the resulting plurality of conceptual frameworks in... more
Scholars of resistance have long identified and differentiated the distinctive features, contours, and boundaries of resistance in social life. However, some have characterised the resulting plurality of conceptual frameworks in resistance studies as ‘somewhat chaotic’ (Baaz et al. 2016: 137). In this Intervention, we play within the chaos at the conceptual margins of resistance within political geography. We revisit Cindi Katz’s (2004) influential articulations of resistance, reworking, resilience, and revanchism 15 years after the publication of Growing Up Global. Considering the last decade and a half of socio-political, economic, colonial and environmental violence encountered by human and non-human life, we explore the ways in which Katz's work remains relevant to the issues and debates central to political geography.
Research Interests:
Social Change, Cultural Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics, Area Studies, Ethnography, and 13 moreSpace and Place, Resilience, Resistance (Social), Political Geography, Feminist Geography, Cultural power and resistance, Refusal, Decolonial Thought, Resistance, Dissent, Protest and resistance, Resistance Studies, and Defiance
Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond... more
Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond Southern Africa) within the discipline of human geography; and (c) erasures of the functions of racialization in African societies. These are compounded by the relative marginalization of African knowledge within decolonial thought, including decolonial geographies and the disunities between the subfields of black geographies and African geographies. To challenge some of these dynamics, we introduce the concept of defiant scholarship in Africa, a form of scholarship that seeks to work against and outside of dominant grammars and prevailing registers and which draws from a powerful and extensive intellectual tradition across the African continent. Working from Walter Rodney's ‘guerrilla intellectuals’ and drawing on Walter Mignolo's ‘epistemic disobedience’, defiant scholarship cultivates those ways of thinking and those practices that are external to, in opposition to, and/or unconventional to the coloniality of knowledge. We ask what it means for our scholarship to be disobedient to colonial and capitalist epistemes, and, in so doing, we sketch the contours of an African geographies subdiscipline that is anti-racist, decolonial, and in active conversation with black geographies. The result of our engagement is a call for a reinvigoration of African geographies as we currently know and practice them.
Research Interests:
Human Geography, Race and Racism, Transdisciplinarity, Political Geography, Africana Studies, and 13 moreDecolonial Thought, Feminist Political Ecology, Decolonizing Methodologies, Anti-Racist Education, Decolonial Feminism, Walter Rodney, Claude Ake, African geography, Coloniality of Knowledge, Epistemic Disobedience, decolonize the university, black geography, and scholars at risk
School geography in England has been largely silent on issues around race, which stands in contrast to important strands of thought in the discipline. In this intervention, we explore two influential approaches in education - cultural... more
School geography in England has been largely silent on issues around race, which stands in contrast to important strands of thought in the discipline. In this intervention, we explore two influential approaches in education - cultural literacy and powerful knowledge - to argue that we urgently need to address the silence on race by making substantive anti-racist changes in the curriculum. Within cultural literacy, we argue that anti-racist geographies provide powerful frameworks to address white supremacy and institutionalised racisms. Working within powerful knowledge, Black and decolonial geographies bring attention to knowledge creation and the great potential that exists to learn from anti-racist conversations and internal debates within academic geography. Our argument is for a more holistic and sustained anti-racist school geography education that empowers young people to understand the complex and shifting politics of space, place and knowledge and contribute to meaningful anti-racist futures.
Research Interests:
Geography, Human Geography, Social Geography, Race and Racism, Race and Ethnicity, and 8 moreCritical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Secondary Education, Decolonial Thought, Primary Education, Critical Race Theory, Anti-Racist Education, Social Justice Education, Black Geographies, Anti-racist Geography, and Decolonial teacher education
Responding to calls for increased attention to actions and reactions “from above” within the extractive industry, we offer a decolonial critique of the ways in which corporate entities and multinational institutions draw on racialized... more
Responding to calls for increased attention to actions and reactions “from above” within the extractive industry, we offer a decolonial critique of the ways in which corporate entities and multinational institutions draw on racialized rhetoric of “local” suffering, “local” consultation, and “local” culpability in oil as development. Such rhetoric functions to legitimize extractive intervention within a set of practices that we call localwashing. Drawing from a decade of research on and along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, we show how multiscalar actors converged to assert knowledge of, responsibility for, and collaborations with “local” people within a racialized politics of scale. These corporate representations of the racialized “local” are coded through long-standing colonial tropes. We identify three interrelated and overlapping flexian elite rhetoric(s) and practices of racialized localwashing: (1) anguishing, (2) arrogating, and (3) admonishing. These elite representations of a racialized “local” reveal diversionary efforts “from above” to manage public opinion, displace blame for project failures, and domesticate dissent in a context of persistent scrutiny and criticism from international and regional advocates and activists.
Research Interests:
Critical Theory, Geography, Human Geography, African Studies, Political Economy, and 15 moreDevelopment Studies, Corporate Social Responsibility, International Development, Political Ecology, Race and Racism, Colonialism, Cameroon, Racism, World Bank, Pipeline, Central Africa, Multinational Corporations, Decolonial Thought, EXTRACTION, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
Oriented to ongoing student and university momentums for decolonial futures, I interrogate the role and status of mainstream International Development curricula and pedagogies by critiquing two absences in the sub-discipline's teaching... more
Oriented to ongoing student and university momentums for decolonial futures, I interrogate the role and status of mainstream International Development curricula and pedagogies by critiquing two absences in the sub-discipline's teaching formulae: appropriations and assassinations.I draw from (1) a decade of research on oil extraction in Central Africa, including ethnographic work with two communities in Cameroon along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline, (2) four years of research (interview-based and unofficial or grey materials) on the 1983 August Revolution in Burkina Faso and assassination of Thomas Sankara and (3) five years of experience teaching International Development in North America, Western Europe and North and Eastern Africa.Through a critical synthesis of political and rhetorical practices that are often considered in isolation (i.e. political assassinations and corporate appropriation of Indigenous knowledges), I make the case for what I call pedagogical disobedience: an anticipatory decolonial development curricula and praxis that is attentive to the simultaneity of violence and misappropriation within colonial operations of power (i.e., 'coloniality of power' or 'coloniality').
Research Interests:
Human Geography, African Studies, Development Studies, International Development, Sociology of Knowledge, and 14 moreCritical Pedagogy, Sustainable Development, Indigenous Knowledge, Political Assassinations, Cameroon, Knowledge and Power, Decolonial Thought, Appropriation, Burkina Faso, Postdevelopment Theory, Epistemic Injustice, Panafricanism, Pluriverse, and Decolonized Curriculum
As an analytical and political term, permanent counterrevolution demands recognition of the dynamics of the continuously kaleidoscopic imperial arrangements and dogmas embedded within and constitutive of global racialised capitalism. It... more
As an analytical and political term, permanent counterrevolution demands recognition of the dynamics of the continuously kaleidoscopic imperial arrangements and dogmas embedded within and constitutive of global racialised capitalism. It is a radical term that demands we acknowledge the complex ways in which leaders, institutions and factions have tailored, regulated and marshalled (through coordination and disorder alike) repressions that—albeit permanently challenged, cracked and strained under various forms of human and environmental resistance—have attained considerable ideological, institutional and infrastructural normalcy.
Contemporary counterrevolution in Africa, while rooted in preceding iterations and power arrangements, seems to have shifted in the post-Arab Spring and post-African Uprisings political context. The routine state suspension of the Internet and social media is one emergent practice of contemporary counterrevolution. Internet disruption and blackout fits within a context of concurrent forms of pervasive counterrevolution in African societies in which US-backed militarism, the criminalisation of resistance and the fracturing of dissent have taken increasingly direct form. These arrangements seem to harken back to the earlier—circa Cold War and colonial—forms of imperial violence. A thoughtful consideration of permanent counterrevolution must be balanced with an attention to the practices and processes of dissent against it. In this, the spatio-temporal dynamics of resistance are important in recognising the permanence of dissent, albeit sometimes what I call ‘slow dissent’. In what follows, I sketch the central core of my arguments at Dar and conclude with some reflections on the implications for radical scholarship in Africa.
Contemporary counterrevolution in Africa, while rooted in preceding iterations and power arrangements, seems to have shifted in the post-Arab Spring and post-African Uprisings political context. The routine state suspension of the Internet and social media is one emergent practice of contemporary counterrevolution. Internet disruption and blackout fits within a context of concurrent forms of pervasive counterrevolution in African societies in which US-backed militarism, the criminalisation of resistance and the fracturing of dissent have taken increasingly direct form. These arrangements seem to harken back to the earlier—circa Cold War and colonial—forms of imperial violence. A thoughtful consideration of permanent counterrevolution must be balanced with an attention to the practices and processes of dissent against it. In this, the spatio-temporal dynamics of resistance are important in recognising the permanence of dissent, albeit sometimes what I call ‘slow dissent’. In what follows, I sketch the central core of my arguments at Dar and conclude with some reflections on the implications for radical scholarship in Africa.
Research Interests:
African Studies, International Relations, Africa, Cameroon, African Politics, and 14 moreSocial movements and revolution, Political Geography, Ethiopia, Cultural power and resistance, Imperialism, Natural Resource Extraction, Dissent, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), EXTRACTION, Counterrevolution, Protest and State Repression, Political dissent, Colonialism and Imperialism, and Geographies of Resistance
Turning my frame of inquiry toward academia, I analyse academic presentations on topics of ‘witchcraft’ conveyed to majority geographer, majority-white and majority-Northern audiences. I argue that (a) the imagined geographies of... more
Turning my frame of inquiry toward academia, I analyse academic
presentations on topics of ‘witchcraft’ conveyed to majority geographer, majority-white and majority-Northern audiences. I argue that (a) the imagined geographies of ‘witchcraft’ have been central to colonial Othering; (b) ‘witchcraft’ is often relegated to the academic periphery; (c) ‘witchcraft’ ontologies are plural, fluid and ambiguous and (d) ‘witchcraft’ is often defiant of academicisations. Given this milieu, scholars risk reproducing a ‘witchcraft’ that is Othering, even when/if the scholarship has an anti-colonial orientation. I call for greater attention to the broadening of academic conference exchanges to allow space for pluriform knowledges
presentations on topics of ‘witchcraft’ conveyed to majority geographer, majority-white and majority-Northern audiences. I argue that (a) the imagined geographies of ‘witchcraft’ have been central to colonial Othering; (b) ‘witchcraft’ is often relegated to the academic periphery; (c) ‘witchcraft’ ontologies are plural, fluid and ambiguous and (d) ‘witchcraft’ is often defiant of academicisations. Given this milieu, scholars risk reproducing a ‘witchcraft’ that is Othering, even when/if the scholarship has an anti-colonial orientation. I call for greater attention to the broadening of academic conference exchanges to allow space for pluriform knowledges
Research Interests:
Development Studies, International Development, Spirituality, Academic Writing, Whiteness Studies, and 27 moreCritical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Witchcraft (Magic), Decolonialization, Witchcraft (Anthropology Of Religion), Witchcraft, Religion and Magic, Critical Whiteness Studies, Early Modern European Witchcraft, White Privilege, Edward Said, Decolonial Thought, Coloniality, Elites, Decolonization, Other, Witchcraft, Whiteness, Geographies of religion and spirituality, Traditional Witchcraft, Othering, Coloniality of Power, Decolonial Feminism, Academic Conference, Imagined geographies, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Academic vocabulary, Academic Communication, and Epistemicide
Drawing from decolonizing scholarships that call for a reorientation of knowledge making that is more inclusive and reflective of oral modes of communication, this article takes the form of a performance autoethnography between two... more
Drawing from decolonizing scholarships that call for a reorientation of knowledge making that is more inclusive and reflective of oral modes of communication, this article takes the form of a performance autoethnography between two friends. This approach allows a rich complexity of subjects to emerge—from " decolonizing " pedagogies and curriculums to university administration and the geopolitics of knowledge globally—at the same time that we retain a specific attention to our university in Jimma, Ethiopia. Our intention is to challenge conventional academic modes of writing through a contextualization of the contemporary struggles that young professors face while teaching in semi-rural Ethiopian universities. Although our discussions reflect our personal struggles, they are reflective of larger general trends in Ethiopian higher education. Academics working on the African continent often confront intersecting material, ideological, linguistic, financial, and political factors that work to exclude African knowledges from global or transnational knowledge exchanges. Our conversation allows us to reflect on the broad tapestry of the current moment, including interactions with administrative staff, violent histories of knowledge colonization, racial and gendered politics, the potential for social science knowledges for social justice, and more.
Research Interests:
African Studies, Knowledge Management, Higher Education, Ethiopian Studies, Sociology of Knowledge, and 18 moreCritical Pedagogy, African History, Indigenous Knowledge, Ethiopia, Performance [auto] ethnography, Horn of Africa, Decolonial Thought, Coloniality, Decolonization, Race and Education, Geopolitics of knowledge, Politics of knowledge production, Coloniality of Power, Decolonial Feminism, African University Education, Authoethnography, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and Coloniality of knowledge and being
Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio-political awareness situated within multifaceted... more
Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio-political awareness situated within multifaceted emotional geographies of resistance. In spite of resistance narratives, explicit and collective resistance practices remain uncommon. As people struggle and live within composite landscapes of structural violence along the pipeline, particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be slow, impromptu or labour based. In this comparative ethnographic analysis, I consider the political environment that shapes socio-political emotional ties in Nanga, particularly its socio-political positioning as 'the village of the First Lady'. In this case, people in proximate positions vis-à-vis the ruling family experience heightened oppression(s) and dispossession(s), at the same time that they report feeling little political recourse. In Kribi, on the other hand, responses to the pipeline can be described as defiant withdrawals , demonstrated through a series of unconnected refusals. Although resistance practices along the pipeline have not been visible or successful in an established sense, emotional geographies of resistance elucidate long-term struggles to survive (i.e., slow dissent), including the accumulation of a collective emotional consciousness grounded in an awareness of historical patterns of injustice.
Research Interests:
Social Movements, Emotion, African Studies, Gender Studies, Anger, and 27 moreEthnography, Sociology of Emotion, Africa, Tropical Ecology, Social Justice, Rural Development, Resistance (Social), Ecology, Cameroon, Pipeline, Central Africa, Chad, Cultural power and resistance, Authoritarianism, Shame, Survival, International political economy of oil and gas, Emotional Geographies, Oil and Gas Pipeline, Decolonizing Methodologies, Natural Resource Extraction, Dissent, Artivism, Extractive industries, Slow Violence, Slow Scholarship, and Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline
There has been a lack of attention to the role of la sorcellerie (witchcraft) and the occult in geographical work on extraction, power and resistance, despite the ways in which these epistemologies inform conceptions of power, wealth and... more
There has been a lack of attention to the role of la sorcellerie (witchcraft) and the occult in geographical work on extraction, power and resistance, despite the ways in which these epistemologies inform conceptions of power, wealth and violence. In two towns along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, epistemologies of la sorcellerie frame understandings and critiques of the invisible actors and processes that effect the pipeline's uneven distributions of violence, wealth and risk. Far from expunging the experience(s) of extraction by erasing the pipeline's visible traces on the landscape, the oil consortium's infrastructural and discursive erasures serve to situate the pipeline within a knowledge system that associates invisible actors and materials with evil, wrongdoing, suspicion and distrust. This article addresses (i) how the production of dispersed extractive landscapes reinforce epistemologies of witchcraft by alienating the people who live within them from networks of power in ways that provoke a mistrust and jealousy that is absorbed within families and communities and (ii) the socio-political significance of this epistemological structuring of the pipeline as a logic of resistance against hydrocarbon capitalism.
Research Interests:
This article further develops a critical geographical theory of structural violence. It does so by considering the ways people in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, two communities in Cameroon, report feeling and experiencing structural violence... more
This article further develops a critical geographical theory of structural violence. It does so by considering the ways people in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, two communities in Cameroon, report feeling and experiencing structural violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. For people living within spaces (re)produced through structurally violent processes, projects, and extractions, a triad of intersecting experiences emerge: structural violence is felt as (i) tangible through the body (senses of loss, the belly, the body, and nourishment), or described through gendered narratives of hunger, illness, and the experiences of land dispossession; (ii) historically compounded, or characterized by a rootedness in the colonial and racist structures of the past alongside expectations that present-day structural violence threatens future generations; and (iii) spatially compounded, or experienced through a concurrent spatial overlapping (or compounding) as multiple forms of structural violence converge within the same landscapes and lifescapes, effecting displacement in-place. Each of these, felt simultaneously, has the effect of rendering structural violence acutely visible, tangible as it is in the restructurings of landscapes and lifescapes, despite discursive attempts to cloak, bury, and efface by powerful actors. Looking toward the narratives that people use to critique and engage with such violence provides conceptual tools for wider resistance practices against structural violence.
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Este artículo contribuye al desarrollo de una teoría geográfica crítica de la violencia estructural, considerando las formas en que los pueblos en Nanga-Eboko y Kribi (dos comunidades camerunesas) dicen sentir y experimentar la violencia estructural a lo largo del oleoducto Chad-Camerún. Para los pueblos que viven dentro de espacios (re)producidos mediante procesos, proyectos y extracciones estructuralmente violentos surge una tríada de experiencias interrelacionadas; la violencia estructural se siente: a) tangible en el cuerpo (el estómago, el cuerpo y las náuseas), o descrita a través de narrativas de género sobre hambre, enfermedad y experiencias de saqueo de sus tierras; b) compuesta históricamente, o caracterizada por la importancia de las estructuras coloniales y racistas del pasado junto a la idea de que la violencia estructural actual amenaza a las generaciones futuras; y c) compuesta espacialmente, o experimentada a través de un solapamiento (o compuesto) espacial cuando se da la convergencia de múltiples formas de violencia estructural dentro de los mismos paisajes y escenarios de vida, constituyendo verdaderos desplazamiento in situ. Cada uno de estos sentimientos, que se sienten de manera simultánea, tiene el efecto de volver claramente visible la violencia estructural, que se hace tangible tal cual es en la restructuración de los paisajes y escenarios de vida a pesar de los intentos discursivos de ocultarlos, enterrarlos y eliminarlos de los poderosos. Analizar las narrativas que utiliza la gente para criticar y enfrentarse a esa violencia provee herramientas conceptuales para analizar prácticas de resistencia contra la violencia estructural.
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Este artículo contribuye al desarrollo de una teoría geográfica crítica de la violencia estructural, considerando las formas en que los pueblos en Nanga-Eboko y Kribi (dos comunidades camerunesas) dicen sentir y experimentar la violencia estructural a lo largo del oleoducto Chad-Camerún. Para los pueblos que viven dentro de espacios (re)producidos mediante procesos, proyectos y extracciones estructuralmente violentos surge una tríada de experiencias interrelacionadas; la violencia estructural se siente: a) tangible en el cuerpo (el estómago, el cuerpo y las náuseas), o descrita a través de narrativas de género sobre hambre, enfermedad y experiencias de saqueo de sus tierras; b) compuesta históricamente, o caracterizada por la importancia de las estructuras coloniales y racistas del pasado junto a la idea de que la violencia estructural actual amenaza a las generaciones futuras; y c) compuesta espacialmente, o experimentada a través de un solapamiento (o compuesto) espacial cuando se da la convergencia de múltiples formas de violencia estructural dentro de los mismos paisajes y escenarios de vida, constituyendo verdaderos desplazamiento in situ. Cada uno de estos sentimientos, que se sienten de manera simultánea, tiene el efecto de volver claramente visible la violencia estructural, que se hace tangible tal cual es en la restructuración de los paisajes y escenarios de vida a pesar de los intentos discursivos de ocultarlos, enterrarlos y eliminarlos de los poderosos. Analizar las narrativas que utiliza la gente para criticar y enfrentarse a esa violencia provee herramientas conceptuales para analizar prácticas de resistencia contra la violencia estructural.
Research Interests:
Political Geography and Geopolitics, Ethnography, Narrative, Geographies of Displacement, Development Induced Displacement, and 7 moreInternational political economy of oil and gas, Structural Violence, Oil and Gas Pipeline, Displacement, Politics of Visibility, Visibility/invisibility, and Hunger and development
This special feature arose from a collaborative student-led conference at the University of Oxford titled, ‘Neoliberalism and Resistance After the Crisis: Violence, the State and Labour’. The papers here continue the conversations begun... more
This special feature arose from a collaborative student-led conference at the University of Oxford titled, ‘Neoliberalism and Resistance After the Crisis: Violence, the State and Labour’. The papers here continue the conversations begun at the event, which emphasised more broadly the importance of ‘naming . . . the destructiveness and violence of neoliberal geopolitics’ in projects to ‘unify the political and the analytical in meaningful—and even audacious—ways’ (Murrey 2014, n.p.). The papers begin with the struggles, resistances and everyday lives of working people—whether they are labouring within the waged sector, the domestic sphere or prisons. These patterns of work create a precarity of labour, which can be traced as a global process. By paying close attention to these patterns within local spaces, the papers within uncover interconnected elements of the global mechanisms and processes (outsourcing, policing, labour repression) within which localised exploitation can operate.
Research Interests:
The life and work of Thomas Sankara can be taken as a reminder of both the power and potential for human agency to enact transformation. I would like to situate my ideas within the geopolitical context of the popular uprisings that... more
The life and work of Thomas Sankara can be taken as a reminder of both the power and potential for human agency to enact transformation. I would like to situate my ideas within the geopolitical context of the popular uprisings that continue to take place around the world as people organise against neoliberal policies of advanced capitalism and their resultant gross inequalities in wealth, health and education.
Research Interests:
The twenty-first century has seen a continued evolution of the US military’s strategic interest in socio-cultural knowledge of (potential) adversaries for counterinsurgency strategies. This paper explores the implications of the... more
The twenty-first century has seen a continued evolution of the US military’s strategic interest in socio-cultural knowledge of (potential) adversaries for counterinsurgency strategies. This paper explores the implications of the reinvigorated and expanding (post-9/11) relationship between social science research and US military strategy, assessing the implications of US Africa Command strategies for preventive counterinsurgency. Preventative counterinsurgency measures are ‘Phase Zero’ or ‘contingency’ operations that seek to prevent possible outcomes, namely threats to ‘security’ in Africa. The research initiatives of US Africa Command illustrate a culture-centric approach to this strategy, which seeks to draw from detailed socio-cultural knowledge in the prevention of possible populist or popular uprisings. Recent such uprisings, resistance actions and strikes in the continent illustrate a problematic tendency to interpret various forms of populist resistance as ‘terrorist’ actions, thereby condoning the bolstering of African national military capacity. The article considers the implications of these culture-centric counterinsurgency strategies as a means of anticipating and repressing the variety of mobilisations encapsulated within the ‘terrorism’ catchall. We conclude by urging social scientists to reject and disconnect from US Africa Command’s missions and knowledge acquisition efforts in Africa.
Research Interests:
This chapter seeks to contribute to these collective decolonial projects to ‘decolonise development’ (De Jong et al. 2019; Rutazibwa 2019) by asserting pedagogical disobedience in our curricula and teaching. This means embracing... more
This chapter seeks to contribute to these collective decolonial projects to
‘decolonise development’ (De Jong et al. 2019; Rutazibwa 2019) by asserting
pedagogical disobedience in our curricula and teaching. This means embracing decolonial pluriversals that service a will-to-life (Dussel 2013) rather than the colonial will-to-conquer or will-to-extract, what Julia Suárez-Krabbe (2015) refers to as coloniality’s ‘death project’. My pedagogical reflection centres on two useful pedagogical tools and concepts – assassination and appropriation – which I have drawn from in a teaching practice that refuses to foster the ‘epistemological desire’ of development thinking (Sabaratnam 2017), including its ‘continued fantasies of superiority, homogeny and violent universality’ (Rutazibwa 2019, 175).
‘decolonise development’ (De Jong et al. 2019; Rutazibwa 2019) by asserting
pedagogical disobedience in our curricula and teaching. This means embracing decolonial pluriversals that service a will-to-life (Dussel 2013) rather than the colonial will-to-conquer or will-to-extract, what Julia Suárez-Krabbe (2015) refers to as coloniality’s ‘death project’. My pedagogical reflection centres on two useful pedagogical tools and concepts – assassination and appropriation – which I have drawn from in a teaching practice that refuses to foster the ‘epistemological desire’ of development thinking (Sabaratnam 2017), including its ‘continued fantasies of superiority, homogeny and violent universality’ (Rutazibwa 2019, 175).
Research Interests:
Development Economics, Development Studies, Sustainable Development, Political Assassinations, Development Geography, and 8 moreKnowledge and Power, Decolonization (African History), Antiracist Education, Epistemic Injustice, Disobedience, Decolonizing Knowledge Production, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and Decolonizing Pedagogies & Research
In this chapter, we contribute to the decolonial feminisms that are expanding our understanding of extractive geographies and political ecologies of the subsoil. In this, we take extractivism to denote both the material processes of... more
In this chapter, we contribute to the decolonial feminisms that are expanding our understanding of extractive geographies and political ecologies of the subsoil. In this, we take extractivism to denote both the material processes of removal as well as a particular logic (not only of economic accumulation but of being) that renders materials, territories and bodies extractible (and necessarily so). We critically examine the ways in which these extractive logics and processes frequently initiate and condone racialised sexualised violence. In this, we argue that intersectional violence is at the heart of extractivism. Extraction settles within internal ecologies (including ecologies of health and disease) in ways that reaffirm colonial logics of race and sexuality. This broadening of the meaning of extractivism is important in understanding (a) how extraction operates through multiple forms and scales of power and (b) its intersectional and pluriform impacts. Sexual violence, we conclude, is at the centre of racialised extractivism; this is illustrated in corporate language and the more informal logics of residential tourism, both of which are united by colonial logics that would render black life disposable. We conclude with reflections on the value of decolonial feminist dialogue-as-critique that attends to the resonances across and between black women’s experiences of extractivism.
Research Interests:
Human Geography, Gender Studies, Tourism Studies, Natural Resources, Political Ecology, and 13 moreGender, Environment and natural resources conservation, World Bank, Politics of the Body, Decolonial Thought, Oil and Gas Pipeline, Decolonial Feminism, Oil Extraction, Female body, Land Politics, Neo-extractivism, Decolonial Feminist Methodology, and decolonial geographies
European colonialisms (circa. Late 1400) are complex, particularized, and changing political- economic-social-religious systems of domination. In the pursuit of capital accumulation and appropriation, Western European colonialisms... more
European colonialisms (circa. Late 1400) are complex, particularized, and changing political- economic-social-religious systems of domination. In the pursuit of capital accumulation and appropriation, Western European colonialisms generated and benefited from racialized and racist logics. Following the “formal” decolonization of much, but not all, of the colonized world—from Haiti in 1804, to Cameroon in 1960, to Papua New Guinea in 1975, to Timor-Leste in 2002—colonial structures, relations, and imaginaries often persisted in altered forms. Social scientists draw variously from political economy and historical materialism as well as postcolonial thought and cultural materialism within the broader field of colonial studies to both critique European colonialisms of the past and reveal the persistence(s) of colonial relations/structures in the present. Colonial “durabilities” and the “coloniality of being” continue to inform post-colonial political economies, social relations, and knowledge productions, creations, circulations, and contestations. The protraction of colonial domination(s) into the early 21st Century have given rise to reinvigorations of anti-colonial and postcolonial critique, including decolonial options and polygonal projects of decolonization. Widespread discontent regarding the persistence of “colonialism in the present” are manifested in the vocal and visible debates within early 21st Century universities around decolonizing knowledge, including struggles to decolonize the discipline of geography.
Research Interests:
African Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, French colonialism, and 13 morePostcolonial Theory, British Imperial and Colonial History (1600 - ), Settler Colonial Studies, Anti-Racism, Decolonial Thought, Colonial Discourse, Decolonization, Settler colonialism, Neocolonialism, Anti-Colonialism, Decolonial Feminism, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and decolonize the university
This chapter works from the wide-ranging and pluriversal political and socio-economic imaginaries elaborated upon by Thomas Sankara through his speeches and actions to tease out his particular political economy of justice, dignity,... more
This chapter works from the wide-ranging and pluriversal political and socio-economic imaginaries elaborated upon by Thomas Sankara through his speeches and actions to tease out his particular political economy of justice, dignity, humanization, and emancipation. I consider some of the lessons learned from the implementation of these political philosophies during the revolution of August 1983 to October 1987. Finally, I conclude by sketching some of the ways in which contemporary Pan-Africanists, decolonial thinkers, green socialists, and others have revived aspects of Sankara’s political economy of justice and “revolution [as] happiness.”
Research Interests:
early 1990s within academic research and policymaking departments of development organisations. The resource curse theory maintains that the proximity of abundant natural resources to a community has detrimental impacts on the economic... more
early 1990s within academic research and policymaking departments of development organisations. The resource curse theory maintains that the proximity of abundant natural resources to a community has detrimental impacts on the economic and social wellbeing of that group. Hence, communities are frequently ‘cursed’ by the presence of resources rather than, as one might otherwise assume, enriched, developed or ‘blessed’. There are four critiques of the idea. The first critique disputes the factuality of the resource curse. Second, epistemological critiques of the resource curse idea emphasise its colonial and capitalistic genealogies. A third critique counters the notion of a linear or causal relationship between the presence and extraction of resources and poor socio-economic performance. Fourth, the resource curse idea has been critiqued for inadequately explaining the complexities and multi-dimensionalities of the geographies of extraction.
Research Interests:
African Studies, Development Studies, Sustainable Development, Africa, Colonialism, and 10 moreAfrican Politics, Oil and gas, Africana Studies, Accumulation by Dispossession, Resource Curse, Natural Resource Extraction, Oil Curse, EXTRACTION, Natural resource curse, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
Introduction to 'A Certain Amount of Madness' The Life, Politics and Legacy of Thomas Sankara (Pluto, 2018)
Research Interests:
Black Studies Or African American Studies, African Studies, African History, History of West Africa, Africa, and 12 moreWest Africa, Politics, Afrocentrism, Pan Africanism, Political Assassinations, West Africa politics, Black feminism, French Imperialism in West Africa, African Union, Poor Countries' External Debt (HIPC), Black Radical Thought, and Thomas Sankara
Chapter 5 in 'A Certain Amount of Madness': The Life, Politics & Legacy of Thomas Sankara (Pluto, 2018)
Research Interests:
Drawing from scholarship in feminist political geography that embraces discomfort and unease as generative features of social encounter along with the literature on decolonial ethics for research, Murrey argues that further concrete work... more
Drawing from scholarship in feminist political geography that embraces discomfort and unease as generative features of social encounter along with the literature on decolonial ethics for research, Murrey argues that further concrete work is necessary to deconstruct the artificial barriers between ‘the field’/home-site and that this project remains particularly acute for research ‘on Africa’ given its position in a global colonial system. To these ends, Murrey makes three interconnected arguments: (a) ‘women researching in Africa’ are responsible for challenging masculinist and colonial epistemologies. (b) This would mean, among others, moving beyond guilt and compassion to an explicit political consciousness of decolonization. (c) Such a consciousness is centered upon attention to the functions of race, particularly global whiteness and anti-blackness, for research in Africa.
Research Interests:
African Studies, Women's Studies, Africa, Fieldwork in Anthropology, Critical Race Theory, and 26 moreReflexivity, Race and Ethnicity, Women, African Politics, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Political Geography, Decolonialization, Feminist Geography, Racialization, Ethnographic fieldwork, Ethnicity, Decolonization (African History), Africana Studies, Decolonial Turn, Anti-Racism, Decolonial Thought, Race, Decolonization, Feminist Political Theory, Researcher, Positionality, Decolonialidad, Decolonial Feminism, Field Study, Anti-Blackness, and Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality
I write my concluding thoughts to this volume as I follow announcements of the implementation of a 24-hour curfew in the northwest region of Cameroon. The curfew comes after 11 months of protracted struggle. Mostly non-violent protestors... more
I write my concluding thoughts to this volume as I follow announcements of the implementation of a 24-hour curfew in the northwest region of Cameroon. The curfew comes after 11 months of protracted struggle. Mostly non-violent protestors have been demonstrating and protesting against the economic, political, and social inequalities that disadvantage and marginalize people living in the Anglophone regions of the country. The state has responded with apprehension and open violence and hostility. The state's armed response has been characterized by brute force— tear gas, water canons, mass arrests, and intimidation—and has been captured recurrently by mobile phones. These videos have circulated widely on social media. In response, the state pressured Internet providers (employing the language of 'national security') to suspend Internet access in the northwest and southwest regions for months. In the most recent renewal of protests, dozens of people have been killed by military and police forces, although no arrests of police or military have been made. This moment in Cameroon—as well as the ongoing violent suppression of civil society protests in the Oromia Region of Ethiopia and the recent violence in Kenya— reveals that justice, transitional and otherwise, remains as immediate and acute as ever. These episodes of seemingly spectacular violence, nonetheless, are part of larger political and economic systems of subordination, domination, and social control. What paradigm of justice might address the depths and historical complexities of social pain, domination, and trauma? What is an approach to justice that demands state accountability?
Research Interests:
Peace and Conflict Studies, African Philosophy, Conflict, Social Justice, Indigenous Knowledge, and 16 moreMasculinity, Transitional Justice, Post-Colonialism, Protest, Conflict Resolution, Transformative Justice, Gender And Violence, Peace Studies, Anthropology of the State, Feminism and Social Justice, Heteronormativity, Transitional justice and reconciliation processes, Social Conflict, Repression, Gender Violence, and Indigneous Studies
In this chapter, I focus on two discrete but interrelated intellectual projects: Southern theory and decolonial options. With a focus on race-aware and anti-racist critiques of Southern theories, I argue that assertions of the need to... more
In this chapter, I focus on two discrete but interrelated intellectual projects: Southern theory and decolonial options. With a focus on race-aware and anti-racist critiques of Southern theories, I argue that assertions of the need to focus more centrally on Southern theory are not equivalent with assertions of the need to end, unequivocally, the coloniality of knowledge. Some of the critical and celebrated scholarship critiquing the (on-going) hegemony of Eurocentric theory and knowing—broadly, theories from the South—has failed to systematically engage with the racialisation of actors within the university and racial inequality in knowledge making. In such paradigms, southern theories are importantly recognised as valuable for shifting the gaze at the same time that there remains a certain blindness to the colonial racial hierarchies that create and sustain the invisibilization(s) and destructions of them. Situated in the context of coloniality, such projects risk reiterating the global knowledge hierarchy. I sketch an alternative approach for knowing across and between North(s)-South(s) and South(s)-South(s). This approach is a feminist decolonial orientation founded on an open assessment of racial and geographical inequalities within the university along with a critical feminist attention to the politics of the mundane in the academy (authorship, citation, language, promotion and impromptu encounters in classrooms and corridors).
Research Interests:
Critical Theory, Area Studies, Sociology of Knowledge, Collaboration, Race and Ethnicity, and 25 moreSocial Justice, Post-Colonialism, Feminism, Friendship, Racialization, Hegemony, Intersectionality and Social Inequality, Global South, Anti-Racism, Southern Theory, Decolonial Thought, Knowledge Hierarchy, South Africa, Decolonization, Coloniality of Power, Positionality, Decolonial Feminism, Declononial Studies, Cognitive Justice, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Student Protest, Coloniality of knowledge and being, White Gaze, Post-Truth, and Decolonizing the University
Recent criticism of the ‘epistemic murk’ obscuring the social worlds of oil and gas (Appel et al. 2015) emphasizes the continued need to focus on the infrastructures, structures, networks, and border making constitutive of resource... more
Recent criticism of the ‘epistemic murk’ obscuring the social worlds of oil and gas (Appel et al. 2015) emphasizes the continued need to focus on the infrastructures, structures, networks, and border making constitutive of resource extraction. More than this, the ‘epistemic murk’ of the global oil and gas industry is deeply political and is situated within a global coloniality of knowledge: such ‘murk’ is often intentionally generated and it is an important component of the dismissal of people’s everyday confrontations with violence(s) of extraction as unsubstantiated, un-measured (often un-measurable) and un-verified by ‘experts.’ Oil corporations and the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) that often finance oil development projects actively contribute to the corporate manufacturing of uncertainties regarding the social, ecological, and political costs associated with extraction. At the same time, cleverly crafted knowledge management and marketing ventures cast oil companies as eco-friendly corporations that operate on behalf of women, Indigenous, and ‘local’ people.
Working from a decolonial orientation, I explore the ways in which the Chad-Cameroon oil consortium (comprised of ExxonMobil, Petronas and, until recently, Chevron) and a major financer, engineer, and proponent of the pipeline, the World Bank, embarked upon highly publicized and celebrated projects to support ‘local’ education though the building of schools as a mechanism of community compensation.
Working from a decolonial orientation, I explore the ways in which the Chad-Cameroon oil consortium (comprised of ExxonMobil, Petronas and, until recently, Chevron) and a major financer, engineer, and proponent of the pipeline, the World Bank, embarked upon highly publicized and celebrated projects to support ‘local’ education though the building of schools as a mechanism of community compensation.
Research Interests:
Human Geography, Anthropology, Corporate Social Responsibility, Ethnography, Postcolonial Studies, and 20 moreRural Development, Resistance (Social), Indigenous Knowledge, Post-Colonialism, Capitalism, Cameroon, World Bank, Central Africa, Ethnographic Methods, Chad, Decolonial Thought, Oil and Gas Pipeline, Natural Resource Extraction, Fossil Fuels, Dissent, Geopolitics of knowledge, Decolonial Feminism, Non-Western Modernity, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, and Sensual Ethnography
This collection represents a significant intervention in the space cohabited by witchcraft, spirit worlds, and development – a realm frequently marginalised by development practice. Through a diverse set of scholarly and methodological... more
This collection represents a significant intervention in the space cohabited by witchcraft, spirit worlds, and development – a realm frequently marginalised by development practice. Through a diverse set of scholarly and methodological orientations, the contributions draw on contrasting case studies (spanning the local, national, and borderlands) to explore the current and possible future co-productions of development through various forms of spirituality. They do so with attention to the paradoxes, nuances, and complexities of these intersections. This introduction explores some of the cross-cutting themes arising from these complexities, including: scale; limitations of Euro-dominant conceptualisations of development; Othering of polytheistic, multi-theistic, and non-theistic spiritual ontologies; entanglements of spirituality, politics, and power; and co-productions of new forms of development. We argue that thinking through these various cross-cutting themes provides a multitude of possibilities for decolonising the development project.
Research Interests:
African Studies, Development Economics, Indigenous Studies, Development Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, and 41 moreGlobalization, Climate Change, International Development, Mental Health, Postcolonial Studies, Race and Racism, Community Development, Spirituality, Sustainable Development, Africa, Race and Ethnicity, Gender, Rural Development, Indigenous Knowledge, Post-Colonialism, Mozambique, Cameroon, Spirituality & Mysticism, Public Health, Witchcraft (Magic), Environmental Sustainability, Indigenous Peoples, Christian Spirituality, Witchcraft (Anthropology Of Religion), Tanzania, Post-Development Theory, Witchcraft, Religion and Magic, Decolonization (African History), Global South, Decolonial Thought, Healing and Religion, South Africa, Decolonizing Methodologies, Decolonization, Witchcraft, Shamanism and Shamanic Healing, Traditional Witchcraft, Sorcery, Healing, Anthropological study of witchcraft and sorcery, and Cliamte Change Adaptation
Extended book review of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi, New York: Nation Books, 2016. “Truth never did stop the concocters of racist ideas.” - Ibram X. Kendi 2016, p.... more
Extended book review of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi, New York: Nation Books, 2016.
“Truth never did stop the concocters of racist ideas.”
- Ibram X. Kendi 2016, p. 266
With Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America Ibram X. Kendi has produced a historical tome that is at once cheeky, serious, heartbreaking, and hopeful, while being highly readable throughout. The immense project began as a genealogy of Black Studies in American universities but—after writing a contextualizing chapter on the history of scientific racism that blossomed into a 90-page meticulously detailed account—a transformational conversation with his father in-law compelled Kendi to expand the project into a no-holds-barred history of anti-Black racism over six centuries in, and sometimes beyond, the United States of America.
“Truth never did stop the concocters of racist ideas.”
- Ibram X. Kendi 2016, p. 266
With Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America Ibram X. Kendi has produced a historical tome that is at once cheeky, serious, heartbreaking, and hopeful, while being highly readable throughout. The immense project began as a genealogy of Black Studies in American universities but—after writing a contextualizing chapter on the history of scientific racism that blossomed into a 90-page meticulously detailed account—a transformational conversation with his father in-law compelled Kendi to expand the project into a no-holds-barred history of anti-Black racism over six centuries in, and sometimes beyond, the United States of America.
Research Interests:
American History, Historical Geography, Black Studies Or African American Studies, American Studies, Race and Racism, and 13 moreCritical Race Theory, Race and Ethnicity, Whiteness Studies, Racism, Feminist Geography, Critical Whiteness Studies, Anti-Racism, Geographies of 'race' and ethnicity, Angela Davis, W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Geographies, Critical Geographies of Race, and Geographies of Resistance
Lori Leonard’s Life in the Time of Oil: A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad draws upon more than ten years of research in three communities in Chad’s southern Doba Basin to elucidate some of the tensions, transformations and contestations that... more
Lori Leonard’s Life in the Time of Oil: A Pipeline and Poverty in Chad draws upon more than ten years of research in three
communities in Chad’s southern Doba Basin to elucidate some of the tensions, transformations and contestations that emerged as people responded to the implementation of the policies and standards of this oil-as-development ‘model’. Through a cohesive and well-researched examination, Leonard identifies several areas of tension between the claims and documentational policies of the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project and their contestations on the ground. This pipeline is not a ‘classic case of enclave extraction’ (Ferguson, 2005), she asserts, but rather an attempt by an oil consortium made up of corporations skilled in global governance, ‘proactive’ in adopting Corporate Social Responsibility (p. 9; although this declaration of CSR as ‘proactive’ seems presumptive and ahistorical) and working to reduce or eliminate any oil-related ‘footprint’ from the region (as a mechanism to reduce ‘friction’ with local communities, which might trigger unrest; see Appel, 2012). Despite attempts to render the pipeline invisible (Barry, 2013), the project was deeply entangled in people’s lives, albeit not in ways anticipated by the project’s engineers and anthropologists.
communities in Chad’s southern Doba Basin to elucidate some of the tensions, transformations and contestations that emerged as people responded to the implementation of the policies and standards of this oil-as-development ‘model’. Through a cohesive and well-researched examination, Leonard identifies several areas of tension between the claims and documentational policies of the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project and their contestations on the ground. This pipeline is not a ‘classic case of enclave extraction’ (Ferguson, 2005), she asserts, but rather an attempt by an oil consortium made up of corporations skilled in global governance, ‘proactive’ in adopting Corporate Social Responsibility (p. 9; although this declaration of CSR as ‘proactive’ seems presumptive and ahistorical) and working to reduce or eliminate any oil-related ‘footprint’ from the region (as a mechanism to reduce ‘friction’ with local communities, which might trigger unrest; see Appel, 2012). Despite attempts to render the pipeline invisible (Barry, 2013), the project was deeply entangled in people’s lives, albeit not in ways anticipated by the project’s engineers and anthropologists.
Research Interests:
This thick edited collection from Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason and Michael Watts contains 18 interdisciplinary chapters (as well as an introduction and photo essay) on the “life worlds of oil and gas”. Juxtaposed between the “intellectual... more
This thick edited collection from Hannah Appel, Arthur Mason and Michael Watts contains 18 interdisciplinary chapters (as well as an introduction and photo essay) on the “life worlds of oil and gas”. Juxtaposed between the “intellectual vertigo” induced by this massive industry
and “oil’s cynosural politics”, the authors seek to clear away some of the “epistemic murk” that pervades the worlds of oil and gas (p.9). Navigating the murk is essential in
uncovering the multiple contestations within the production of oil “truths”–from the determination of the toxicity of hydrocarbon molecules, to calculations of remaining barrels of oil, to the fluctuations of paper oil prices, to the meteorological forecasts of hurricane trajectories. The contributors to Subterranean Estates focus on rendering intelligible the assemblages of oil and gas: the hard and soft infrastructures, the actors, the networks, the flows, the representations, the images, the films, the archives, the regulatory mechanisms, the price dynamics, the competing sciences and expertise, the technopolitics, the social lives, the futures, the prognostics, the transparency initiatives, and more, of oil and gas.
and “oil’s cynosural politics”, the authors seek to clear away some of the “epistemic murk” that pervades the worlds of oil and gas (p.9). Navigating the murk is essential in
uncovering the multiple contestations within the production of oil “truths”–from the determination of the toxicity of hydrocarbon molecules, to calculations of remaining barrels of oil, to the fluctuations of paper oil prices, to the meteorological forecasts of hurricane trajectories. The contributors to Subterranean Estates focus on rendering intelligible the assemblages of oil and gas: the hard and soft infrastructures, the actors, the networks, the flows, the representations, the images, the films, the archives, the regulatory mechanisms, the price dynamics, the competing sciences and expertise, the technopolitics, the social lives, the futures, the prognostics, the transparency initiatives, and more, of oil and gas.
Research Interests:
Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Law, Corporate Governance, Resistance (Social), Corporate Ethics, and 27 moreMasculinity, Groundwater Contamination, Neoliberalism, Materiality (Anthropology), Biopolitics, Oil and gas, Indigenous Peoples, Financialization, Contamination and remediation, Marxist political economy, Infrastructure, Politics of natural resources, Natural Resource Extraction, Subcontracting, Politics of knowledge production, Oil companies, Niger Delta, HYDROCARBONS, Unconventional oil and gas, Technopolitics, Anthropology of Oil, Fracking, Oil and gas reserves, Chevron, Exxonmobil, Oil Spill Risk Assessmen, and Fuel Bunkering
Olsson’s film is a powerful aesthetic backdrop for Fanon’s anticolonial manifesto, one that unflinchingly engages with colonialism as—above all else—a project of extraordinary violence. Against this illogical violence, counter-violence is... more
Olsson’s film is a powerful aesthetic backdrop for Fanon’s anticolonial manifesto, one that unflinchingly engages with colonialism as—above all else—a project of extraordinary violence. Against this illogical violence, counter-violence is a crucial component of emancipation. The film opens up new spaces for considerations of the use of violence in the face of terrible, absolute, and normalized violence—including today’s anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-capitalist movements, poised as they are against the enormous infrastructures of normalized and everyday violence.
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In the first couple of minutes of the opening of the film, Sweet Crude, director, Sandy Cioffi, discloses, ‘this is not the movie I intended to make’. She had travelled to the Niger Delta to film the building the Niger Delta Friendship... more
In the first couple of minutes of the opening of the film, Sweet Crude, director, Sandy Cioffi, discloses, ‘this is not the movie I intended to make’. She had travelled to the Niger Delta to film the building the Niger Delta Friendship Library, which was to serve as a ‘symbol of peace’ in the region. While traveling, visiting and listening to local voices, the true value of this library as an empty symbol was revealed. Sandy says, the ‘reality of their lives are far more complex than a community library. Knowing them would change everything’.
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Extended book review of Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine (eds.)
African Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions, Pambazuka Press: Cape Town, Dakar, Nairobi, and Oxford, 2011; 324 pp.: 9780857490216, $17.95 (pbk)
African Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions, Pambazuka Press: Cape Town, Dakar, Nairobi, and Oxford, 2011; 324 pp.: 9780857490216, $17.95 (pbk)
Research Interests:
Revolutions, Resistance (Social), Uganda, Protest, Cameroon, and 16 moreEgypt, Morocco, African Politics, Social movements and revolution, Peace, Libya, South Africa, Cote D'Ivoire, Algeria, Burkina Faso, Gabon, Peace and Non-violence, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), Swaziland, Panafricanism, and Samir Amin
'“When will it end? 1982-201?” The open-ended question – with the last digit intentionally left out – fills the final screen of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s most recent film, Le Président (2013). The question refers to the political tenure of... more
'“When will it end? 1982-201?”
The open-ended question – with the last digit intentionally left out – fills the final screen of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s most recent film, Le Président (2013). The question refers to the political tenure of the president of Cameroon, where the film has been banned at all locations, including at L’Institut Français Cameroun (IFC, The French Institute). The IFC plays an important role in providing a venue for film screenings in Cameroon, particularly since the closing of Yaoundé’s movie theatre, Abbia, in 2009. Around the time of the release of Le Président, another Cameroonian filmmaker, Richard Fouofie Djimili, was abducted and tortured for eleven days, allegedly in response to material in his film, 139… The Last Predators (2013, watch the trailer here). Djimili’s fictional film focuses on a 139-year dictatorship in an unnamed African country. According to Times Live, shortly before the filmmaker’s abduction, a friend of Djimili’s received a text message that read, “Tell your friend Richard Fouofie he is digging his own grave. His film is part of a destabilization plot that has already been unmasked. If he wants to play the patriot, he will be decapitated. Victory is near.” Reporters Without Borders has documented other cases of harassment, censoring and imprisoning of Cameroonian artists and journalists. On 6 November 2012, President Paul Biya celebrated 30 years in power and Bekolo has quipped that when Biya was minister in 1962, “Barack Obama was one year old.” It is in this political context that Bekolo’s film explores a fictional African president’s last days in power....' [from paragraph 1]
The open-ended question – with the last digit intentionally left out – fills the final screen of Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s most recent film, Le Président (2013). The question refers to the political tenure of the president of Cameroon, where the film has been banned at all locations, including at L’Institut Français Cameroun (IFC, The French Institute). The IFC plays an important role in providing a venue for film screenings in Cameroon, particularly since the closing of Yaoundé’s movie theatre, Abbia, in 2009. Around the time of the release of Le Président, another Cameroonian filmmaker, Richard Fouofie Djimili, was abducted and tortured for eleven days, allegedly in response to material in his film, 139… The Last Predators (2013, watch the trailer here). Djimili’s fictional film focuses on a 139-year dictatorship in an unnamed African country. According to Times Live, shortly before the filmmaker’s abduction, a friend of Djimili’s received a text message that read, “Tell your friend Richard Fouofie he is digging his own grave. His film is part of a destabilization plot that has already been unmasked. If he wants to play the patriot, he will be decapitated. Victory is near.” Reporters Without Borders has documented other cases of harassment, censoring and imprisoning of Cameroonian artists and journalists. On 6 November 2012, President Paul Biya celebrated 30 years in power and Bekolo has quipped that when Biya was minister in 1962, “Barack Obama was one year old.” It is in this political context that Bekolo’s film explores a fictional African president’s last days in power....' [from paragraph 1]
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This is a conference report from "African Knowledges and Alternative Futures: Toyin Falola at 65," held at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria in 2018.
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Amber Murrey and Nicholas A. Jackson, editor and contributor of "A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara" examine Sankara’s political philosophies and legacies and their relevance today.
Research Interests:
Rural Sociology, Social Movements, Human Geography, African Studies, International Relations, and 16 morePolitical Philosophy, Radical Geography, Leadership, Peasant Studies, African History, Revolutions, Africa, Cold War, Gender, Sustainable Urban Environments, Pan Africanism, Social movements and revolution, Labor History and Studies, Thomas Sankara, Black Emancipation, and Workers Movement
During a discussion at a five-day academic workshop on decolonizing academic publications, Dr Tesfaye Gebeyehu guided the workshop participants through the processes of engaging with, responding to, and (sometimes) recovering from... more
During a discussion at a five-day academic workshop on decolonizing academic publications, Dr Tesfaye Gebeyehu guided the workshop participants through the processes of engaging with, responding to, and (sometimes) recovering from reviewer comments.
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In terms of revolutionary movements in Africa, Sankara’s stands out not only because it occurred well after independence but also because of the ambition of its vision. Sankara was a militant economic revolutionary who aimed to achieve... more
In terms of revolutionary movements in Africa, Sankara’s stands out not only because it occurred well after independence but also because of the ambition of its vision. Sankara was a militant economic revolutionary who aimed to achieve social justice at home through a prioritization of food justice while recalibrating Burkina Faso’s place in the international system. Unlike most of the African leaders of his generation and those preceding him, Sankara did not author books that captured or guided his political philosophy in any systematic way. Indeed, Sankara refused to give an ideological name to the revolution. Our task, then, is to trace Sankara’s words and actions to synthesise his radical and comprehensive approach to social transformation, self-sufficiency, decolonization, and freedom.
Research Interests:
African Studies, Development Studies, African Philosophy, Leadership, Sovereignty, and 15 moreAfrican History, Africa, Social Activism, Self-Sufficiency, African Politics, Food Sovereignty, Decolonial Thought, Anti-imperialism, Militancy, Decolonization, Anti-Colonialism, Panafricanism, Thomas Sankara, Radical Activism, and anti-development
Last year, Jimma University was the location for a five-day workshop to address colonial hierarchies embedded in academic publication and to foster writing communities. This is a brief reflection on said workshop, which was titled "... more
Last year, Jimma University was the location for a five-day workshop to address colonial hierarchies embedded in academic publication and to foster writing communities. This is a brief reflection on said workshop, which was titled " Setting Forth at Dawn: A workshop on the Geopolitics and Practices of Academic Writing. " The workshop had three main objectives: (1) To share theories and praxis on decolonizing academic research in the global South. (2) To discuss the realities faced by African-based scholars as they seek to publish and the ways in which they craft research agendas in such a context. (3) To workshop scholars’ on-going projects as a means to cultivate publication know-how and foster
writing communities.
writing communities.
Research Interests:
Geography, Interdisciplinarity, Praxis, Critical Pedagogy, Academic Writing, and 11 moreTransdisciplinarity, Knowledge and Power, Decolonial Thought, Workshop, Decolonization, Academic Publication, Workshops, Neoliberalism and Education, The University in Crisis, Academic Communication, and geopolitics of knoweldge
Decolonizing knowledge requires multi-pronged efforts: Decolonizing publications, decolonizing research, and decolonizing curriculums. During this writing workshop in Jimma, Ethiopia, we focused on the first two and touched upon the... more
Decolonizing knowledge requires multi-pronged efforts: Decolonizing publications, decolonizing research, and decolonizing curriculums. During this writing workshop in Jimma, Ethiopia, we focused on the first two and touched upon the third, while maintaining an awareness that much of discussions around the geopolitics of “voice”–whose is heard and how to “give voice” to marginalized communities—continues to take place in the institutions of the North. Building upon preceding and ongoing energies to move beyond “armchair decolonizing,” this experimental workshop was about identifying and discussing concrete steps to create and sustain dynamic and vital writing and reading cultures in the humanities and the social sciences.
Our efforts were both individual and collective as we worked through some of the challenges and tedium of the craft of writing (formatting, time management, brainstorming) as well as the difficulties and the obstacles of submitting and publishing (targeting journals, remarking linguistic and technical particularities, identifying publication venues, avoiding predatory publishers). Although there are very real limitations faced by African scholars, the limitations are also surmountable without the need for extensive investment, restructuring, and funds. Because this workshop, conceptually, was not bound by Northern-based scholars coming to “train” people or by a large development group loaning funds and infrastructure, this model is highly replicable. The core agenda was not bound by geography, discipline, or personality. Rather, the agenda was philosophical: We wanted to help to nurture an exploration of decolonization of knowledge through small pivots that would inherently include visionary approaches to and transformations of existing disciplines as well as institutional writing and reading cultures. This centering of the writer as teacher-researcher-citizen in practice in her community is part of what was exciting and thrilling about what we undertook in Jimma.
Our efforts were both individual and collective as we worked through some of the challenges and tedium of the craft of writing (formatting, time management, brainstorming) as well as the difficulties and the obstacles of submitting and publishing (targeting journals, remarking linguistic and technical particularities, identifying publication venues, avoiding predatory publishers). Although there are very real limitations faced by African scholars, the limitations are also surmountable without the need for extensive investment, restructuring, and funds. Because this workshop, conceptually, was not bound by Northern-based scholars coming to “train” people or by a large development group loaning funds and infrastructure, this model is highly replicable. The core agenda was not bound by geography, discipline, or personality. Rather, the agenda was philosophical: We wanted to help to nurture an exploration of decolonization of knowledge through small pivots that would inherently include visionary approaches to and transformations of existing disciplines as well as institutional writing and reading cultures. This centering of the writer as teacher-researcher-citizen in practice in her community is part of what was exciting and thrilling about what we undertook in Jimma.
Research Interests:
African Studies, Publishing, Interdisciplinarity, Educational Inequalities (class; race; gender etc), African Diaspora Studies, and 18 morePolitical Science, Africa, Academic Writing, Race and Ethnicity, Resistance (Social), Pan Africanism, Neoliberalism, Knowledge and Power, Ethiopia, Global South, Decolonial Thought, Research Writing, Decolonizing Methodologies, University, Scholarly Publishing, Workshops, African University Education, and Decolonizing Knowledge Production
When it comes to food justice, environmentalism and ecological practices, Thomas Sankara was way ahead of his time. Sankara helped Burkina Faso become self-sufficient before in basic foodstuffs in just a few years before he was... more
When it comes to food justice, environmentalism and ecological practices, Thomas Sankara was way ahead of his time. Sankara helped Burkina Faso become self-sufficient before in basic foodstuffs in just a few years before he was assassinated.
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This year’s Summer School brought Southern scholars, activists, practitioners, and farmers to Harare, Zimbabwe to learn from each other’s work and experiences to advance social justice projects for the rural global South. Our... more
This year’s Summer School brought Southern scholars, activists, practitioners, and farmers to Harare, Zimbabwe to learn from each other’s work and experiences to advance social justice projects for the rural global South. Our conversations emphasized both the scale of capitalist destruction in the countryside as well as the powerful people-led movements against this destruction. We must work to preserve and empower such spaces for South-South resistance, struggle, and co-creations of knowledge.
Research Interests:
Rural Sociology, Social Movements, Rural-to-urban Migration, Agrarian Studies, Peasant Studies, and 10 moreLand tenure, Gender, Rural Development, Mainstreaming of gender and environmental issues in rural development programs, Housing, Transnational Feminism, Rural Social Movements, Land Rights, South-south cooperation, and Geopolitics of knowledge
La vie et les travaux de Thomas Sankara peuvent être évoqués comme un rappel du pouvoir et du potentiel de l'action humaine pour engendrer des transformation sociopolitiques et économiques... La transformation révolutionnaire de la Haute... more
La vie et les travaux de Thomas Sankara peuvent être évoqués comme un rappel du pouvoir et du potentiel de l'action humaine pour engendrer des transformation sociopolitiques et économiques... La transformation révolutionnaire de la Haute Volta, pays de l'Afrique de l'Ouest, en Burkina Faso (connue sous le terme de Révolution d'août 1983) a eu lieu au cours d'une précédente crise néolibérale, celle de la crise de la dette de l'Afrique des années 1980. Sankara a publiquement dénoncé avec véhémence la dette odieuse et encouragé les dirigeants politiques africains à faire de même. Les politiques et le leadership politique de Sankara contestaient l'idée que le système du capitalisme global ne pouvait être défait.
Pendant 4 ans, en sa qualité de président du Burkina Faso, il a travaillé avec la population pour construire des politiques émancipatrices basées sur le bien-être humain, social, écologique et planétaire. Cette révolution, centrée sur les gens, était un point de départ en direction des nouvelles sociétés du continent. Nous avons beaucoup à apprendre de la révolution burkinabé. Ce qui distingue Sankara de nombreux autres dirigeants révolutionnaire était sa confiance dans les compétences d'humains ordinaires. Il ne se voyait pas comme un prophète ou un messie, comme il l'a déclaré à la tribune de l'Assemblée générale des Nations Unies en octobre 1984. Il est utile de citer Sankara en longueur lorsque, devant les délégations de 159 nations, il a dit : "Je ne prétends pas présenter une doctrine ici. Je ne suis ni le messie ni un prophète. Je ne détiens aucune vérité. Ma seule aspiration est … de parler au nom de mon peuple… de parler au nom des grands peuples déshérités du monde, ceux qui appartiennent à ce monde si ironiquement baptisé le Tiers Monde. Et de déclarer, bien que je sois pas sûr de pouvoir être compris, la raison de la révolte. "
Sankara a placé les actions de résistance des femmes au centre de la révolution. Il a vu les luttes des femmes pour des droits égaux comme point central de politiques plus égalitaires sur le continent. Des transformations sociales significatives ne peuvent avoir lieu sans le soutien actif et la participation des femmes.
Pendant 4 ans, en sa qualité de président du Burkina Faso, il a travaillé avec la population pour construire des politiques émancipatrices basées sur le bien-être humain, social, écologique et planétaire. Cette révolution, centrée sur les gens, était un point de départ en direction des nouvelles sociétés du continent. Nous avons beaucoup à apprendre de la révolution burkinabé. Ce qui distingue Sankara de nombreux autres dirigeants révolutionnaire était sa confiance dans les compétences d'humains ordinaires. Il ne se voyait pas comme un prophète ou un messie, comme il l'a déclaré à la tribune de l'Assemblée générale des Nations Unies en octobre 1984. Il est utile de citer Sankara en longueur lorsque, devant les délégations de 159 nations, il a dit : "Je ne prétends pas présenter une doctrine ici. Je ne suis ni le messie ni un prophète. Je ne détiens aucune vérité. Ma seule aspiration est … de parler au nom de mon peuple… de parler au nom des grands peuples déshérités du monde, ceux qui appartiennent à ce monde si ironiquement baptisé le Tiers Monde. Et de déclarer, bien que je sois pas sûr de pouvoir être compris, la raison de la révolte. "
Sankara a placé les actions de résistance des femmes au centre de la révolution. Il a vu les luttes des femmes pour des droits égaux comme point central de politiques plus égalitaires sur le continent. Des transformations sociales significatives ne peuvent avoir lieu sans le soutien actif et la participation des femmes.
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Tony Blair's establishment of the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) has been lauded by reporters and bloggers as being indicative of a "new" way for the international community to engage with African countries to assist in poverty... more
Tony Blair's establishment of the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI) has been lauded by reporters and bloggers as being indicative of a "new" way for the international community to engage with African countries to assist in poverty reduction and to move "beyond aid" by "attract[ing] sustainable investment" to the continent. While the tenets of Blair's AGI are fairly clear — focusing on strengthening African leadership and good governance and boosting economic growth through sustainable development of infrastructure — a visit to the AGI website is less than clear on how the initiative will (or can) ensure the necessary good governance. The AGI model can be summarized as: Leadership (founded on skills, systems and structures) + prioritisation + planning + performance management = delivery. There is a fundamental flaw, however, in the repeated focus on bolstering private sector development (presumably through foreign loans) as a means through which sustainable development and poverty reduction can be achieved for the bulk of African citizens. In fact, history has shown that immense amounts of money flow into African countries every year from foreign lending institutions has not provided development for local people.
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A recent interdisciplinary academic conference held at the University of Oxford, Geographies of Neoliberalism and Resistance After the Crisis: The State, Violence and Labour, took at its crux the need to re-centre the discussion on the... more
A recent interdisciplinary academic conference held at the University of Oxford, Geographies of Neoliberalism and Resistance After the Crisis: The State, Violence and Labour, took at its crux the need to re-centre the discussion on the violence of neoliberalism alongside the occasions for resistance. It did so by engaging with the ways in which neoliberal policies, actions of the state, and shifts in labour patterns – including outsourcing, deregulation, pervasive joblessness, the workfare-prisonfare nexus and the feminisation of work – shape and inform how people organise, struggle and resist.
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Interview with Dr. Amber Murrey by Ioanna Moriatis for American University in Cairo. Available at https://www.aucegypt.edu/news/stories/chad-cameroon-oil-pipeline-mapping-community-voices
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Interview with Bridget Kendall on the BBC World Service's "The Forum" regarding the politics and legacies of Thomas Sankara. Episode Summary: Thomas Sankara is the revolutionary who became the first president of Burkina Faso in West... more
Interview with Bridget Kendall on the BBC World Service's "The Forum" regarding the politics and legacies of Thomas Sankara.
Episode Summary: Thomas Sankara is the revolutionary who became the first president of Burkina Faso in West Africa, and gave the country its name, meaning 'the land of upright people'. In his short time as leader of Burkina Faso, Sankara instituted sweeping reforms to make the country more self-sufficient and society more equal. For some Sankara was a hero, for others, he was a ruthless autocrat. This year marks 30 years after his mysterious -and as yet unsolved- assassination, but why do memories of him still haunt Africa to this day?
Joining Bridget Kendall to discuss Thomas Sankara, are Dr Amber Murrey-Ndewa from the American University in Cairo, Lamine Konkobo BBC Afrique journalist from Burkina Faso, and Aziz Fall, Professor of International Studies in Canada and campaigner for justice on behalf of the Sankara family.
Full Interview Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvsfh
Episode Summary: Thomas Sankara is the revolutionary who became the first president of Burkina Faso in West Africa, and gave the country its name, meaning 'the land of upright people'. In his short time as leader of Burkina Faso, Sankara instituted sweeping reforms to make the country more self-sufficient and society more equal. For some Sankara was a hero, for others, he was a ruthless autocrat. This year marks 30 years after his mysterious -and as yet unsolved- assassination, but why do memories of him still haunt Africa to this day?
Joining Bridget Kendall to discuss Thomas Sankara, are Dr Amber Murrey-Ndewa from the American University in Cairo, Lamine Konkobo BBC Afrique journalist from Burkina Faso, and Aziz Fall, Professor of International Studies in Canada and campaigner for justice on behalf of the Sankara family.
Full Interview Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csvsfh
Research Interests:
Social Movements, Political Geography and Geopolitics, African Studies, Gender Studies, Critical Geopolitics, and 13 moreRevolutions, Africa, West Africa, Gender, Political Assassinations, PanAfrican History, French Imperialism, French Imperialism in West Africa, Imperialism, Burkina Faso, Assassination, Panafricanism, and Thomas Sankara
Interview on Episode 4 of The Thin Layer: "Regrowth: How to Push Back a Desert" with Ian Steadman. I speak about PanAfrican ecology in the Sahel via the policies and praxis of Thomas Sankara. Episode summary: Throughout history, people... more
Interview on Episode 4 of The Thin Layer: "Regrowth: How to Push Back a Desert" with Ian Steadman. I speak about PanAfrican ecology in the Sahel via the policies and praxis of Thomas Sankara. Episode summary: Throughout history, people and communities have built close connections with the land. When we talk about soil — and about trying to “fix” soil —taking action can mean breaking or disrespecting those connections, good intentions or not. Lessons on environmental cooperation from a Marxist revolutionary, the Great Green Wall, and more.
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Through readings, practicums, and in-class discussion, this course will help students become acquainted with the methodological skills necessary to carry out rigorous, thoughtful, and independent qualitative social science research. I... more
Through readings, practicums, and in-class discussion, this course will help students become acquainted with the methodological skills necessary to carry out rigorous, thoughtful, and independent qualitative social science research. I constructed this syllabus with the direct input of students (via a voluntary electronic survey). Emphasizing the practice of qualitative methods alongside a thorough examination of the issues of place, power, politics, self, and representation, the course is designed to create a supportive and encouraging environment in which graduate students will think seriously and critically about negotiating and implementing qualitative methods for graduate-level research but also have room for experimentation and error. The focus will be on providing students with the critical tool-set necessary to conduct their own qualitative research projects and the space in which they can put into practice methods that are directly relevant to their own eventual projects. To provide this foundation, our discussions will focus on the theories, logics, and practices of qualitative research, as well as specific methodological, political and ethical issues associated with studying people and society.
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International development has been an overwhelmingly white, heteronormative, and patriarchal project. That is to say, it has been informed ideologically, epistemologically, and in practice by hegemonic Eurocentric norms, priorities, and... more
International development has been an overwhelmingly white, heteronormative, and patriarchal project. That is to say, it has been informed ideologically, epistemologically, and in practice by hegemonic Eurocentric norms, priorities, and “expert knowledge.” In this course, we focus our attention on the shifting but near-permanent criticisms of normative, hegemonic development projects articulated by LGBTQ people, people of color, Indigenous scholars and activists, Pan-Africanists and African feminists, transnational feminists, Chicano/a historians, and more. We give particular attention to elucidating alternative imaginaries of “progress,” “empowerment,” and “development” for meaningful, livable futures that emphasize wellbeing, ecological balance, and buen vivir. In this way, the course is explicitly forward-looking as we seek to move beyond critique and beyond tokenism towards the active imagining of new horizons.
Research Interests:
Development Studies, Critical Disability Studies, Political Ecology, Sustainable Development, Gay And Lesbian Studies, and 18 moreCritical Race Theory, Pan Africanism, World Bank, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Witchcraft (Magic), Ubuntu, Critical Whiteness Studies, Wellbeing, Heteronormativity, LGBTq Activisms, Patriarchy, Alternatives to Development, Indigenous Development, Buen vivir, Queering development, African Feminisms, Tokenism, and Indigenizing Education
This course begins with the emergence of imperial claims to benign humanitarianism alongside the colonial project and engages in a broad survey of the diverse and complex ways in which (multiple) ideologies of race condone forms of... more
This course begins with the emergence of imperial claims to benign humanitarianism alongside the colonial project and engages in a broad survey of the diverse and complex ways in which (multiple) ideologies of race condone forms of humanitarians through the cultivation of a particular (victimized, disposable, criminal) " Other. " Alongside the ideological representation of a racialized Other, we look at whiteness as a project and a projection of power (drawing on the work of Troillot and Said) and the ways in which whiteness is historically bound up in imperial projects and continues to be a key marker of (the " imagined geographies " of) humanitarian identity. We will talk about the ways in which different racial markers (from blackness to multicultural identity) are symbolically deployed to legitimize particular initiatives and projects that perpetuate unequal (colonial) hierarchies and relations. Learners will become acquainted with forms of racial dominance as well as racial resistance. We will consider how development can move beyond fetishization or beyond the merely symbolic inclusion of non-white people as agents of social change. Our course will be grounded in our contemporary global moment: We will be both outward and inward looking as we incorporate current events within our curriculum, reflect upon our positionalities in racialized landscapes and relations, and hold guest lectures with activists and intellectuals who are organizing on the ground for racial justice.
The intentions of this course are to establish a collective of engaged learners who are passionate about knowledge and racial justice. Inspired by critical pedagogies of bell hooks and Paulo Freire, we will engage together and we will learn together. As such, this syllabus is a living document that will be worked and reworked throughout our time together. There will be moments when we decide as a collective to pursue new topics that were not originally scheduled and/or to drop or alter others.
The intentions of this course are to establish a collective of engaged learners who are passionate about knowledge and racial justice. Inspired by critical pedagogies of bell hooks and Paulo Freire, we will engage together and we will learn together. As such, this syllabus is a living document that will be worked and reworked throughout our time together. There will be moments when we decide as a collective to pursue new topics that were not originally scheduled and/or to drop or alter others.
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Qualitative Advanced Research Methods for 1st year MA students in Governance & Development Studies
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From resistance against Shell Oil in Nigeria’s Ogoniland to the revolutionary movement led by Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, this course considers geographies of violence and resistance in their historically situated contexts. We examine... more
From resistance against Shell Oil in Nigeria’s Ogoniland to the revolutionary movement led by Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso, this course considers geographies of violence and resistance in their historically situated contexts. We examine geopolitical spaces across West and Central Africa, locating diverse forms of resistance that emerge therein, including unorganized resistances that are practiced everyday, organized resistance, and revolution. We become acquainted with debates on the interconnections between place, violence, resistance, and power. Using several case studies across Africa, we look at the trajectory of political movements against colonial, (neo)imperial, and structural forms of violence. The course takes a critical stance on ethnic, religious, and racialized interpretations that naturalize violence in contemporary Africa; instead, we conduct comprehensive historical and spatial examinations, emphasizing that protest and resistance emerge within complex structures of power, domination, and violence.
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Murrey, A (2016) “Gender Equality in Development and Nation Building: Opportunities and Constraints.” Plenary lecture delivered at Jimma University’s 7th Annual Research Conference, 31 March 2016. Jimma, Ethiopia.
Research Interests:
An experimental workshop, Humour and Environmental Justice in Cameroon, brought together 30 stand-up comedians, environmental advocates, artists, and researchers at Yaahot Hotel in Yaoundé, Cameroon on 27 and 28 March 2023. Building upon... more
An experimental workshop, Humour and Environmental Justice in Cameroon, brought together 30 stand-up comedians, environmental advocates, artists, and researchers at Yaahot Hotel in Yaoundé, Cameroon on 27 and 28 March 2023. Building upon traditions of les griots and comedic oration in Cameroon, our collaborative and interactive workshop centred efforts to move beyond written sources and dominant formulas to address issues of environmental justice across Central Africa. Comedians provided unparalleled insights into Cameroonian comedy craft; environmental activists discussed the potentials for humour to raise awareness of ecological issues; and we considered the need for forms of intellectual creativity and joy to challenge the history of extractive academic methods in studies of Cameroonian ecologies and environments.
Research Interests:
How do we teach emergent, defiant, decolonial options even as they are rendered unimaginable, unknowable, and/or delegitimised within the dominant paradigm and the global 'Westernised university' (Grosfoguel 2013)? How do we learn and... more
How do we teach emergent, defiant, decolonial options even as they are rendered unimaginable, unknowable, and/or delegitimised within the dominant paradigm and the global 'Westernised university' (Grosfoguel 2013)? How do we learn and practice ways of knowing that do not concede to the violence that keeps the present colonial system in place? How do we move away from colonial illusions of certainty, efficiency, expertise, discovery, and related promises? How do we resist the seductive desires to have our knowledge validated, acclaimed, and affirmed by dominant systems, institutions, and people? How do we teach and learn what is uncertain, what is becoming?
In this experimental course, we would like to foster an interactive and collaborative digital space to build, challenge, and practice ways of knowing offered by the rich scholarship on decolonising research methods in the social sciences. We recognise the significance of trust within collectives thinking against coloniality and colonial violence and striving towards epistemic decolonisation-particularly online. Guided and immersive sessions will help us work towards the creation of a different kind of digital classroom and cultivate a collective commitment. Our course activities are flexible and include the creation of a power playlist; sessions on self-critique and decolonial reflection; discussions with serious, committed, and humble scholars who have worked for decades on community centred and decolonial knowledges in Africa and beyond; an Uncomfortable Oxford digital tour tracing Oxford's spatial and historical relationship with colonialism, particularly in Africa; a final week of student-led deliberations and (re)imaginations of their current research; and more. Underpinning this course is the long-standing need for students and educators to think critically about the dominance of epistemic and methodological forms of coloniality.
In this experimental course, we would like to foster an interactive and collaborative digital space to build, challenge, and practice ways of knowing offered by the rich scholarship on decolonising research methods in the social sciences. We recognise the significance of trust within collectives thinking against coloniality and colonial violence and striving towards epistemic decolonisation-particularly online. Guided and immersive sessions will help us work towards the creation of a different kind of digital classroom and cultivate a collective commitment. Our course activities are flexible and include the creation of a power playlist; sessions on self-critique and decolonial reflection; discussions with serious, committed, and humble scholars who have worked for decades on community centred and decolonial knowledges in Africa and beyond; an Uncomfortable Oxford digital tour tracing Oxford's spatial and historical relationship with colonialism, particularly in Africa; a final week of student-led deliberations and (re)imaginations of their current research; and more. Underpinning this course is the long-standing need for students and educators to think critically about the dominance of epistemic and methodological forms of coloniality.
Research Interests:
Social Research Methods and Methodology, Social Sciences, Qualitative methodology, Indigenous Research Methodologies, Portuguese Colonialism and Decolonizaton, and 5 moreColonialism, Post-Colonialism, Decolonial Thought, Decolonization, and Collaboration and Representation within Indigenous Decolonising Research Methodologies
In this (the first part of a) two-part workspace, a collective of interdisciplinary scholars will come together to deliberate on and practice new modes of communicative praxis in academic conference/workshops. This workspace builds upon... more
In this (the first part of a) two-part workspace, a collective of interdisciplinary scholars will come together to deliberate on and practice new modes of communicative praxis in academic conference/workshops. This workspace builds upon energies to decolonize university spaces, including during a previous workshop, Setting Forth At Dawn: A Workshop on the Geopolitics and Practices of Academic Writing, held in May 2016 at Jimma University in Jimma, Ethiopia.
In traditional academic conferences, scholars are subject to rigid time and space controls that often privilege more positivist and axiomatic research topics and knowledge(s). These academic spaces often reaffirm a spatial and metaphysical distancing between the “audience” (learners) and the “presenter” (the knower). This enforced distancing can re-privilege and re-center the “presenter.” This re-privileging can be particularly problematic for scholars whose works contribute to projects of decolonizing and/or are critical of the relationship(s) between knowledge and power. Moreover, traditional conference modes of communicative praxis can de-privilege (a) hesitancy, (b) the expression of multiple subjectivities, and (c) highly transdisciplinary scholarships. This is perhaps more acute for emerging, independent, and non-affiliated scholars, whom have yet to achieve the renown, prestige, and/or job security of tenured and highly published scholars. In such settings, scholars attempt transformative expressions through clandestine and often dis-unified formulas, oftentimes at the fringes of academic conferences.
Through guided discussions, interactive and embodied sessions, we will address the structural and epistemological legacies of colonialism within our universities as we continue to foster the energies of decolonization, with an attention to concrete practices of decolonization.
In traditional academic conferences, scholars are subject to rigid time and space controls that often privilege more positivist and axiomatic research topics and knowledge(s). These academic spaces often reaffirm a spatial and metaphysical distancing between the “audience” (learners) and the “presenter” (the knower). This enforced distancing can re-privilege and re-center the “presenter.” This re-privileging can be particularly problematic for scholars whose works contribute to projects of decolonizing and/or are critical of the relationship(s) between knowledge and power. Moreover, traditional conference modes of communicative praxis can de-privilege (a) hesitancy, (b) the expression of multiple subjectivities, and (c) highly transdisciplinary scholarships. This is perhaps more acute for emerging, independent, and non-affiliated scholars, whom have yet to achieve the renown, prestige, and/or job security of tenured and highly published scholars. In such settings, scholars attempt transformative expressions through clandestine and often dis-unified formulas, oftentimes at the fringes of academic conferences.
Through guided discussions, interactive and embodied sessions, we will address the structural and epistemological legacies of colonialism within our universities as we continue to foster the energies of decolonization, with an attention to concrete practices of decolonization.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Social Movements, African Studies, Indigenous Studies, Development Studies, Social Sciences, and 27 moreBlack/African Diaspora, Academic Writing, African Literature, North-South relations, Rural Development, Indigenous Knowledge, Second Language Writing, Pan Africanism, Writing, Black feminism, Decolonialization, Ethiopia, Decolonial Thought, Corporate University, Postcolonial Theory/Subaltern Studies, Research Writing, Experimental Writing, Creative Writing Workshops, and Avant-Garde Texts, Wole Soyinka, Research and Publications, Writing Pedagogy, Geopolitics of knowledge, Politics of knowledge production, Social and Legal Theory, Workshops, Jimma, African University Education, and Politics of Knowledge
In collaboration with African Geographical Review and Pambazuka News We invite early career scholars working on topics connected to and practices grounded in 'defiant scholarship in Africa' to apply for writing workshops in Yaoundé,... more
In collaboration with African Geographical Review and Pambazuka News We invite early career scholars working on topics connected to and practices grounded in 'defiant scholarship in Africa' to apply for writing workshops in Yaoundé, Cameroon and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Deadline for Yaoundé Applications: 10 March 2024
Deadline for Addis Ababa Applications: 2 April 2024
During these three-day hybrid workshops we will work to identify and challenge the academic racism(s) and academic imperialism(s) that remain embedded within dominant publication models. We will centre work that pursues decolonial, solidarity, and anti-colonial praxes to break with self-referencing, recursive, and imperial modes of social science research (Ake 1979). Importantly, our collective refuses prevailing models of North/South writing workshops that too often commence from unspoken assumptions that there is a dearth of publishing know-how or skill in African settings that requires ‘correcting’.
https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/events/call-papers-writing-workshops-defiant-scholarship-africa
Deadline for Yaoundé Applications: 10 March 2024
Deadline for Addis Ababa Applications: 2 April 2024
During these three-day hybrid workshops we will work to identify and challenge the academic racism(s) and academic imperialism(s) that remain embedded within dominant publication models. We will centre work that pursues decolonial, solidarity, and anti-colonial praxes to break with self-referencing, recursive, and imperial modes of social science research (Ake 1979). Importantly, our collective refuses prevailing models of North/South writing workshops that too often commence from unspoken assumptions that there is a dearth of publishing know-how or skill in African settings that requires ‘correcting’.
https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/events/call-papers-writing-workshops-defiant-scholarship-africa
Research Interests:
Social Movements, African Studies, Political Economy, Academic Writing, Cameroon, and 15 moreEthiopia, Black Feminist Theory/Thought, Decolonial Thought, Solidarity, Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism, Research and Publications, Panafricanism, Resistance Studies, African Feminisms, Black Geographies, African geography, Addis Ababa, Panafricanisme, Geographies of Resistance, and Addis Ababa University
The initial optimistic readings of digital communications and mobile technologies, such as the so-called Facebook and Twitter #Revolutions, have been revised to account for the disparities associated with Internet technologies, which have... more
The initial optimistic readings of digital communications and mobile technologies, such as the so-called Facebook and Twitter #Revolutions, have been revised to account for the disparities associated with Internet technologies, which have simultaneously amplified race, class, and gender inequalities and further embedded capitalist and colonial relations (Chun 2006; Hughes 2016; Gòmez-Barris 2017; Noble 2018). Human geographers and critical social scientists recognize the complex ways in which social media and the Internet more broadly operates as a critical mechanism of place- and community-making, bound up with complex contestations of political meaning-making, stories and counter-stories (Pickerill 2003; Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto 2008; Hands 2011). At the same time, digital spaces are increasingly being disrupted and inhibited through processes of infrastructural injustice, including stoppage, suspension, blackouts, user fees, throttling and more (Murrey 2019). Cyberspace has emerged as a contentious “terrain of resistance” within contemporary political, social, and economic struggle (Routledge 2017, 5).
Research Interests:
In this two-part workspace, a collective of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholars will come together to deliberate on and practice new modes of communicative praxis in academic conference/workshops. This workspace builds upon... more
In this two-part workspace, a collective of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary scholars will come together to deliberate on and practice new modes of communicative praxis in academic conference/workshops. This workspace builds upon energies to decolonize university spaces, including during a previous workshop organized by members of our collective, Setting Forth At Dawn: A Workshop on the Geopolitics and Practices of Academic Writing, held in May 2016 at Jimma University in Jimma, Ethiopia.
Scholarships from across, within, and outside disciplines have asserted the need to move and extend beyond limited and limiting modes of knowing crafted and maintained under the auspices of colonial " modernity. " Enrique Dussel proposes modernity as an alternate being in the world, with " trans " meaning beyond, while Walter Mignolo encourages us to de-link from modernity through increasingly conscious bio-and geo-political scholarships. Horace Campbell prompts us to think and be through African fractal expressions that honor geometrically balanced forms of knowing. More recently, major scholarly associations have made calls for decolonization within conference frameworks and proceedings. In short, much of the efforts to decolonize knowledge have importantly been directed at
• What knowledge(s) are destroyed/expressed/cultivated/canonized and how,
• Who expresses knowledge(s), and
• Methodologies through which we know.
Less sustained attention has, as of yet, been given to the direct decolonization of academic conferences and workshops, during which scholars transmit and communicate knowledge(s).
Traditional conference modes can suppress expressions of dissimilar modes of knowing and communicating. In traditional academic conferences, scholars are subject to rigid time and space controls that often privilege more positivist and axiomatic research topics and knowledge(s). These academic spaces often reaffirm a spatial and metaphysical distancing between the " audience " (learners) and the " presenter " (the knower). This enforced distancing can re-privilege and re-center the " presenter. " This re-privileging can be particularly problematic for scholars whose works contribute to projects of decolonizing and/or are critical of the relationship(s) between knowledge and power. Moreover, traditional conference modes of communicative praxis can de-privilege (a) hesitancy, (b) the expression of multiple subjectivities, and (c) highly transdisciplinary scholarships. This is perhaps more acute for emerging, independent, and non-affiliated scholars, whom have yet to achieve the renown, prestige, and/or job security of tenured and highly published scholars. In such settings, scholars attempt transformative expressions through clandestine and often dis-unified formulas, oftentimes at the fringes of academic conferences.
Scholarships from across, within, and outside disciplines have asserted the need to move and extend beyond limited and limiting modes of knowing crafted and maintained under the auspices of colonial " modernity. " Enrique Dussel proposes modernity as an alternate being in the world, with " trans " meaning beyond, while Walter Mignolo encourages us to de-link from modernity through increasingly conscious bio-and geo-political scholarships. Horace Campbell prompts us to think and be through African fractal expressions that honor geometrically balanced forms of knowing. More recently, major scholarly associations have made calls for decolonization within conference frameworks and proceedings. In short, much of the efforts to decolonize knowledge have importantly been directed at
• What knowledge(s) are destroyed/expressed/cultivated/canonized and how,
• Who expresses knowledge(s), and
• Methodologies through which we know.
Less sustained attention has, as of yet, been given to the direct decolonization of academic conferences and workshops, during which scholars transmit and communicate knowledge(s).
Traditional conference modes can suppress expressions of dissimilar modes of knowing and communicating. In traditional academic conferences, scholars are subject to rigid time and space controls that often privilege more positivist and axiomatic research topics and knowledge(s). These academic spaces often reaffirm a spatial and metaphysical distancing between the " audience " (learners) and the " presenter " (the knower). This enforced distancing can re-privilege and re-center the " presenter. " This re-privileging can be particularly problematic for scholars whose works contribute to projects of decolonizing and/or are critical of the relationship(s) between knowledge and power. Moreover, traditional conference modes of communicative praxis can de-privilege (a) hesitancy, (b) the expression of multiple subjectivities, and (c) highly transdisciplinary scholarships. This is perhaps more acute for emerging, independent, and non-affiliated scholars, whom have yet to achieve the renown, prestige, and/or job security of tenured and highly published scholars. In such settings, scholars attempt transformative expressions through clandestine and often dis-unified formulas, oftentimes at the fringes of academic conferences.
Research Interests:
Critical Theory, Human Geography, African Studies, French Literature, Queer Studies, and 18 moreAnthropology, International Relations, Political Philosophy, Communication, Humanities, Feminist Theory, Social Sciences, Radical Geography, Critical Pedagogy, Political Science, English, French language, Environmental Sustainability, Transnational feminist praxis, Decolonization (African History), Decolonial Thought, Decolonizing Methodologies, and Decolonial Feminism
During the early years of the 21 st Century, we have witnessed powerful reassertions of the continuing political, social, and economic relevance of decolonizing projects within the university. Working within many intellectual paradigms... more
During the early years of the 21 st Century, we have witnessed powerful reassertions of the continuing political, social, and economic relevance of decolonizing projects within the university. Working within many intellectual paradigms (subaltern studies, area studies, feminist and anti-racist political ecology, decolonial studies, critical race studies, anarchist thought), decolonizing scholars have advanced innovative projects to undermine privilege and power within institutions of higher learning. These efforts have included the bolstering of a sundry and powerful literature articulating critiques of racial, gender, and geographical inequalities and their reverberations and influences within university spaces. These dialogues confront deeply rooted, complex, and multidimensional power structures that continue to effect and enforce long-standing colonial inequalities. There is a well-developed and self-critical scholarship within geography that has called out the discipline's whiteness (in our classrooms, in our curriculums, and in our reference lists), the discipline's privileging of Anglophone voices and places, the discipline's role in advancing colonial projects, and the discipline's hetero-normative methodological orientations. Race and colonialism have been urgently re-centered in today's universities. This re-centering is made all the more acute by the charged global atmosphere created by the US Presidential Election, by rising anti-Black and anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence across North America and Western Europe, by demands to confront long-standing racial injustices within policing practices, by the racialized effects of global climate change, and by growing global economic inequalities.
At the same time, powerful student movements and activist-intellectual projects—from #RhodesMustFall to #whyismycurriculumsowhite to #CadaanStudies to " I, Too, Am Harvard " to #BlackLivesMatter to #FeesMustFall—have demanded that university administration and faculty account for the entanglements and engagements of the university with(in) historical and contemporary forms of oppression (both on and off campus). Indeed, universities have long been spaces wherein larger social changes reverberate profoundly: spaces of resistance and struggle as well as oppression and suppression. We have seen this again throughout more than 18-months of sustained #Oromo student struggles across the Oromo region of Ethiopia, where hundreds of student activists have been shot at, beaten, and disappeared, where Internet connectivity has been reduced, and where campuses have been occupied by military police officers. We have seen this again through the violent police crackdown on protestors at the University of Nairobi, which resulted in the indefinite closing of the institution. We have seen this again in campuses across the US and the UK, where students have disrupted sporting events and held die-ins and lie-ins to bring attention to racial inequalities within their campuses and communities, but are met with opposition and condemnation...
At the same time, powerful student movements and activist-intellectual projects—from #RhodesMustFall to #whyismycurriculumsowhite to #CadaanStudies to " I, Too, Am Harvard " to #BlackLivesMatter to #FeesMustFall—have demanded that university administration and faculty account for the entanglements and engagements of the university with(in) historical and contemporary forms of oppression (both on and off campus). Indeed, universities have long been spaces wherein larger social changes reverberate profoundly: spaces of resistance and struggle as well as oppression and suppression. We have seen this again throughout more than 18-months of sustained #Oromo student struggles across the Oromo region of Ethiopia, where hundreds of student activists have been shot at, beaten, and disappeared, where Internet connectivity has been reduced, and where campuses have been occupied by military police officers. We have seen this again through the violent police crackdown on protestors at the University of Nairobi, which resulted in the indefinite closing of the institution. We have seen this again in campuses across the US and the UK, where students have disrupted sporting events and held die-ins and lie-ins to bring attention to racial inequalities within their campuses and communities, but are met with opposition and condemnation...
Research Interests:
Black Studies Or African American Studies, Indigenous Studies, Radical Geography, Higher Education, Political Ecology, and 9 moreAcademic Writing, Critical Geography, Academic Publishing, Decolonial Thought, Racial Justice, Decolonizing Methodologies, Decolonization, Geopolitics of knowledge, and Decolonizing Education
Thomas Sankara was one of the most confident and vocal anti-imperialists of the late 20th Century. Sankara’s collective praxis, vision and legacy continue to be enormously influential in shaping anti-imperial and pan-African resistance... more
Thomas Sankara was one of the most confident and vocal anti-imperialists of the late 20th Century. Sankara’s collective praxis, vision and legacy continue to be enormously influential in shaping anti-imperial and pan-African resistance across the world. This influence has been reinvigorated since the popular uprisings in Burkina Faso in 2014.
We invite abstracts for contributions to a forthcoming edited volume that aims to bring forward the different ways in which activists, theorists and writers in and beyond Africa have engaged with Sankara’s political philosophies and praxis since his assassination in 1987.
We invite abstracts for contributions to a forthcoming edited volume that aims to bring forward the different ways in which activists, theorists and writers in and beyond Africa have engaged with Sankara’s political philosophies and praxis since his assassination in 1987.
Research Interests:
Social Movements, Music, International Relations, African History, Colonialism, and 27 moreRural Development, Pan Africanism, Feminism, African Politics, Black feminism, Social movements and revolution, Decolonization (African History), Feminism and Social Justice, Che Guevara, Solidarity, Rural Social Movements, Anti-Capitalism, Anti-imperialism, Afrikology. Social Constructivism. Pan Africanism., Burkina Faso, Western Sahara, Radical politics, Tree Planting, Neocolonialism, Anti-Colonialism, Pan African Studies, Palestine: international cultural solidarity with., Participative Democracy, Panafricanism, Thomas Sankara, Political Praxis, and Rural Social Change
This seminar coincides with the 39th anniversary of the assassination of the historian, activist and Pan-African scholar Dr. Walter Rodney in June 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana. On colonial and neocolonial education, Rodney wrote, 'in the... more
This seminar coincides with the 39th anniversary of the assassination of the historian, activist and Pan-African scholar Dr. Walter Rodney in June 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana.
On colonial and neocolonial education, Rodney wrote, 'in the final analysis, perhaps the most important principle of colonial education was that of capitalist individualism. In Africa, both the formal school system and the informal value system of colonialism destroyed social solidarity and promoted the worst form of alienated individualism without social responsibility'.
In our contemporary period, colonial hangover, neo-colonial intercessions and marketised interventions in African educational spaces serve to undermine, sometimes deliberately, the importance of critical and emancipatory scholarship. We will consider ongoing and urgent questions of defiant scholarship in creating alternative political imaginaries.
On colonial and neocolonial education, Rodney wrote, 'in the final analysis, perhaps the most important principle of colonial education was that of capitalist individualism. In Africa, both the formal school system and the informal value system of colonialism destroyed social solidarity and promoted the worst form of alienated individualism without social responsibility'.
In our contemporary period, colonial hangover, neo-colonial intercessions and marketised interventions in African educational spaces serve to undermine, sometimes deliberately, the importance of critical and emancipatory scholarship. We will consider ongoing and urgent questions of defiant scholarship in creating alternative political imaginaries.
Research Interests:
African Studies, Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Decolonization (African History), PanAfrican History, and 13 moreAfricana Studies, Decolonial Thought, Coloniality, Decolonization, University, Politics of knowledge production, Colonial Education, Walter Rodney, Critical University Studies, Panafricanism, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Epistemicide, and decolonize the university
In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015–2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In... more
In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015–2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In both cases, resistance was met with pervasive state-initiated and corporate-sanctioned internet shutdowns and disruptions. I situate these techno-political practices within the longue durée of coloniality to argue that the state suspension of internet connectivity is a form of infrastructural harm; an intentional violence made socially and structurally possible by the colonial configurations of infrastructure. My analysis draws from five years of digital ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork, including thirteen months in Jimma, Ethiopia and nine months in Yaoundé, Cameroon. I mobilise a decolonial praxis that unmasks practices of authoritarian control within global racial coloniality, and seeks to foster cross-fertilisations of struggle and resistance praxis.
Research Interests:
Social Movements, African Studies, Digital Divide, Development Studies, Ethiopian Studies, and 13 moreSocial Media, Cameroon, Political Geography, Multidisciplinary, The Internet, Authoritarianism, Infrastructure, Protest and resistance, Digital Infrastructure, Resistance Studies, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Globalizations, and Infrastructural Violence
Scholars of resistance have long identified and differentiated the distinctive features, contours, and boundaries of resistance in social life. However, some have characterised the resulting plurality of conceptual frameworks in... more
Scholars of resistance have long identified and differentiated the distinctive features, contours, and boundaries of resistance in social life. However, some have characterised the resulting plurality of conceptual frameworks in resistance studies as ‘somewhat chaotic’ (Baaz et al. 2016: 137). In this Intervention, we play within the chaos at the conceptual margins of resistance within political geography. We revisit Cindi Katz’s (2004) influential articulations of resistance, reworking, resilience, and revanchism 15 years after the publication of Growing Up Global. Considering the last decade and a half of socio-political, economic, colonial and environmental violence encountered by human and non-human life, we explore the ways in which Katz's work remains relevant to the issues and debates central to political geography.
Research Interests:
Social Change, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics, Area Studies, and 15 moreEthnography, Space and Place, Resilience, Political Science, Resistance (Social), Political Geography, Feminist Geography, Cultural power and resistance, Refusal, Decolonial Thought, Resistance, Dissent, Protest and resistance, Resistance Studies, and Defiance
As an analytical and political term, permanent counterrevolution demands recognition of the dynamics of the continuously kaleidoscopic imperial arrangements and dogmas embedded within and constitutive of global racialised capitalism. It... more
As an analytical and political term, permanent counterrevolution demands recognition of the dynamics of the continuously kaleidoscopic imperial arrangements and dogmas embedded within and constitutive of global racialised capitalism. It is a radical term that demands we acknowledge the complex ways in which leaders, institutions and factions have tailored, regulated and marshalled (through coordination and disorder alike) repressions that—albeit permanently challenged, cracked and strained under various forms of human and environmental resistance—have attained considerable ideological, institutional and infrastructural normalcy. Contemporary counterrevolution in Africa, while rooted in preceding iterations and power arrangements, seems to have shifted in the post-Arab Spring and post-African Uprisings political context. The routine state suspension of the Internet and social media is one emergent practice of contemporary counterrevolution. Internet disruption and blackout fits within a context of concurrent forms of pervasive counterrevolution in African societies in which US-backed militarism, the criminalisation of resistance and the fracturing of dissent have taken increasingly direct form. These arrangements seem to harken back to the earlier—circa Cold War and colonial—forms of imperial violence. A thoughtful consideration of permanent counterrevolution must be balanced with an attention to the practices and processes of dissent against it. In this, the spatio-temporal dynamics of resistance are important in recognising the permanence of dissent, albeit sometimes what I call ‘slow dissent’. In what follows, I sketch the central core of my arguments at Dar and conclude with some reflections on the implications for radical scholarship in Africa.
Research Interests:
African Studies, International Relations, Africa, Cameroon, African Politics, and 15 moreSocial movements and revolution, Political Geography, Ethiopia, Cultural power and resistance, Imperialism, Natural Resource Extraction, Dissent, Arab Spring (Arab Revolts), EXTRACTION, African political economy, Counterrevolution, Protest and State Repression, Political dissent, Colonialism and Imperialism, and Geographies of Resistance
As a concept and policy lesson, the “resource curse” idea gained popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s within academic, research, and policymaking departments of development organizations. Meanwhile, social scientists, including... more
As a concept and policy lesson, the “resource curse” idea gained popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s within academic, research, and policymaking departments of development organizations. Meanwhile, social scientists, including human geographers, anthropologists, and political ecologists, have argued that the resource curse idea is inadequate, restraining, or inappropriate as a framework for understanding the complex and shifting dynamics of resource management and extraction. Three main critiques of the theory have emerged. The first critique disputes the factuality of the resource curse by countering the notion of a linear or causal relationship between the presence and extraction of resources and poor socio-economic performance. Epistemological critiques of the logic of the resource curse idea have revealed its colonialist and capitalistic genealogies. A second critique reveals the dualistic and deterministic emphasis of the resource curse idea. Third, the resource curse ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The Toyin Falola @65 Conference brought together scholars from across the African continent and the world from 29 to 31 January 2018 under the theme, ‘African Knowledge and Alternative Futures.’ Our focus reflected on the long struggle... more
The Toyin Falola @65 Conference brought together scholars from across the African continent and the world from 29 to 31 January 2018 under the theme, ‘African Knowledge and Alternative Futures.’ Our focus reflected on the long struggle for epistemic justice on the continent while centering and recognizing Falola’s important role in the project. This was a unique conference in terms of its structure, content, as well as the diversity of intellectuals that it attracted.
Research Interests:
Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond... more
Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond Southern Africa) within the discipline of human geography; and (c) erasures of the functions of racialization in African societies. These are compounded by the relative marginalization of African knowledge within decolonial thought, including decolonial geographies and the disunities between the subfields of black geographies and African geographies. To challenge some of these dynamics, we introduce the concept of defiant scholarship in Africa, a form of scholarship that seeks to work against and outside of dominant grammars and prevailing registers and which draws from a powerful and extensive intellectual tradition across the African continent. Working from Walter Rodney's ‘guerrilla intellectuals’ and drawing on Walter Mignolo's ‘epistemic disobedience’, defiant scholarship cultivates those ways of thinking and those practices that are external to, in opposition to, and/or unconventional to the coloniality of knowledge. We ask what it means for our scholarship to be disobedient to colonial and capitalist epistemes, and, in so doing, we sketch the contours of an African geographies subdiscipline that is anti-racist, decolonial, and in active conversation with black geographies. The result of our engagement is a call for a reinvigoration of African geographies as we currently know and practice them.
Research Interests:
Human Geography, Race and Racism, Transdisciplinarity, Political Geography, Africana Studies, and 13 moreDecolonial Thought, Feminist Political Ecology, Decolonizing Methodologies, Decolonial Feminism, Walter Rodney, Claude Ake, African geography, Anti Racist Education, Coloniality of Knowledge, Epistemic Disobedience, decolonize the university, black geography, and scholars at risk
PurposeOriented to ongoing student and university momentums for decolonial futures, the purpose of this paper is to interrogate the role and status of mainstream international development curricula and pedagogies by critiquing two... more
PurposeOriented to ongoing student and university momentums for decolonial futures, the purpose of this paper is to interrogate the role and status of mainstream international development curricula and pedagogies by critiquing two absences in the sub-discipline’s teaching formulae: appropriations and assassinations.Design/methodology/approachThe author draws from a decade of research on oil extraction in Central Africa, including ethnographic work with two communities in Cameroon along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline; four years of research (interview-based and unofficial or grey materials) on the 1983 August Revolution in Burkina Faso and assassination of Thomas Sankara; and five years of experience teaching international development in North America, Western Europe and North and Eastern Africa.FindingsThrough a critical synthesis of political and rhetorical practices that are often considered in isolation (i.e. political assassinations and corporate appropriation of Indigenous know...
Research Interests:
This seminar coincides with the 39th anniversary of the assassination of the historian, activist and Pan-African scholar Dr. Walter Rodney in June 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana. On colonial and neocolonial education, Rodney wrote,... more
This seminar coincides with the 39th anniversary of the assassination of the historian, activist and Pan-African scholar Dr. Walter Rodney in June 1980 in Georgetown, Guyana. On colonial and neocolonial education, Rodney wrote, 'in the final analysis, perhaps the most important principle of colonial education was that of capitalist individualism. In Africa, both the formal school system and the informal value system of colonialism destroyed social solidarity and promoted the worst form of alienated individualism without social responsibility'. In our contemporary period, colonial hangover, neo-colonial intercessions and marketised interventions in African educational spaces serve to undermine, sometimes deliberately, the importance of critical and emancipatory scholarship. We will consider ongoing and urgent questions of defiant scholarship in creating alternative political imaginaries.
Research Interests:
African Studies, Colonialism, Decolonization (African History), PanAfrican History, Africana Studies, and 13 moreDecolonial Thought, Coloniality, Decolonization, University, Politics of knowledge production, Colonial Education, Walter Rodney, Critical University Studies, Panafricanism, Modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, Epistemicide, Post Colonialism, and decolonize the university
Amber Murrey and Nicholas A. Jackson, editor and contributor of "A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara" examine Sankara’s political philosophies and legacies and their relevance... more
Amber Murrey and Nicholas A. Jackson, editor and contributor of "A Certain Amount of Madness: The Life, Politics and Legacies of Thomas Sankara" examine Sankara’s political philosophies and legacies and their relevance today.
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Rural Sociology, Social Movements, Human Geography, African Studies, International Relations, and 15 morePolitical Philosophy, Radical Geography, Leadership, Peasant Studies, African History, Revolutions, Africa, Cold War, Gender, Sustainable Urban Environments, Pan Africanism, Social movements and revolution, Labor History and Studies, Thomas Sankara, and Black Emancipation
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People's narratives, interpretations and understandings of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and pipeline actors emphasise the uneven exercise of power through which structural violence is effected and experienced. The complexity of the... more
People's narratives, interpretations and understandings of the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline and pipeline actors emphasise the uneven exercise of power through which structural violence is effected and experienced. The complexity of the processes of structural violence along with local socio-political context and peoples' dynamic understandings thereof play major roles in shaping resistance practices, in complex ways in Kribi and Nanga-Eboko. Working from these narratives, I offer a theoretical re-articulation of structural violence as (i) tangible through the body, (ii) historically compounded, (iii) spatially compressed and (iv) enacted in a globalised geopolitical nexus by actors who are spatially nested within a racialised and gendered hierarchy of scale. Drawing from critical interdisciplinary work on violence, my theory of a triad of divergent, often interrelated and co-existing, distinguishable indexes of structural violence includes: infra/structural violence, industria...
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Engineering, Human Geography, Cultural Geography, Gender Studies, Development Studies, and 15 moreEthnography, Agrarian Studies, Cameroon, Neoliberalism, Authoritarianism, Decolonial Turn, Decolonial Thought, Feminist Political Ecology, Oil and Gas Pipeline, Decolonizing Methodologies, Dissent, Decolonial Feminism, EXTRACTION, Oil Extraction, and Everyday Resistance
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Works on the political and economic thoughts of Thomas Sankara have gained recent currency in the light of the resurgence of decolonization of knowledge in both the global North and South. This chapter works from the wide-ranging and... more
Works on the political and economic thoughts of Thomas Sankara have gained recent currency in the light of the resurgence of decolonization of knowledge in both the global North and South. This chapter works from the wide-ranging and pluriversal political and socioeconomic imaginaries elaborated upon by Sankara (through his speeches and actions) to tease out his particular political economy as one insistent upon building a society in which each person could work toward self-liberation and dignity. I consider some of the lessons learned from the implementation of these political philosophies during the revolution of August 1983 to October 1987. Finally, I conclude by sketching some of the ways in which contemporary pan-Africanists, decolonial thinkers, green socialists, and others have revived aspects of Sankara’s political economy of justice and “revolution [as] happiness.”
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Drawing from scholarship in feminist political geography that embraces discomfort and unease as generative features of social encounter along with the literature on decolonial ethics for research, Murrey argues that further work is... more
Drawing from scholarship in feminist political geography that embraces discomfort and unease as generative features of social encounter along with the literature on decolonial ethics for research, Murrey argues that further work is necessary to disrupt the barriers between ‘the field site’ and ‘home-site,’ and that this project remains particularly acute for research ‘on Africa’ within a racialised global colonial system. To these ends, Murrey makes three interconnected arguments about disrupting colonial practices within social science research: (a) ‘women researching in Africa’ are responsible for challenging masculinist and colonial epistemologies. (b) This would mean, among others, moving beyond guilt and compassion to an explicit political consciousness of decolonisation through ‘constant questioning.’ (c) This sort of ‘researching in Africa’ is centred upon ongoing questioning (on-and-off the page) that addresses the functions of race, particularly whiteness and anti-blackness...
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African Studies, Africa, Fieldwork in Anthropology, Critical Race Theory, African Politics, and 15 moreCritical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Political Geography, Decolonialization, Feminist Geography, Ethnographic fieldwork, Ethnicity, Africana Studies, Decolonial Turn, Decolonial Thought, Decolonization, Anti racism, Feminist Political Theory, Decolonialidad, Decolonial Feminism, and Field Study
School geography in England has been largely silent on issues around race, which stands in contrast to important strands of thought in the discipline. In this intervention, we explore two influentia...
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This article further develops a critical geographical theory of structural violence. It does so by considering the ways people in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, two communities in Cameroon, report feeling and experiencing structural violence... more
This article further develops a critical geographical theory of structural violence. It does so by considering the ways people in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, two communities in Cameroon, report feeling and experiencing structural violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. For people living within spaces (re)produced through structurally violent processes, projects, and extractions, a triad of intersecting experiences emerge: structural violence is felt as (i) tangible through the body (senses of loss, the belly, the body, and nourishment), or described through gendered narratives of hunger, illness, and the experiences of land dispossession; (ii) historically compounded, or characterized by a rootedness in the colonial and racist structures of the past alongside expectations that present-day structural violence threatens future generations; and (iii) spatially compounded, or experienced through a concurrent spatial overlapping (or compounding) as multiple forms of structural violence...
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Human Geography, Political Geography and Geopolitics, Economics, Ethnography, Narrative, and 11 morePolitical Science, Geographies of Displacement, Development Induced Displacement, International political economy of oil and gas, Structural Violence, Oil and Gas Pipeline, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Displacement, Politics of Visibility, Visibility/invisibility, and Hunger and development
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Development Studies, International Development, Academic Writing, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Decolonialization, and 15 moreCritical Whiteness Studies, Early Modern European Witchcraft, Edward Said, Decolonial Thought, Coloniality, Elites, Decolonization, Geographies of religion and spirituality, Coloniality of Power, Decolonial Feminism, Academic Conference, Imagined geographies, Academic vocabulary, Academic Communication, and Epistemicide
Amber Murrey PAMBAZUKA NEWS 2012-07-09, Numero 248 http://pambazuka.org La vie et les travaux de Thomas Sankara peuvent etre evoques comme un rappel du pouvoir et du potentiel de l'action humaine pour engendrer des transformation... more
Amber Murrey PAMBAZUKA NEWS 2012-07-09, Numero 248 http://pambazuka.org La vie et les travaux de Thomas Sankara peuvent etre evoques comme un rappel du pouvoir et du potentiel de l'action humaine pour engendrer des transformation sociopolitiques et economiques. Je voudrais placer mon propos dans le contexte geopolitique des soulevements populaires qui continuent d'avoir lieu dans le monde, les populations s'organisant contre les politiques neoliberales du capitalisme (...)
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Abstract There has been a lack of attention to the role of la sorcellerie (witchcraft) and the occult in geographical work on extraction, power and resistance, despite the ways in which these epistemologies inform conceptions of power,... more
Abstract There has been a lack of attention to the role of la sorcellerie (witchcraft) and the occult in geographical work on extraction, power and resistance, despite the ways in which these epistemologies inform conceptions of power, wealth and violence. In two towns along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, epistemologies of la sorcellerie frame understandings and critiques of the invisible actors and processes that effect the pipeline's uneven distributions of violence, wealth and risk. Far from expunging the experience(s) of extraction by erasing the pipeline's visible traces on the landscape, the oil consortium's infrastructural and discursive erasures serve to situate the pipeline within a knowledge system that associates invisible actors and materials with evil, wrongdoing, suspicion and distrust. This article addresses (i) how the production of dispersed extractive landscapes reinforce epistemologies of witchcraft by alienating the people who live within them from networks of power in ways that provoke a mistrust and jealousy that is absorbed within families and communities and (ii) the socio-political significance of this epistemological structuring of the pipeline as a logic of resistance against hydrocarbon capitalism.
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Human Geography, Ethnography, Political Science, Resistance (Social), Non-Western Social Theories, and 13 moreOil and gas, Political Geography, Witchcraft (Anthropology Of Religion), Geographies of Violence, Structural Violence, Oil and Gas Pipeline, Resistance, Anthropological study of witchcraft and sorcery, Public Administration and Policy, Politics of Visibility, Visibility/invisibility, Structural Violence and Capitalism, and Oil Pipelines
Thank you all for joining us this afternoon for what I hope will be a rewarding and engaging exchange. I want to begin my brief discussion by honouring the wonderful people who have offered me the joy of thinking about the world in... more
Thank you all for joining us this afternoon for what I hope will be a rewarding and engaging exchange. I want to begin my brief discussion by honouring the wonderful people who have offered me the joy of thinking about the world in radical ways; professors, activists and friends who have taught me about Pan-Africanism, feminist thought and emancipatory politics, and who continue to encourage me to be more and more critical and engaged. Next, I would like to situate my ideas within the geo-political context of the popular uprisings that continue to take place around the world as people organise against neoliberal policies of advanced capitalism and their resultant gross inequalities in wealth, health and education. Accompanying the intensifying neoliberal crises -manifested through the financial crisis, food security crisis, and struggles over land reform and landed property -is an ever expanding militarisation. The US military now has more bases and more personnel station in more co...
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Extended book review of Firoze Manji and Sokari Ekine (eds.) African Awakening: The Emerging Revolutions, Pambazuka Press: Cape Town, Dakar, Nairobi, and Oxford, 2011; 324 pp.: 9780857490216, $17.95 (pbk)
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The twenty-first century has seen a continued evolution of the US military’s strategic interest in socio-cultural knowledge of (potential) adversaries for counterinsurgency strategies. This paper explores the implications of the... more
The twenty-first century has seen a continued evolution of the US military’s strategic interest in socio-cultural knowledge of (potential) adversaries for counterinsurgency strategies. This paper explores the implications of the reinvigorated and expanding (post-9/11) relationship between social science research and US military strategy, assessing the implications of US Africa Command strategies for preventive counterinsurgency. Preventative counterinsurgency measures are ‘Phase Zero’ or ‘contingency’ operations that seek to prevent possible outcomes, namely threats to ‘security’ in Africa. The research initiatives of US Africa Command illustrate a culture-centric approach to this strategy, which seeks to draw from detailed socio-cultural knowledge in the prevention of possible populist or popular uprisings. Recent such uprisings, resistance actions and strikes in the continent illustrate a problematic tendency to interpret various forms of populist resistance as ‘terrorist’ actions, thereby condoning the bolstering of African national military capacity. The article considers the implications of these culture-centric counterinsurgency strategies as a means of anticipating and repressing the variety of mobilisations encapsulated within the ‘terrorism’ catchall. We conclude by urging social scientists to reject and disconnect from US Africa Command’s missions and knowledge acquisition efforts in Africa.
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Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio-political awareness situated within multifaceted... more
Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio-political awareness situated within multifaceted emotional geographies of resistance. In spite of resistance narratives, explicit and collective resistance practices remain uncommon. As people struggle and live within composite landscapes of structural violence along the pipeline, particular processes and mechanisms of uneven power influence the tendency for resistance struggles to be slow, impromptu or labour based. In this comparative ethnographic analysis, I consider the political environment that shapes socio-political emotional ties in Nanga, particularly its socio-political positioning as 'the village of the First Lady'. In this case, people in proximate positions vis-à-vis the ruling family experience heightened oppression(s) and dispossession(s), at the same time that they report feeling little political recourse. In Kribi, on the other hand, responses to the pipeline can be described as defiant withdrawals , demonstrated through a series of unconnected refusals. Although resistance practices along the pipeline have not been visible or successful in an established sense, emotional geographies of resistance elucidate long-term struggles to survive (i.e., slow dissent), including the accumulation of a collective emotional consciousness grounded in an awareness of historical patterns of injustice.