Paper short abstract:

Complex relationships and lives between Chinese economic actors and the Fijian people have been transformed by growing Chinese infrastructure development in the region. Chinese general infrastructures are maintained during Covid19, keeping alive aspirations of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative.

Paper long abstract:

China uses transnational companies with close ties to Beijing to take out long-term leases on host islands in the Pacific, enabling them to take control of key infrastructures. The project will examine Chinese influence on the Fijian tourist sector, particularly mega-projects where new properties are acquired to cater for resort development. Additionally, Chinese infrastructure projects and loans catered to those projects and beyond will be examined, due to overlapping interests of Chinese transnational companies' pursuit of furthering China's Belt and Road Initiative's agenda in the Pacific. Issues to be addressed include the negotiation of often opaque contracts at high institutional levels, the transformation and control of supply chains especially at the local level, capital flight and relations with local labour. The project's research will be informed by theories of social justice, and will pursue anthropological questions relating to identity, political ecology, power and agency. These questions may reveal fractures in Fiji's ability to ensure maintenance of the population's well-being in the face of hegemonic forms of development imposed by Chinese transnational corporations in the tourism and general infrastructure sectors.

Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how technicians and producers ‘behind the scenes’ of Sunday worship services carefully cultivate religious experiences. I show how this group of people is implicated in the creation of affective regimes enabled by complex assemblages that include people and technologies.

Paper long abstract:

In many contemporary Christian churches, a Sunday worship service can feel like attending a pop concert. Multimedia technologies such as lighting, music, video, haze machines, and the use of smartphones not only help to set the scene but are instrumental in the creation of feelings of belonging and an experience of the ‘presence’ of the Holy Spirit for Pentecostal Christians. This paper looks at how technicians and producers ‘behind the scenes’ of worship services carefully cultivate these religious experiences and how they negotiate which technologies are (not) used to what ends.

I argue that religious experiences cannot be simply explained away as resulting from the successful manipulation of technologies by the human hand. Rather, they are the result of complex assemblages which include humans and (digital) technologies. I propose to understand the ‘successful’ implementation of multimedia technologies as the result of powerful affective regimes that share affinities with the contemporary, arguably secularised, context in which these churches are situated.

Paper short abstract:

This paper demonstrates that negotiations of love were experienced as offering opportunities to resist normative masculinities through 'ukushela' and emotional reflexivity. Young black men’s investments in their relationships suggest that the liberatory potential of love in their lives.

Paper long abstract:

Love in the lives of young black men in South Africa has received considerably limited attention in literature. While there has been a steady increase in love scholarship in Africa, these studies have mostly focused on the love experiences of young women. In this context, studies on love are often motivated by the disproportionate vulnerabilities that experienced by young women, such as intimate partner violence. This characterisation of love in South African literature has, perhaps inadvertently, presented a limited understanding of young black men as violent and emotionally inept. This paper moves beyond these limited conceptualisations of young black men and explores love as a productive force in their lives. Drawing on empirical findings generated with 34 young men between the ages of 16 and 21, the paper shows how love and the young men’s emerging masculinities are conceptualised as mutually constitutive. As a result, negotiations of love were experienced as offering opportunities to resist normative masculinities demonstrated through 'ukushela' and emotional reflexivity. Young black men’s investments in their relationships suggest that the liberatory potential of love in their lives.