Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Wiebe Nauta
(Maastricht University)
Rike Sitas (University of Cape Town)
Timo Makori (Maastricht University)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Economy and Development (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S87
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 31 May, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
We invite contributions on imagining and infrastructuring decolonial and anti-colonial futures. Infrastructuring is the creation of webs of social, technical or biological connections and exchange, pertaining to imagined forms of achieving liberation from oppression and realising just futures.
Long Abstract:
Mignolo and Walsh (2018) contend that “there is no modernity without coloniality” and push us to consider how decoloniality undoes, disobeys, and delinks from colonial regimes of thinking, knowing, being and doing (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015), to construct paths toward an otherwise. This may be juxtaposed to the anti-coloniality of Franz Fanon (1963) who posits liberation from the racial orders underpinning colonial domination as demanding (violent) struggle. It is Fanon’s idea of liberation that inspires contemporary scholars like Hickel (2021) when they employ the term anti-colonial to call for an end to the colonial patterns of appropriation through a degrowth agenda. As a travelling theory, anti-colonial thinking is also meaningful to young African activists to address climate change as an urgent anti-racist struggle (Nakate 2021).
We invite contributions on imagining and infrastructuring decolonial and anti-colonial futures. By infrastructuring we mean the creating of webs of either social, technical, or biological connections that allow for exchange (Larkin 2013). Thus, claims pertaining to imagined forms of achieving liberation from oppression and realising just (urban) futures interest us. We also invite more grounded contributions, for example, on how artisanal miners in southern Congo, currently viewed as a surplus population by state and private interests, strive for meaningful work and livelihoods. Similarly, how decolonial claims to cultural heritage by cultural activists in South Africa and Kenya are offering inroads into urban justice. Alternatively, the ways that African traditions of thought like Ubuntu may be linked to climate activism and ecological agendas such as degrowth.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 31 May, 2023, -Ted Lawrence (African Center for Aquatic Research and Education)
Paper short abstract:
The residue of colonialism persists in conducting research in Africa, with financial capacity and research ideas initiated from the "global north". Such an approach leads to short-term, disparate efforts, and information inequity. Decolonizing science gives agency to African researchers.
Paper long abstract:
The African Great Lakes (AGL) consist of over 28% of the world's surface freshwater. They provide millions of people with food, water, and livelihoods and their riparian governments reap large benefits from them. These critical resources face the same challenges as other freshwater resources the world over. What is surprising, is the relative lack of resources directed towards addressing the problems these lakes face. The lack of resources, is caused, in part, by colonial approaches to development and natural resource research and management. These approaches keep financial power and influence, and research directives, centered in the "global north", providing little leadership opportunities from the researchers on the ground. Further, such approaches are actually detrimental to understanding these resources through short-term, disparate, and underfunded efforts. The results are inadequate and inconsistent monitoring of even basic parameters, incomplete information and data, barriers to accessing data and information relevant to these resources, and a dearth of in-field training opportunities for African scientists. There must be a shift from the present reliance on international and top-down approaches to funding and research, to long-term comprehensive processes that give agency to the African scientific community. Herein, I discuss how this can be done by creating "dense" networks of scientists who establish harmonized and prioritized research needs on each of the AGL--empowering those on the ground to direct those who desire to conduct research in this region. This concept creates the "voice of science" and flips the top-down "bungee" approach to a bottom-up process.
Timo Makori (Maastricht University)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I interrogate how state power in the Democratic Republic of Congo is increasingly being revitalised through foreign alliances with extra-territorial actors building a variety of forms of extractive infrastructures.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I interrogate how state power in the Democratic Republic of Congo is increasingly being revitalised through foreign alliances with extra-territorial actors building a variety of forms of extractive infrastructures. Since the liberalization of the mining economy in the Congo in 2002, sociotechnical projects in the form of state joint-ventures companies, public-private partnerships, labour formalization arrangements, and mineral supply chain programmes have all sought to re-order, expand and expedite the production or supply of minerals from the Congo. A global imperative to shift away from fossil fuels offers further impetus and appetite for Congo’s metal ores and it has brought with it vast amounts of foreign investment which appears to be revitalizing the authority of the state, largely at the expense of the Congolese people. Drawing on the works of anti-colonial thinkers such as Patrice Lumumba, Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Samir Amin, who anticipated the endurance of imperial control over Africa and called for pan-African strategies to protect African self-determination, I reflect on whether an extraverted Congolese state today remains a useful vehicle for channeling the needs, desires and aspirations of the Congolese people. I contend that doing so is not only necessary to centering empire in an analysis of political sovereignty in the 21st century, but it is also an attempt to move our imaginations beyond the realist confines of nation-states to consider other ‘concrete utopias’ (Wilder 2022) for building post-national solidarity.
Wiebe Nauta (Maastricht University)
Paper short abstract:
African climate activists, though having been systematically ignored internationally and in the media, represent important voices in the global climate movement. How do they imagine decolonial and anti-colonial climate futures? What challenges do they face?
Paper long abstract:
Climate activism in Africa is hardly researched, while according to Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate “Africa is the least emitter of carbons, but we are the most affected by the climate crisis” (2021 :2). Therefore, Africa should be at the centre of the climate conversation while keeping in mind that climate justice needs to go hand in hand with racial justice.
This paper aims to examine who is active on the African continent and how these climate activists imagine decolonial and anti-colonial climate futures? Furthermore, it aims to explore to what extent these activists are integrated in transnational global activist networks and whether they experience challenges, including racial and gender discrimination, in their activism. Such challenges may have to do with funding issues, repression and censorship by African governments and/or lack of support from international organizations, NGOs and Northern activists. What tools are at their disposal and how do they make use of (social media) channels to get connected and getting their messages out?