Paper short abstract:

Ensuring that girls are seen as knowers and narrators of their own stories is essential. Our paper explores our creative, collaborative research on African Girlhoods with African girls. The flourishing of girls’ creative agency & incisive voices has given rise to vibrant scholarship on girlhoods.

Paper long abstract:

Ensuring that girls are seen to be knowers and narrators of their own stories is essential.

Our paper will situate our creative, participatory research on African Girlhoods with African girls, within the debates about global girlhoods and the emergence of girlhood studies as a discipline. Over the last century, girls, long ignored as sources of knowledge, have engaged in activism and creative endeavors to express their visions and aspirations for a future society inclusive of their needs. In the last decade a flourishing of girls’ creative agency and incisive voices has given rise to growing and vibrant scholarship on girlhoods & their politics, histories, economics, arts, & cultures.

Girlhood studies provides a critical means to counter the historical tendency of feminist scholarship to center adult women and marginalize or even ignore girls. While recent scholarship has shifted from focusing on girls as largely vulnerable and in need of protection, most of the research has been about girlhood in the Global North. Additionally, research on girlhoods by now better reflects a range of approaches that move beyond the focus on precarity in Africa.

By turning questions about empowerment away from how we empower girls to those about how societies, institutions, and families can support the ways in which girls have empowered themselves and address the ways they have been ignored, we can better understand and deal with issues related to African girls.

The presenters include two undergraduate research participants who will discuss the ethics and complexity of conducting theis work.

Paper short abstract:

In Political Sciences, the international debt regime has long been interpreted and critiqued from a parochial Western perspective. Drawing on the example of Jubilee Afrika, this contribution seeks to rethink international debt relations from the perspective of social movements in the Global South.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution strives to rethink international debt relations from the perspective of social movements in the Global South. With their critiques, these movements reversed liberal economic assumptions of debt relations and brought forward visions for more equitable and just futures.

The ‘global turn’ in critical IPE and social movement scholarship led to a broadening of the disciplines that invite to research these complex interrelations. The recent acknowledgement of ‘blind spots’ in IPE contributed to shift attention to the periphery in order to be able to grasp knowledge that does not neatly fit into modern categories. However, important struggles in debt activism in Africa remain almost invisible and there is still little work done to conceptualize debt starting from the epistemologies of the South.

Taking the example of Jubilee Afrika, this contribution seeks to rethink the critique of international debt relations from the perspective of social movements in the Global South. It argues to broaden our understanding of debt by garnering greater visibility for the African movements, their conceptualisations of debt and their visions for social justice.

Paper short abstract:

This paper critically analyzes selected African Twitter responses to the death of the Queen with the aim of demonstrating how the concept of global social media is a techno-capitalist adventure that is meant to promote Western hegemony, which invariably poses danger to minority cultures.

Paper long abstract:

The concept of “global social media” – a form of context collapse in cultural and media studies that is injurious to minority cultures – calls for interrogation, especially because of the neoliberal ideals it seems to propagate. The intended purpose of globalizing social media is tethered around the assumption that it homogenizes social media experiences across time and space. In other words, there is a universal experience of social media use among every user in the world. While this might be intended to achieve neoliberal freedom, it nevertheless undermines and craftily promotes Eurocentric ideas and Western cultures that underscore and foregrounds social media. Upon the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Western media portrayed the Queen’s death on social media as a global loss, and as such, the world was expected to mourn the Queen. While the Queen’s death was a tragic loss, the subsequent social media theatrics that erupted, especially from former British colonies, begs for critical analysis. This paper is therefore aimed at critically analyzing selected African Twitter responses to the death of the Queen. By doing a qualitative analysis of these selected tweets, the overall goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the concept of global social media is a techno-capitalist adventure that is meant to promote Western hegemony, which invariably poses danger to minority cultures and people with colonial history.