The Africa Thesis Award
The Award
Deadline for submission: 16 June 2009!
Are you interested in Sub-Saharan Africa and is your Masters thesis on a related subject? If so, the African Studies Centre (ASC) in Leiden is offering you the chance to win €1000 in its Africa Thesis Award!
The award aims to encourage student research and writing on Sub-Saharan Africa and to promote the study of African cultures and societies. It is presented annually to a student whose Masters thesis has been completed on the basis of research conducted on Africa.
The award consists of a prize of €1000 for the winning thesis. The winning thesis will be published in the ASC African Studies Collection. Submitted theses may be (partially) published on The Broker's website:www.thebrokeronline.eu.
Who can apply
Any final-year student who has completed his/her Masters thesis with distinction (80% or higher or a Dutch rating of at least 8) at a university in Africa or the Netherlands can apply. The thesis has to be based on independent empirical research related to Sub-Saharan Africa in one of the subjects listed in the following section and must have been examined within one year prior to the deadline for submitting manuscripts (see below).
The ASC specifically encourage students from Sub-Saharan Africa to submit their theses for this annual competition.
Subject of the thesis
Any thesis thematically related to socio-geographical, economic, political, juridical or anthropological issues or focusing on the humanities such as history, religion and literature (but with the exception of language and/or semiotic studies) can be submitted. Its geographical focus should be on Sub-Saharan Africa or its migrant communities elsewhere in the world. The thesis must be socially relevant.
Details of the how and where, etc of submission can be found at
http://www.ascleiden.nl/Research/Award/Labels: africa, prizes, theses
Here is a documentary, and subsequent interview with the filmmaker and one of the fellow passengers, screened on Spanish television, about the quest of countless Africans to arrive (after risking life and limb on the high seas) on Spanish soil. Dominique Mollard went undercover for a period of years in order to tell and reveal the more human face behind the almost-daily reports of illegal immigration into Spain.
It is well worth watching, even if you don´t understand Spanish.
From the rtve web site:
11-11-2008 Documental único, obra del francés Dominique Mollard, quien, tras 26 meses de trabajo, logró embarcarse en un cayuco para retratar como nunca antes se había hecho -el combate a vida o muerte- al que se enfrentan miles de africanos que buscan una vida mejor más allá de nuestras costas. Pepa Bueno, entrevista al propio Mollard y a una de las pasajeras del cayuco.
And
the video.
Labels: africa, Europe, illegal immigration
I´ve been trying to get a sense of Obamania in South Africa as I sit perched here at a distance in the UK, but scanning the daily SA papers online, the reporting (those that I could gain unpaid access to) always seemed to me rather low-key. I also saw the odd congratulatory facebook status message whizz by (if that´s any useful indication) from a handful of South African friends, but not many. And this seeming lack of enthusiasm (don´t know what else to call it) seemed all the more odd, as in contrast, I´d seen reporting not only on Kenyans taking to the streets celebrating Barack Obama´s win (with even an official day of holiday thrown in for good measure), but also earlier today I´d read an article in the El País reporting on how
excited Africa was about the Obama win (not forgetting that the story only profiled, in very brief paragraphs, about six or seven countries in toto, all sub-saharan).
That said, moments ago I´d stumbled across the following series of stories published by the Mail & Guardian in South Africa, titled
"Voices of Africa". The series seems to me a splendid idea. Here (below) is how it describes its aims and remit. About half of the current submissions (at the time of writing this post) report on the country-specific responses to Barack Obama.
One criticism: I do think that "Voices of Africa" could include North African voices in their offering too.
The blurb:
About Voices of Africa
Life in Africa: a one-dimensional struggle to survive war, poverty, corruption and disease; an ongoing saga of famine and failure. Recognise the story?
It's the one most often presented to newspaper readers and other media consumers. We know it's not the whole story. We know these are not the only stories.
Voices of Africa is an ambitious new publishing venture by the Mail & Guardian, which aims to show how we live in Africa, not how we die; how we thrive as multifaceted humans, not merely as survivors. It is an ongoing series of lively articles written by Africans about life in "their" Africa -- ordinary people getting on with their own lives, often in the face of adversity.
Where and how we live might partly determine our behaviour and attitudes. But there are universal joys and tribulations that bind us: we fall in love, we have families, we get older, we watch TV, play, gossip, fight with our bosses, laugh with our friends, shop, worry about our health, our children, our budgets … We publish a selection of exclusively commissioned stories that give us glimpses across the fence into the daily lives, loves and frustrations of our neighbours -- beyond the usual headlines. Voices of Africa is a dynamic series-in-progress and today we take our first "baby steps".
In the next months we will continue to scout for fresh, original voices from a growing number of countries, bringing our readers weekly insights into the experiences of the people who call some small corner of this continent home.
As Voices of Africa grows, we will also launch a more complete online version of the series, about which we'll keep readers posted. To capture as rich and diverse a range of voices that truly represents the continent, we will also commission and translate suitable articles written in French.
Though the nature of this exciting series excludes South African contributions, we hope our readers will help us to grow Voices of Africa into a unique and compelling series by spreading the word among their friends and acquaintances in other African countries.
Welcome to our Africa, explored as never before.
Click here for details about how to "audition" for Voices of Africa.
Contact us
Anglophone correspondence to Charlotte Bauer: charlotteb@mg.co.za
Francophone correspondence to Stephanie Wolters: stephanie@okapi.cc
Tel: +27 11 250 7300
Labels: africa, news, US
the below story landed in my mailbox. i want to highlight particularly:
"The stereotype of Africa as a non-competitive continent is simply not true," said John Page, chief economist for Africa at the World Bank. But across the continent, this potential is stymied by failures to make legal frameworks and trading processes less onerous for business, he added.
the full story below:
Industry’s bottom line on African innovationR&D investment will come when capacity is there, say leaders
Kenya, South Africa and Tunisia have the best innovation climates in Africa, say business leaders. But despite a steady upward trend in economic growth, the continent still does not cut the mustard to attract significant R&D investment from industry.
Data to this effect comes from a survey published at the World Economic Forum “Davos for Africa” meeting in Cape Town from 13 to 15 June. It captures the perceptions of leading business executives from a cross-section of firms operating in African countries.
Of the 29 countries surveyed, Tunisia receives the most consistently high rating for its innovation capacity. It is the only country to register in the top three in all nine categories pertaining to science and technology [see table via link to PDF below]. It also gets the top overall score.
Tunisia’s hegemony might come as a surprise, since South Africa holds the number one spot in more categories. But the Southern giant is let down by poor quality science education and a shortfall of scientists. This fate is shared by Kenya, although the second runner up also falls short on IP protection.
A North-South divide can also be discerned in the data, which forms part of the Forum’s African Competitiveness Report 2007. Northern Africa chalks up the highest scores in categories related to skills and human resources, while Sub-Saharan Africa does well on research quality and technology transfer.
“Africa is doing well in basic areas of competitiveness but needs to focus more on technological readiness and market efficiency to really jump-start competitiveness,” said Jennifer Blanke, senior economist with the World Economic Forum and one of the authors of the competitiveness report.
The report compares Africa’s four largest economies—South Africa, Algeria, Nigeria and Egypt—to the Bric (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies, suggesting the “Sane” countries have the potential to be the drivers of African economic growth. As a result, the authors suggest, international investment in Africa should not only focus on the poorest, but also go into bolstering economies that are doing well.
“The stereotype of Africa as a non-competitive continent is simply not true,” said John Page, chief economist for Africa at the World Bank. But across the continent, this potential is stymied by failures to make legal frameworks and trading processes less onerous for business, he added.
Economic growth in Africa measured 5.5 percent in 2006 and is expected to exceed six percent in coming years. But while the continent is experiencing its highest growth rates for decades, the dream of competing with other growing economies for multinational R&D investment remains elusive.
The majority of the countries surveyed by the Forum report attain only the lowest stage of economic development, namely “factor driven”. A handful—Benin, Botswana, Libya, Namibia and Tunisia—are described as “T1-2 transition economies”, which means that they are moving between stage one and stage two, which is “efficiency driven”. Only South Africa and Mauritius manage to reach the latter, while none attain the third level: “innovation driven”.
And while a session on R&D in Cape Town heard business representatives say that “the door was obviously open” in terms of their investing in R&D in Africa, in practice the scientific and technological quality is simply lacking at this stage.
“The R&D investment will come when demonstrated capability is there,” said Kenneth Willett, vice president and managing director for Africa of computer hardware giant HP.
For more on the “Davos of Africa” click on the links below.
Other sites
Table to accompany article (PDF). On this (research-africa) site
More on the “Davos of Africa” - p.2. More on the “Davos of Africa” - p.20. More on the “Davos of Africa” - p.21.Labels: africa, innovation, south africa
Strikes a funny chord, for all those who have ever had to "suffer" the kind of verbal exchanges below, as compiled by
Sidumiso Dahlia Sibanda at U Sheffield. & thanks to her for creating the group :))
Group name: Africa is not one bloody country!!
Group Type: Geography - General
Group Description: For anyone who is from or lives in or has ever lived in one of the 53 COUNTRIES on the CONTINENT of Africa. Or anyone who has ever said, (or been tempted to say...)
* Just like you're not from "Europe", I am not from "Africa".
* No, I don't speak African, do you speak European?
*(On being congratulated on your good English): "Thank you, I practice every day."
* No, I don't know your friend Anna from Kenya, (even if I was from Kenya, which I'm not!).
* 'o your from Nairobi ei?.......I have a friend in Cape town'
*Swinging from trees is an Olympic sport.
* Yes, I miss my pet cheetah - he was so convenient for taking me to and from school.
* Oh yes, my father's loaded. We lived in the largest cave for miles around!
* Back home in the country 'Africa' we don't wear much - we save our loin cloths and paint for the festive seasons, harvest, marriage and circumcision...clothing is not very popular we tend to keep it natural.
Anyone who has anything to add on, please feel free...
Labels: africa
conferenciante /conferencer
first. an amusing quote:
QI Quote of the Day
“Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.”
ERIC SEVAREID (1912-92) US journalist
given the context, i guess he meant "broadcast tv networks", but my mind hopped to Internet networks and wondered whether the same could be said there. i don´t know. i just wandered (sic).
second.it is high time that i write about the UniPID/EADI
symposium of last week. more especially so, since they today announced an
Open Access Dossier on the EADI web site. Some background:
UniPID is the Finnish Universities´ Partnership for International Development.
Their mission is "
To promote and implement ethically and culturally sustainable development in the world through establishing long-lasting research cooperation, based on the principles of partnership and institutional cooperation, between universities in Finland and their partners in the south."
EADI is the European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes, and aims to be the prime professional association for development and regional studies, with
member institutions numbering at least 150 across Europe.
the particular aim of the one-day symposium was to look at the problematic of accessing development knowledge. what was interesting to me was to meet persons from the development studies domain (one which i am not too familiar with). the acid test is "will EADI create a domain/subject archive?"; "might they consider encouraging (in some way/shape/form) their associated researchers to deposit their papers in an institutional archive?". i don´t know, and i am not going to try and speak on their behalf. but i did see some encouraging signs, in that the meeting was positive and upbeat, and there was a willingness to grapple with the Open Access debate (the EADI Executive were having their meeting the friday after the thursday symposium). you can see the programme and presentations linked-to from
here. as i prepared for the talk; mulling over issues particular to access to development research, i thought, imagine what could be achieved if only African researchers located on other spots on the planet could still stay connected and in tune with their country´s research trends by merely having good (unfettered) information to the research output coming out from their places of origin. people always speak of born-digital documents. so, let me use this shorthand. there i was talking to development studies researchers born-Europe, concerned about having and expanding access to development knowledge. but let´s not then lose sight of the born-Africa or born-LAm researcher located outside of, Africa or Latin America, respectively, who also needs to be "kept in the loop". because, quite obviously, we do consider that the born-African in-Africa researcher needs access to scientific output from his/her country (though it might not always be country-specific -- depends on the discipline e.g. some social science questions may be developing country-specific, for instance; sometimes agriculture, etc). imagine the plusses vis-a-vis countering brain-drain effects if you could just keep researchers connected
in such a way to their countries as i think too often when people leave for other climes the connections can become porous. and of course, what i say applies to all disciplines and not just that of development studies. i will not attempt to provide a summary of the papers presented, but merely want to mention my excitement when i saw the empirical research work of my co-presenter, Finnish musicologist Philip Donner. it was a good graphic illustration of the notion of "exposure to ideas", and why it is that we need more systematic archiving of such research materials.
he said "Finland has a number of valuable collections of cultural material from developing countries. Some of them are well documented, and they would deserve to be easily accessible in a dedicated archive. As existing archives have chosen to give priority to national content, it unfortunately seems to be difficult to find a working solution. This situation appears to be similar in other European countries. "
see for instance his video of
Selo greetings from Tanzania.
third.this brings me to a lecture i attended this evening. since it is
freedom day, it was rather appropriate that i end up seated in the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre at the Saïd Business School here at Oxf. this was to listen to Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, giving the John Berger lecture, which he titled "Things subverting ideas: Africa in the British Museum". (if you´ve not read Berger´s "Ways of Seeing" then you´ve missed out... I read it at age 18 and it just about changed my life. seriously.) and MacGregor began his talk by saying "you look in terms of what you know, and sometimes knowing inhibits the looking". indeed. and then he went on to give an eloquent lecture on historical views of Africa, and of how much this has evolved during the past 100 years. for instance, he quoted from the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1911 which claimed that Africa was devoid of development save for that given it by its colonial rulers, that it was "a continent practically without history" (yep, that was MacGregor´s quote from the EB), which he said represented liberal thinking for that time. and so he went, illustrating how some facets (and objects in the British Museum) proved that Africa had always been global and of course was capable of inventing lost wax bronze casting, creating hand-axes which were of aesthetic significance rather than just functional, how Europe had at a point been exporter of raw materials to West Africa (ca. rise of the Ashanti Empire) for processing/fashioning in what is now Benin.
(did you know that Gothic representations of the Madonna swayed because they follow the curvature of the ivory tusk from which they were carved?)
the long-and-short of the talk to me, was how scientific thinking progresses (or not). and more particularly, of how scientific, cultural, and historical thinking about Africa has evolved away from that represented by the 1911 EB. moreover he made an argument for multiculturalism (something i´ve been bumping up against, and see the lack of, in a lot of the legal literature -- legal pluralism as a rather PC notion, but something cast aside rather quickly in most of the scholarly legal discourse). but i digress. he said "we all need to have a deeper understanding of the histories of Africa." and "How do new histories get written?."
fourth.this theme of "looking" takes me back to the talk i attended yesterday. it was the talk titled "Next Generation Web in a Nutshell" run by the Science Enterprise Centre of the Saïd Business School. Last night folks from the OII spoke, so my coursemate Sangamitra and I attended. We were at the Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre again. The speakers were Bill Dutton (OII), Nir Vulkan (SBS), and Jonathan Zittrain (OII). Well, of course, strictly speaking we would have heard it all before, given that we are OII DPhils. But well, it is interesting sometimes to see how something specialised is packaged for public scientific consumption. The talks were good. i finally understood the philosophy underpinning the stopbadware.org project. before, i knew its nuts-and-bolts, but somehow the context had escaped me. but this brings me to this matter of "looking" (as had been mentioned by MacGregor above), and Jonathan´s longitudinal illustration of the interfaces of various "computers" through the decades. what we saw was a series of limited vendor-defined fx. well, pick- or wake up your mobile phone. probably you have 9 little icons splashed across the screen. the scary thing, as seen from JZ´s presentation, is that this UI (user interface) pattern is repeated when looking back across the decades, and what it illustrates is the vendor deciding which applications you are wont to use.
what you end up with is that users resort/default to this
vendor-decides-the-fx-i-have model of information experience and use, since the threats on/via the network are such that the unsuspecting user prefers to rather then relinquish decision-making about the applications s/he wants to install/use, as the risks for attack just become too great. so we move closer to an idiot-box and away from a pc, in the end. dumb terminal, anyone?
the classic blogquote award goes to Jonathan for his declaiming that kids today see TV as a "weird soporific aberration" in response to someone´s question re web 2.0 and convergence.
that´s not funny for its content. no. i think it is true (depending on where on the planet you are; i mean, let´s not get carried away by the notion that "tv is dead" just yet. it still lingers in many parts of the globe. well, i guess he didn´t say "tv´s dead"...) bueno. well, i don´t have a tv here in the UK. i refuse, on principle, to pay a TV licence. same as i did in SA. that´s why "no tv". but.
the quote was funny for being a discordant yet catchy wordstring.
;)
--
fifth.about writing histories. i was today thinking and half-amused in my thoughts about south african literature, and questions around representivity. i never became enchanted by south african literary fiction at an early age (and the stuff they shove at you at a young age) simply because i couldn´t relate. i mean, i saw a copy of Olive Schreiner´s "Story of an African Farm" in the bookstore yesterday. nice story, saw the series, etc. but let´s get real, that was not my experience of life in South Africa. i´d not been to a farm
ever during my childhood. that´s because i was confined to the city and suburbs. and that was the thing: the literature being published represented the experiences of those who had access to the publishing scene and market. that has changed now. there are some stories out about life in the townships, for instance. and they even get translated into spanish (i recall seeing a work last year in casa del libro in madrid). and yet, that township story has not entirely been my experience either. but, in the end, my early unhappy experiences with South African fiction just turned me away from reading that in my idle moments. sometimes i wonder to myself what it is then that i would write, if i, of a day, sat down and gave myself this task of writing a story representative of
my South Africa... dunno... too ill-defined for now.
Labels: africa, development, EADI, OII, open access, UniPID
