ECAS7 “Urban Africa - Urban Africans: New encounters of the rural and the
urban”

European Conference on African Studies, Basel/Switzerland, 29 June – 1 July
2017

website (www.ecas2017.ch)



Dear collegues,

the Call for Papers for the ECAS7 in Basel has opened.

I would like to draw your attention to panel c36 “Unspectacular Youth -
Practicing the everyday in urban/rural Africa”. Thanks and see you all in
Basel!

Best,

Susann



*“Unspectacular Youth - Practicing the everyday in urban/rural Africa”*



*Short Abstract*

The panel highlights everyday practices of youth in Africa. Rather than
focusing on exceptional phenomena, which commonly leads to a depiction of
youth as heroes or victims, we promote the value of research on routines.
This might enable a better understanding of youths' everyday experiences.



*Long Abstract*

The field of youth studies seeks to conceptualize "youth" and describe its
practices. To do so, researchers have looked to experiences such as war,
revolution, poverty, etc., and the discourse that emerges captures a
tension in these spectacular circumstances to cast youth as danger or
potential, victims or heroes, stuck or dynamic, excluded or included. The
delineation of a distinct agency appropriated by young Africans is an
important step towards a comprehensive understanding of the implications of
youth. But what if researchers also inquired youths' everyday practices and
experiences of the world? By looking at the unspectacular - that is
routines and (possibly) ruptures of the everyday, we hope to get a
different and deeper understanding of the experiences. We are interested in
motives and ambitions of youth whose life-worlds are not structured by the
spectacular phenomena that suspend the predictability of their environment.
Therefore, we are further interested in the mutual influence of youths and
their social environment, and in the way urban or rural contexts impact
their repertoires and ambitions.



Instead of asking what youth is, this panel intends to discuss questions
like:

What do young people do?

What constitutes their everyday and how do they experience it?

What motivates their actions?

What are the dynamics of the "unspectacular"?

We welcome papers based on ethnographic research.



*Convenors*

Maike Birzle (University of Basel)
Susann Ludwig (University of Basel)



Call for Papers: Deadline *18 January 2017*.

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