Dear colleagues,
we would like to invite you to propose a paper to our conference panel "Thinking through time. Large-scale technological innovations in Africa" at the European Conference on African Studies, Basel, 29 June - 01 July 2017. The deadline for submissions is 19 January, the link for paper proposals can be found here:
http://www.nomadit.co.uk/ecas/ecas2017/paperproposal.php5?PanelID=5072
Very best,
Alena Thiel
Panel 26: Thinking through time. Large-scale technological innovations in Africa
Convenors
Davide Chinigo' (Stellenbosch University)
Alena Thiel (GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies)
Abstract
Processes of change in Africa are inextricably related to innovations in social, political and material technologies. Most research has regarded this relation teleologically, based on notions of secularized progress and western political modernity. This panel proposes to understand technological innovation from the perspective of how time is conceptualized and represented in different ways. It focuses on how heterogeneous representations of the future - as a site of desire and anticipation - are entangled with narrations of the past - as the site of memory - and the present as lived and experienced in its "multiplicity of times, trajectories, and rationalities" (Mbembe 2001: 9).
In this panel, we approach the complex constellation of overlapping significations of time, and of the future in particular, through the lens of large-scale technological projects in Africa. If imaginations of the future are mediated within "anticipatory assemblages" (Groves 2016) that operate through specific routines, deadlines, and schedules, what kinds of competing anticipations do these large-scale projects, typically involving actors at all levels of governance, entail? Which (political) rationalities ensue from these temporal overlaps or frictions? What are their effects?
The panel seeks conceptually inspired contributions that provide a critical analytical lens on the temporal dimensions of technological innovation. Panellists are asked to present empirical work on the unfolding of routines, rhythms, and representations of the past, present and future in urban or rural sites of large-scale technological innovation in Africa.
Dr Alena Thiel / Research Fellow
GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies/
Leibniz-Institut für Globale und Regionale Studien
Neuer Jungfernstieg 21 / 20354 Hamburg / Germany
[log in to unmask] / www.giga-hamburg.de<https://giga.hamburg/en>
Project: West African Traders as Translators Between Chinese and African Urban Modernities<http://giga.hamburg/en/project/west-african-traders-as-translators-between-chinese-and-african-urban-modernities>
<https://giga.hamburg/en>
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