Urban Africa – Urban Africans: New encounters of the rural and the urban
Basel, 29 June – 1 July 2017
The Centre for African Studies Basel and the Swiss Society for African Studies on behalf of AEGIS (Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies) invite you to submit paper proposals for the 7th European Conference on African Studies ECAS 2017 with the theme: Urban Africa – Urban Africans: New encounters of the rural and the urban.
African urbanization trends raise several issues that are of interest to scholars. These range from politics, through economics, all the way to social and cultural issues. The key issue, however, is how urbanization processes in Africa transform conventional objects of African Studies and how do scholars of Africa gear up to face such changes? These are the questions which we have invited scholars of Africa to engage with in a more conscious and systematic manner.
While among the 223 accepted panels the urban is prominent, many also look into the entanglements of the rural with the urban, especially with a view to addressing an implicit assumption underlying the study of Africa and which concerns the supposed rural ‘nature’ of the continent as well as the constitutive nature of the tension between tradition and modernity. Over the past few decades a self-critical attitude within many disciplines has led to a weakening of these assumptions, the urban continues arguably to be seen as the exception or, at any rate, as analytically less consequential than the rural. ECAS 2017 “Urban Africa – Urban Africans” will, therefore, be an occasion for rethinking African Studies, but also for exploring and deepening research avenues that many researchers working on urban and rural issues have taken up over recent years. There is a critical mass to be harnessed in the effort to push the frontiers of critical European knowledge production on Africa.
The call for papers is now open and closes at midnight on 19 January 2017. Before you propose a paper, please read the theme of the conference, the rules below, and then browse the list of list of panels.