Latest News from African Studies
Congratulations to our Graduates!
Congratulations to Professor Safia Aidid on her Connaught New Researcher Award !
Frofessor Safia Aidid (History and African Studies Centre) has been recognized with a 2022-2023 Connaught New Researcher Award. Professor Aidid’s research examines anticolonial nationalism, territorial imaginations, borders, and state formation in the Horn of Africa, with a particular focus on modern Somalia and Ethiopia. The two-year Connaught award will support the research and writing of her first book, entitled “Pan-Somali Dreams: Ethiopia, Greater Somalia, and the Somali Nationalist Imagination.”
Upcoming African Studies Events
Community-Based Conservation in East Africa and Canada
Toward Territories of Life
The African Studies Centre & School of the Environment invite you to a panel discussion on Friday, November 17, 2023.
Community-Based Conservation in East Africa and Canada
Toward Territories of Life
Convenor:
Professor Kariuki Kirigia. School of the Environment and African Studies Centre, University of Toronto
Panelists:
Professor John Galaty. Department of Anthropology, McGill University.
Professor Colin Scott. Department of Anthropology, McGill University (Winner of the Weaver-Tremblay Award for 2023).
Professor Vinay Kamat. Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia.
Professor Justin Raycraft. Department of Anthropology, University of Lethbridge.
When: Friday, November 17, 2023 | 5:00-6:30pm
Where: 2053 Wilson Hall, New College (40 Willcocks St.)
Register here.
Archive of African Studies News
Congratulations to Professor Safia Aidid on her Connaught New Researcher Award !
Frofessor Safia Aidid (History and African Studies Centre) has been recognized with a 2022-2023 Connaught New Researcher Award. Professor Aidid’s research examines anticolonial nationalism, territorial imaginations, borders, and state formation in the Horn of Africa, with a particular focus on modern Somalia and Ethiopia. The two-year Connaught award will support the research and writing of her first book, entitled “Pan-Somali Dreams: Ethiopia, Greater Somalia, and the Somali Nationalist Imagination.”
African Studies Welcomes Dr. Kariuki Kirigia jointly appointed to the School of Environment!
Kariuki Kirigia (PhD, McGill University) is an Assistant Professor within the School of the Environment and African Studies Centre at the University of Toronto. Dr. Kirigia’s research lies at the intersection of climate change, biodiversity conservation, territories of life, land governance, food security, African epistemologies and pedagogies, and sustainability in Africa, and adopts engaged approaches to research sutured by partnerships with African indigenous organizations and African universities. Join me in welcoming Prof. Kariuki Kirigia to the African Studies and New College communities!
Elimu: Volume 3
The African Studies Program Undergraduate Journal, is out! 
Congratulations to all the contributors and the Elimu Editorial Team for your brilliant work! Here is the direct link to Volume 3.
The journal is also available on the U of T website and journal system.
Re-appointment of Professor Marieme Lo as Director of African Studies
New College is pleased to announce the re-appointment of Professor Marieme Lo as Director of African Studies, for a five-year term, from July 1, 2022 – June 2027.
Dr. Nisrin Elamin Joins Anthropology, African Studies, New College
African Studies and New College are delighted to announce the hiring of Dr. Nisrin Elamin, 75% anthropology/25% African Studies/New College. Nisrin Elamin received her PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University in 2020.
African Studies and New College are delighted to announce the hiring of Comfort Azubuko-Udah
African Studies and New College are delighted to announce the hiring of Comfort Azubuko-Udah, Her teaching and scholarship is invested in the nature and politics of storytelling as it relates to landscapes and non-human agency in literature.
Archive of African Studies Events
Agency of/in African Studies: Of Naked Agency and Open Reading
Agency of/in African Studies: Of Naked Agency and Open Reading
The African Studies Centre invites you to attend a public lecture featuring Professor Naminata Diabate (Cornell University) on Friday, October 6th.
Notions of subjectivity and agency, both collective and individual, have haunted African studies in the Euro-American academy since its inception in the 1960s. This is so because of multiple historical (self-inflicted) injuries, including the Tran Saharan slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonization. This lecture redirects the terms of the debate by exploring defiant disrobing, women’s aggressive self-exposure in moments of social-political duress. Robust attention to this universal form of conflict management, not so much as an easily read feminist or feminine performance of contestation, but as a border-crossing story given life and sensitive to multiple interpretations in social media, academia, and beyond; yields the concept of naked agency and its connected reading praxis, open reading. Naked agency and open reading showcase the unstable nature of subjectivity qua agency, which results most particularly from the emerging and subjugating effects of our hyper-digitized age.
When: October 6, 2023 | 2 – 4 PM
Where: Jackman Humanities Building, 100A 170 St. George Street
An Indigenous Maasai Response to the Climate Crisis
An Indigenous Maasai Response to the Climate Crisis
The African Studies Centre and the School of the Environment invite you to a talk by NELSON OLE REIYIA on Friday, September 29, 2023.
An Indigenous Maasai Response to the Climate Crisis
with Nelson Ole Reiyia
Co-founder of Nashulai Maasai Conservancy, Kenya
Global Biodiversity Warrior &
Vanguard of the Vanishing Ecosystems
When: September 29, 2023 | 5:30 – 7:00 PM
Where: Wilson Hall, Room 2053, New College, University of Toronto
Series: Creative Writing Workshop for racialized students
Looking for a great space for artistic vulnerability and expression?
Build up your confidence as a writer and a great historian for your own life and experiences and develop your storytelling voice!
No prior creative writing experience needed or required.
Dates: Tuesdays: Jan. 17th, 24th, 31st, and Feb. 7th.
Time: 6pm to 8pm
Organized by Dr. Comfort Azubuko-Udah
December 8: The African Studies Seminar Series
The African Studies Seminar Series Presents:
Beyond decolonization and the critical: a case for precolonial history and the intricacies of violence and genocides in Africa
Presented by Felix Amoh-Siaw, doctoral candidate, Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of British Columbia (Okanagan Campus—UBCO) & 2022 Trudeau Foundation Scholar
Until the Cows Come Home: Patchwork Land Reform in South Africa’s Ranching Sector
Presented by Alex Dyzenhaus, Ph.D., SSHRC postdoctoral researcher in the Political Science Department at the University of Toronto
WHEN: Thursday, December 8, 2022, 2-4PM
WHERE: 2053 Seminar Room, 20 Wilson Hall, New College
Organized by the African Studies Program at New College, University of Toronto
Contact: Prof. Marieme Lo, Director, African Studies Program | Email: Marieme.lo@utoronto.ca
All Welcome! Refreshments!
December 8, 2022: African Studies End of Year Party
Join us for the African Studies end of year party !
WHEN: THURSDAY, December 8, 2022, 6pm-9pm
WHERE: William Doo Auditorium
45 Willcocks St. (Lower Level)
Join us for delicious African food, ASCU Elimi’s Volume 3 Lauch, Drumming, Music & more.
Family and friends are all welcome!
November 23, 2022: (Un)sentimental Educations: Children, Intellectuals, and West African Publics, 1920-1960
Event Details
By Merve Fejzula
Assistant Professor, University of Missouri
When: November 23, 2022 | 3 – 4:30 PM
Where: Room UC152, University College, University of Toronto
November 18, 2022: (Un)Making Decolonial Anthropologists: How should native scholars respond to decolonality?
Event Details
Please note that this event has been postponed. New date TBA.
Talk By Professor Divine Fuh, Director of the Institute for Humanities at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
When: Friday, November 18, 2022 | From 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Where: William Doo Auditorium, Room A
Talk Description
There is an underlying assumption today that Southern scholarship, especially when associated with Africa, is essentially decolonial – an idea that increasingly appears for many as intellectually bullying and associated with cancel culture. Yet, as an intellectual movement, decoloniality poses a knowledge production challenge for many scholars, particularly regarding how to translate critique into practice. Through an autoethnographic narrative account of my training and development as an anthropologist, this paper ironically asks how native scholars should respond to decoloniality. I focus on the simultaneous processes of becoming and unbecoming, and their relationship to self, insights, and the production of particularly scientific subjectivities. I am especially interested in the being and making of African anthropologists, particularly within a space in which one must unmake oneself in order legitimately to become. In the midst of decolonization, decolonial and African feminist intellectual subjectivation debates, what are the possible implications for the future of anthropological work, science and related scholarship production as natives become ethnographers? What opportunities does decoloniality offer for expanding and enriching existing anthropological archives?
Co-sponsors: The African Studies Program and Anthropology Department
November 17, 2022: Traditions as Legends: Rivonia, or Humanism Miscast
Event Details
Talk by Professor Siba Grovogui (Cornell University)
When: November 17 | 12:30 pm
Where: Canadiana Gallery (14 Queen’s Park Crescent West), CG 265 (2nd floor)
Talk Description
There is either failure or omission in the social sciences and humanities to entertain the idea that African political actions have behind them distinct traditions of thought. This is to say that it is often assumed in the canons and beyond that African actions are not grounded in moral predicates that reflect time and the material conditions of the existence of the authors of such actions. One way to cast aside African thought, as well as their ethical and moral predicates, is to present them as legends: the result of exceptional heroic acts of bravery, foresight, and/or humanity. To counter the underlying reflex, I wish to revisit the last paragraph of Nelson Mandela’s “I’m Prepared to Die’ speech. I do so to demonstrate the manners in which the last paragraph stands as an instance and instantiation of a longstanding and uniquely African expression of humanism. Further, I wish to show how the absence of interest and acquaintance with this particular speech is also evidence of the poverty of moral and ethical thought today.
About Professor Siba Grovogui
Siba N’Zatioula Grovogui is Professor of International Relations Theory and African Political Thought at Cornell University in the United States of America. He is also the Nelson Mandela Visiting Professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University for 2020 and 2021. He is the author of Sovereigns, Quasi Sovereigns, and Africans: Race and Self-Determination in International Law (1996) and Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Order and Institutions (2006). He is currently in the final phase of completion of a manuscript titled The Gaze of Copernicus: Postcolonialism, Serendipity, and the Making of the World. The manuscript offers a critique of international relations, its practices, disciplinary canons, archives, and regimes of truth as foundations for a set of propositions on postcolonial inquiries, methods, and utopias.
This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, the Transnational Justice Project, and the African Studies program at the University of Toronto.
A light lunch will be served at 12:00pm in the Centre Lounge, 2nd floor of the Canadiana Gallery.
Please note that the location does not have a working elevator. If you are a person with a disability and require accommodation, please contact us at crimsl.communications@utoronto.ca and we will do our best to make appropriate arrangements.
September 17-22, 2022: Afrifusa Fintech Summit
September 17-22, 2022
African Studies is co-sponsoring FINTECH Masterclasses which will all happen on the 17th Sept from 10am-1pm ET: These are great opportunities for networking and career exploration.
- Understanding the Canadian Fintech Landscape
Taught by Nina-Mae, Head of Partnerships at Fintech Cadence - VC Fund investing in African Tech
Taught by Hany Assaad of Co-Founder and Chief Portfolio & Risk Officer at Avanz Capital, former Chief Investment Officer at the IFC for Emerging Markets - Financial Literacy for Youth and Newcomers
Taught by Andre Lewis, VP Treasury of DUCA Credit Union and Leighton Watson, Regional Sales Manager at Pineapple