Publications

This paper examines the relationship between visuality, knowledge and power in the postcolonial African novel. With examples from selected texts of Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Sony Labou Tansi, it argues that visual culture, usually employed in the analysis of cultural images and material iconographies in media studies, can aptly be employed in textual analysis given that postcolonial novels are primarily engaged with the undoing of dominant visual regimes. Against the background of hegemonic regimes based on instrumentalist and subjectifying surveillance of the subject, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Labou Tansi build their texts on visual tactics and practices that subvert the capacity of the state apparatus to see, hence to know the subject. Bordering on humour, parody, graffiti, bricolage and surrealist representation, the two authors “play” with the state Panopticon, creating avenues for countervailing meanings that elude the dominant regimes of vision, knowledge and power. The subversive visual practices are inscribed within a conception of literary textualities that is based on plurivocality, heteroglossia, dialogism and the non-transparent text. Through the deconstruction of dominant visual architecture, both authors open up spaces for democratic conception of power that takes account of inter-subjectivity and non-hegemonic participation in the postcolonial public sphere.

Entre as décadas de 1960 e 1970, na esteira das lutas anti-coloniais em África, vê-se surgir através do cinema a possibilidade de construção de uma identidade africana e uma autonomia cultural e política do continente. A linguagem cinematográfica configurou-se, naquele momento, numa ferramenta de discurso diante da dificuldade de escrita da História. A câmara, assim, tornou-se uma arma para a denúncia da impotência da classe política africana e, além disso, um meio para a reivindicação de uma imagem descolonizada do continente. Neste artigo, problematizo os conceitos de identidade, tradição e modernidade no contexto pós-independência africana, conforme a representação do filme Xala (1975) do cineasta-escritor senegalês Ousmane Sembène. Além disso, discuto os aspectos que possibilitaram a construção de um imaginário de superação da colonização e a articulação discursiva dessa tendência cinematográfica em torno da desejada revolução social em África.

Land cover change in the semi-arid environment of the eastern Hindu Kush region is driven by anthropogenic activities and environmental change impacts. Natural hazards, such as floods presumably influenced by climatic change, cause abrupt change of land cover. So far, little research has been conducted to investigate the spatiotemporal aspects of this abrupt change in the valleys. In order to explore the abrupt change in land cover and floods as its possible drivers in the eastern Hindu Kush, a semi-arid mountain region characterized by complex terrain, vegetation variation, and precipitation seasonality, we analyzed long-term Landsat image time series from 1988 to 2020 using Breaks For Additive Seasonal and Trend (BFAST). Overall, BFAST effectively detected abrupt change by using Landsat-derived Modified Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (MSAVI). The results of our study indicate that approximately 95% of the study area experienced at least one abrupt change during 1988–2020. The years 1991, 1995, 1998, 2007, and 2016 were detected as the peak years, with the peaks occurring in different seasons. The annual trend of abrupt change is decreasing for the study area. The seasonality of abrupt change at the catchment level shows an increasing trend in the spring season for the southern catchments of Panjkora and Swat. The spatial distribution patterns show that abrupt change is primarily concentrated in the floodplains indicating that flooding is the primary driver of the land cover change in the region. We also demonstrated the accurate detection of past flood events (2015) based on the two case examples of Ayun, Rumbur, and Kalash valleys. The detection of the flood events was verified by fieldwork and historical high-resolution Google Earth imagery. Finally, our study provides an example of applying Landsat time series in a dry mountain region to detect abrupt changes in land cover and analyze impact of natural hazards such as floods.

Uyo is one of the fastest-growing cities in Nigeria. In recent years, there has been a widespread change in land use, yet to date, there is no thorough mapping of vegetation change across the area. This study focuses on land use change, urban development, and the driving forces behind natural vegetation loss in Uyo. Based on time series Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM)/Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+)/Operational Land Imager (OLI) image data, the relationships between urban land development and its influencing factors from 1985 to 2018 were analyzed using remote sensing (RS) and time series data. The results show eight land use cover classes. Three of these (forest, swamp vegetation, and mixed vegetation) are related to natural vegetation, and three (sparse built-up, dense built-up, and borrow pit) are direct consequences of urban infrastructure development changes to the landscape. Swamp vegetation, mixed vegetation, and forest are the most affected land use classes. Thus, the rapid growth of infrastructure and industrial centers and the rural and urban mobility of labor have resulted in an increased growth of built-up land. Additionally, the growth pattern of built-up land in Uyo corresponds with socioeconomic interviews conducted in the area. Land use changes in Uyo could be attributed to changes in economic structure, urbanization through infrastructure development, and population growth. Normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) analysis shows a trend of decreasing vegetation in Uyo, which suggests that changes in economic structure represent a key driver of vegetation loss. Furthermore, the implementation of scientific and national policies by government agencies directed at reducing the effects of urbanization growth should be strengthened, in order to calm the disagreement between urban developers and environmental managers and promote sustainable land use.

Since July 2019, the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth has been funding a project dedicated to the creation of an Islamic Cultural Archive (ICA), a database designed for collaborative research in English, French and Arabic connecting researchers based in Germany and four African countries. The ICA project pursues individual but interconnected studies revolving around Islamic learning in Africa. Supported by IT specialists, we develop a digital platform that meets the related requirements. The ICA seeks to develop new approaches to the handling of data through establishing an ontology-based digital research environment building on WissKI, a set of modules that extends the content management system Drupal with semantic web technology. The chapter sheds light on the technical implications of our endeavor to connect diverse alphabets and data from various digital and digitized media. The research team members connect their diverse data sets to create synergies between various research foci and interests, ranging from the nexus of Islamic knowledge production, dissemination, and acquisition to the socio-religious, political-economic, and cultural dimensions of Islamic learning. The chapter shows how our system allows us to collect and archive different types of data, generate metadata through an ontology, and connect data beyond language barriers. Most notably, our data description method links the data through multilayered and multilingual tags, as well as through comprehensive cross-references, thus constituting an innovative way of data handling that can benefit researchers in Islamic Studies as well as cultural and literary studies more broadly.

This dissertation contributes to the understanding of three pertinent developmental challenges in sub-Saharan Africa, namely education, geography, and trade. More specifically, it presents three independent and self-contained chapters which analyze these factors from a micro-level perspective, in turn. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 re-visits the role of physical geography in economic development. In particular, it employs a large-scale geo-referenced household-level survey covering 28 sub-Saharan African countries over 20 years to analyze the previously established link between coastal access and individual living standards. Analyzing individual-level data allows to expand on the insights from cross-country and cross-regional contexts and also facilitates the analysis of potential channels. The results show that individuals living further away from the coast are significantly poorer, as measured along a breadth of welfare indicators, such as basic consumption (water, food, medical care), possession of various consumer durables, or having paid employment. The chapter highlights the role of human capital, urbanization as well as infrastructural endowments in explaining the identified within-country differences in individual economic welfare. Chapter 3 investigates the effect of education on women's fertility and contributes to a growing literature which analyzes this nexus via quasi-experimental methods. Specifically, it leverages Burundi's Free Primary Education Policy of 2005 to identify exogenous variation in schooling via a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) and analyzes the outcomes affected by schooling through an instrumental variable (IV) approach. The results confirm the negative relationship between schooling and fertility observed in other developing settings. However, contrary to extant studies, the chapter provides novel evidence on a differential treatment effect of education. While poor women profit from policy-induced education in terms of increases in literacy, remunerated employment opportunities as well as a reduction in teenage births, none of these effects of additional education are observed for women from the wealthier households of our sample. The evidence of such a marked heterogeneity helps to evaluate under which conditions the literature’s previous findings may generalize. Chapter 4 evaluates the distributional effects of trade liberalization in Africa by combining the spatial considerations of regional market integration with a household-level analysis. The chapter thereby treats the re-establishment of the East African Community (EAC) in 2001 as a regional policy intervention having differential effects on individual households governed by their geo-spatial location within the countries. This prediction is derived from an extension to a canonical New Economic Geography (NEG) developed in the chapter. Contrary to the model’s prediction, the empirical results drawn from a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach do not reveal relative welfare increases in regions closer to internal EAC borders. Rather, the results provide evidence of strengthened agglomeration tendencies in the pre-existing economic hubs of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and Kampala, as measured by an increase in consumption and population density.

In this paper I explore the nexus of slavery, diaspora, and citizenship through the close examination of the complex negotiations of “diasporic citizenship” in Ghana. Over the past 25 years, Ghana has been a major site for diasporic homecoming, both in terms of tourism and repatriation. This movement has been accompanied by multiple demands and promises of citizenship. I discuss three dimensions of citizenship that speak to the problematics of inclusion and exclusion in the rhetoric and practice of diasporic homecoming. First, there is citizenship as an affective claim to belonging; second, there is citizenship as a legal status (and obligation); and third, there is the renegotiation of citizenship through genetic ancestry. Articulated in terms of soul, dual citizenship, and embodied link, these citizenship claims and practices transcend and challenge the strict limits of the nation-state, thereby pointing toward the “crisis of citizenship” as a larger problem.

Wie selbstverständlich es in Deutschland geworden ist, dass alle Kinder eine Schule besuchen, zeigen die Schul- und Kitaschließungen während der Corona-Pandemie. Dass Kinder den ganzen Tag zu Hause sind, ist eine ungewohnte Situation für viele Haushalte und beeinträchtigt den Arbeitsalltag ihrer Eltern. Im Gegensatz dazu ist es in anderen gesellschaftlichen Kontexten selbstverständlich, dass Kinder die Arbeit ihrer Eltern begleiten und selbst mitarbeiten. Die Durchsetzung einer allgemeinen Schulpflicht und ein Verbot von Kinderarbeit stellt diese Haushalte vor Herausforderungen.

During the armed struggle, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) supported women's liberation and appointed women to several political, logistical, and military positions. Meanwhile, in colonial society, changes in economic activities, access to formal education, and urban sociability resulted in a more significant female presence in public spaces. After independence, women's liberation rose to prominence in a context of internal conflict and economic disruption. The new government promoted the “New Man” and a host of associated social personae, all of which were defined by a set of moral qualities individuals were expected to comply with if they wanted to qualify as legitimate actors in the making of independent Angola. Women ought to engage in “National Reconstruction” by joining the Organization of Angolan Women (OMA), which focused on literacy and hygienist campaigns aimed at fighting “obscurantism”. However, many urban women had their own agendas, which called for changes in gender roles in both public and domestic realms. This paper seeks to highlight the shifting gender patterns in Luanda and rural guerrilla zones during the late colonial period, and then analyze how, after independence, different groups of women conceived their place in the building of the new nation, and how the State tried to “domesticate” the possibilities of women's activism as such, in symbolic as well as practical ways.

Founded five years ago, DjumbaiALA is a network committed to enhancing intercultural conversations and a non-hierarchical co-production of knowledge in the Global South. Diverse researchers, artists and activists from Latin America, Africa and Europe are contributing to this cause.

Eine funktionierende Wissenschaftskommunikation außerhalb des akademischen Feldes stellt gerade bei Kooperationen mit benachteiligten Bevölkerungsgruppen im Globalen Süden eine herausfordernde Notwendigkeit dar. Dahingehend bedarf es nicht nur ausreichender Open-Access-Zugangsmöglichkeiten, sondern ebenso sach- und zielgruppengerechter Übersetzungen, welche sowohl sprachliche, als auch soziokulturelle und wissensbasierte Deutungsbarrieren überwinden. Das Projekt "DjumbaiALA: Dialoge afrikanischer und afro-diasporischer Wissensformen im multimedialen Zeitalter" ermöglicht die Durchführung eines Workshops in Salvador da Bahia (Brasilien), der Nachwuchswissenschaftler*innen und Expert*innen aus den Bereichen digitales Design, Performance und Afrikastudien vereint. Als deutsch-brasilianisches Kooperationsprojekt zielt das Vorhaben darauf ab, das erste multimediale E-Book des transdisziplinären Netzwerks DjumbaiALA zu produzieren, um innovative Wege in der digitalen Wissenschaftskommunikation einzuschlagen. Durch die kollaborative Erschaffung dieses Prototyps werden institutionelle Partnerschaften gefestigt, auf deren Grundlage künftig weitere multimediale E-Books erstellt werden sollen. Indem Textelemente auf kreative Weise mit audiovisuellen Inhalten verknüpft und in unterschiedlichen Sprachen bereitgestellt werden, erhöht sich die Sichtbarkeit und Reichweite von sozial- und geisteswissenschaftlichen Forschungsergebnissen. Die Originalität des Projektes besteht insbesondere darin, dass mittels der multimedialen DjumbaiALA Books ein Wissensaustausch auf Augenhöhe zwischen dem Globalen Norden und Süden angestrebt wird. So können nachhaltige Lösungen für globale Herausforderungen erarbeitet werden.

The post-colonial debate challenges the self-certainty of sociology and the suggested universality of its theoretical premises. This has led to calls to provincialize sociological theories and concepts and include perspectives from the South. Thus, we need to ask whether sociological concepts apply globally. Burawoy’s notion of a professional ‘global sociology’ offers a starting point for provincializing sociological concepts without giving up their global applicability. The problems involved in applying the core sociological category of class to Kenya show that classical sociological concepts may be inadequate for analysing societies outside the European and North American context. For the analysis of inequality, we need a more open and empirically founded concept in which the classical notion of class describes just a particular pattern of social structure. For the development of sociological concepts, we always require a broad empirical and intercultural basis in order not to be caught in the trap of Eurocentrism.

Situated at the crossroads of pragmatics and interactional linguistics, the aim of the present working paper is to sketch a theoretical framework that is able to capture the linguistic and communicative facets of everyday moralities. Based on a phenomenological, constructivist and dynamic understanding which is informed by recent sociological and anthropological research, the case is made that moralities are best conceptualized as an interactional achievement, in other words, as ‘doing ethics’. Moreover, it is argued that communication plays a major role in doing ethics. Hence, moralities are explored in relation with language. The focus is on everyday moral communication and, in particular, on the verbal means and communicative practices conventionally used to signal moral meanings. The main purpose is to flesh out a conceptualization of doing ethics which opens up this domain for pragmatic and interactional approaches. Thus, theoretical considerations are prevalent in the working paper.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved AI capabilities for non-Western languages and scripts. Drawing on my experience building and curating the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), a digital repository of over 14,500 newspaper articles and archival documents in French, English, Arabic, Hausa, and Ewe, I present a practical walkthrough of an AI-assisted research pipeline: from raw scans to interactive visualisation. The challenges I encountered with West African sources have direct parallels for scholars working with Asian languages and scripts. I outline three stages of a "datafication" workflow: (1) text extraction through OCR and HTR, where multimodal LLMs increasingly outperform traditional engines on degraded documents in non-Western scripts; (2) data enrichment, including named entity recognition; and (3) data visualisation, where scholars without programming expertise can use AI-assisted coding to build interactive dashboards and explore their data. I demonstrate this workflow through a sentiment analysis dashboard analysing how 12,000+ IWAC newspaper articles portray Islam across five West African countries. Featuring temporal trends, cross-country comparisons, and multi-model agreement metrics, the dashboard was developed without writing manually a single line of code, through iterative dialogue with AI assistants. I also introduce Google's NotebookLM for source analysis and synthesis. Where Arlette Farge (2013) located the "allure" of the archive in the slow, tactile encounter with the document, AI offers a pragmatic complement: rapid triage of the ever-growing personal collections of scans that scholars accumulate, serving as an intuition pump for thinking with sources rather than automating their consumption. Rather than a theoretical discussion, this talk is an invitation to experiment, turning dormant digital collections into active research instruments.

This edited volume examines the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia. Changes in drylands are happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of often common land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. At the same time, powerful narratives about the drylands as ‘wastelands’ and their ‘backward’ inhabitants continue to hold sway, legitimizing interventions for development, security, and conservation, informing re-emerging frontiers of investment (for agriculture, extraction, infrastructure), and shaping new dryland identities. The chapters in this volume discuss the politics of change triggered by forces as diverse as the global land and resource rush, the expansion of new Information and Communication Technologies, urbanization, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the spread of violent extremism. While recognizing that changes are co-produced by differently positioned actors from within and outside the drylands, this volume presents the dryland’s point of view. It therefore takes the views, experiences, and agencies of dryland dwellers as the point of departure to not only understand the changes that are transforming their lives, livelihoods, and future aspirations, but also to highlight the unexpected spaces of contestation and innovation that have hitherto remained understudied.

Change is of all times, but it would appear that in the drylands of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia/Inner Asia it is happening in an overwhelming manner. Climate change, growing political instability, and increasing enclosures of large expanses of land are some of the changes with far-reaching consequences for those who make their living in the drylands. This edited volume is about the changes that arise from the entanglement of global interests and narratives with the local struggles that have always existed in the drylands. In this chapter, the notion of ‘frontier’ is proposed as a metaphor to frame this entanglement and as a way to bring the different chapters in the volume together. Overviews of the chapters show that to understand the full politics of frontier processes, analytical approaches are necessary that take into account historical institutional changes and different forms of power relations.