Publications

This tenth edition of BIGSASworks! explores different theoretical and methodological approaches to fieldwork experiences, practices, and challenges in African Studies. Employing multidisciplinary perspectives and lenses that include intersectionality, decolonization and reflexivity, the contributors discuss how fieldwork can question, upend and reconfigure the research experience. All contributions are underlined by a critical reflection on positionality, exploring the intersections between different positions emanating from parenting, age, marriage, race, motherhood, nationality, diaspora, language, and religion. In particular, there is a conscious reflection on often marginalized positions and perspectives in the field, underscored by a critical reflection of the positions of the contributors as attached to institutions in the global north, in relation to their work in the global south. The contributors reinforce the need for critical reflections on the practice of fieldwork in African studies, underscoring the intersections between lived experience and the research process.

This Working Paper is the revised transcript of the New Year Lecture by the dean of the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, which won the coveted funding of the Excellence Strategy of the German Federal and State Government. The agenda of reconfiguring African Studies features not only in the lecture title, but is also prominent in the cluster's agenda. However, drafting a successful proposal is one thing; implementing the agenda is another. The paper explores the various layers, levels, and intricacies implied in the reconfiguration of African Studies, and also highlights the conceptual shift required to steer the study of Africa in new directions.

The dynamics of contemporary capitalism have empowered the role and influence of finance within the realm of agriculture. In response, agri-finance research has focused on the extension of global finance's investment chains and how parts of the agricultural sector—mainly farmland—are transformed into financial assets, where multiple sources of capital seek to make gains. To do so, scholarship on ‘finance going farming’ has directed attention to the variety of financial actors (i.e., pension, endowment and private equity funds, insurance companies and investment banks); their motives to invest; the variegated mechanisms deployed to reformat farmland and agricultural production for financial purposes; and the increasing power of shareholders to shape productive and distributive decisions. While this literature has advanced our understanding of how finance makes its way into agriculture, within agrarian studies, these processes and dynamics raise important conceptual and methodological challenges about how to centre financialization in dynamics of agrarian change. In this exchange, our contributors consider how contemporary trends in agri-finance demand us to rethink relations of production, property and power and processes of accumulation. Key questions that the forum addresses include how and to what extent is finance connected to the restructuring of capital and its modalities of accumulation in agrarian settings? What ties does financialization have to changes in labour regimes? How does it affect productive capital and its associated relations of power?

The quest for transdisciplinary research requires academics to collaborate with actors from heterogeneous fields, both inside and outside academia. In order to transcend disciplinary, social, symbolic or physical boundaries, co-producers of knowledge need to deal with multiple relations, theories and practices taken for granted in each field involved. This presentation explores how field alignments can be made between researchers, artists and activists in order to create synergies and produce knowledge collaboratively. It draws on a participatory research project developed with diverse actors from Brazil, Colombia, Mozambique, Cameroon and Germany, who share a common interest in understanding whether and how the arts can contribute to processes of transformation in communities afflicted by violence, racism and social exclusion. The reflection shows how the research field emerges as a fluid third space co-created by actors with specific knowledges and positionalities. Ultimately, this presentation raises fundamental questions on whose queries, assumptions, interests, theories and methodologies count as legitimate, giving them the power to (re)define a research field.

Este ensaio apresenta uma reflexão sobre o poder testemunhal de fotografias tiradas no campo de extermínio nazista de Auschwitz-Birkenau. Pretende-se, a partir delas, problematizar a relação entre fotografia, memória e história, na medida em que tais imagens nos podem fornecer uma possibilidade de pensarmos como um testemunho visual pode aperfeiçoar grandes narrativas históricas da representação do holocausto – desde um objeto de memória de natureza tipicamente mediada (VAN DJICK, 2007). Nesses termos, a fotografia se manifesta aqui contra as vontades de desaparecimento, ligando-se à memória coletiva e à temporalidade. Finalmente, buscar-se-á entender como o político e o poético se entrecruzam nessas imagens, pensadas por Didi-Huberman (2012) como um ato contra a própria razão da história e contra a política de desimaginação e do inimaginável, dando um novo rumo às representações públicas do holocausto, em oposição à proposta da Shoah Foundantion.

Discourses on translation are a symbolic production that provide a key to understanding how texts and practices are conceptualised and given meaning in the process of (re)producing knowledge, which in turn shapes social realities. The objective of this study is to investigate the discourse on literary translation into Swahili from a comparative and diachronic angle, as well as from a sociological perspective, in order to identify the deep entanglements among sociocultural situatedness, historical contingencies, and literary receptivity that frame the circulation or rejection of literary translations. Three historical settings at particular moments of dramatic social change are explored, namely the seizure of power on the East African coast by Oman, British rule in Tanganyika, and the nation-building project in post-independence Tanzania. Major questions addressed in this book include: have there been major translation flows? What were their main functions? How have Swahili literary translations and translators been conceptualised throughout history? What motivated translators to translate specific texts? What hindered or favoured their agency? Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, concerning the (re)production of knowledge, and Pascale Casanova, Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro’s theories of the circulation of symbolic goods in an international space of cultural, political, and economic relations provide a framework for exploring of the dynamics of literary importation into Swahili. However, the specificity of the context explored here, has required the canonical narratives of consecration, heterodoxy/orthodoxy dichotomy, and autonomy to be critically questioned and modified. The method adopted in this book builds networks among translation flows, para- and extratextual analysis, the inclusion of sociocultural and historical facts (contextual analysis), and the analysis of the literary field and agents’ trajectories. In so doing, the focus of the analysis moves from a macro-(context) to a microperspective (texts and discourses) and back again. While many differences can be found in the three historical settings presented in this book, the findings reveal that the discourse on translation is a unique site where different (intellectual, political, economic) spheres speak to each other. The discourse on translation has contributed to the formation, or in other cases adjustments or erasure of literary as well as social and political spaces. This book thus throws light on the use of literary translation as a platform where the demands, needs, or visions of individuals or social and political groups could be channelled.

Arlette Farge's celebrated model of archival research — the slow, tactile encounter with documents in a silent reading room — presupposes well-ordered European institutions. For historians of West Africa, the reality is different: newspaper archives scattered across countries and continents, poorly catalogued, physically deteriorating, and sometimes easier to find in Berlin or Washington than in their countries of origin. Fieldwork often becomes a race to photograph as much as possible, leaving thousands of images unprocessed on hard drives for years. The gap between digitisation (capturing documents) and datafication (transforming them into searchable, structured data) is one of the most significant unacknowledged obstacles in contemporary historical research. This presentation draws on the Islam West Africa Collection (IWAC), an open-access database of over 14,500 newspaper articles, to show how AI can address this bottleneck. It discusses multimodal OCR for complex layouts, named entity recognition adapted to West African contexts, and corpus-level triage through sentiment analysis. It then introduces agentic AI pipelines — systems where specialised sub-agents autonomously handle image processing, text extraction, and metadata enrichment under human supervision — as a way to make these methods accessible to researchers without programming expertise. The talk concludes by reflecting on the stakes of using Western-built tools to make non-European knowledge visible.

How does being a parent in the field influence a researcher's positionality and the production of ethnographic knowledge? Based on regionally and thematically diverse cases, this collection explores methodological, theoretical, and ethical dimensions of accompanied fieldwork. The authors show how multiple familial relations and the presence of their children, partners, or other family members impact the immersion into the field and the construction of its boundaries. Female and male authors from various career stages exemplify different research conditions, financial constraints, and family-career challenges which are decisive for academic success.

While World War II was ravaging Europe, thousands of Polish people found a safe haven in British colonial Africa. This forgotten history shows us that migration patterns are constantly changing.

Cet article explore l'intersection de la géographie des conflits et de la médiation sociale, avec un focus particulier sur les zones frontalières du nord du Bénin, à travers une approche qualitative. Il examine comment les dynamiques foncières, les identités culturelles et les tensions ethniques interagissent dans un contexte de conflits territoriaux exacerbés par l'émergence de groupes armés et d'activités terroristes. S'appuyant sur la théorie de la transformation des conflits de Lederach, J. P. (1995), l'étude utilise des méthodes qualitatives pour analyser les défis de la médiation et évaluer l'efficacité des pratiques traditionnelles face à ces complexités. L'article propose des stratégies de médiation innovantes, basées sur des analyses qualitatives approfondies des perspectives locales et des dynamiques socioculturelles, promouvant une approche de médiation flexible et inclusive. Ces stratégies recommandent l'implication d'acteurs infra-étatiques et non étatiques, soulignant la nécessité de réinventer les pratiques de médiation pour établir une paix durable. Les orientations pratiques dérivées de l'analyse qualitative offrent des perspectives précieuses pour les médiateurs et les décideurs dans des contextes de conflit intense.

In view of the developments of eSciences and accompanying infrastructures in German academia, the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple with its Digital Solutions portfolio has set the ambitious aim of establishing a digital research repository for its disciplinary heterogenous research projects ranging from economics to climate studies to linguistics, history and media studies, the “only” common ground being the studied area “Africa” and “African diasporas”. The four thematic sections that all touch upon eSciences, or put more generally, the digital transformation of the academic world and society from very different perspectives and disciplinary diversity. Be it knowledge management as a big data business model for academic services, digital neo-colonialism, the different legal aspects, problems of bias in semantic data processing, digitalization projects in Africa or digitization projects and collections built up in Europe.

This paper critically assesses the making of the modern timescape “the future” from an early modern historian’s and a postcolonial perspective. As a western invention, it was imposed on many societies in the historical contexts of colonialism and imperialism. “The future” is thus loaded with semantics such as ‘civilization versus primitive forms of life’, ‘progress versus backwardness’, ‘development versus regression’ and other similar dichotomies. This article looks into timescapes prevalent in the early modern period, using the latter as a background against which we can reflect on the historical making and baggage of linear timescapes such as the “past, present and future”, about the diversity, or multiplicity, of timescapes in the past and today, how this could inform our understanding of constructions of cultural difference and how much we would need a transperiodical and transregional anthropology of time.

This study revisits and explores the contributions of women religious organizations in Nigeria, namely, The Federation of Muslim Women Organizations in Nigeria, (FOMWAN) and Zumuntar-Mata (Church Women League) of Christian Churches, in comparative and proportional evaluations. The elemental findings reveal that these religious organizations under study are well structured and methodical associations with the primary aim of addressing some major challenges faced by women in Nigeria, and had taken necessary steps to ameliorate them. Initiatives such as Economic empowerment, educational, religious and political enlightenments, and provision of health services are their major contributions to women and the society at large. One interesting manifestation of toleration among the two differing religious groups was that they cooperate and, in some cases, jointly execute some essential and enablement programs to both Muslim and Christian women. Their slogans ‘the act of kindness knows no boundary’ is always at fore. In the same vein, in order to widen the horizon of their activities and responsibilities they partner favorably and mutually with development partners governmental and non-governmental within Nigeria and beyond with a bid to advance and extend their interventions to as many women as possible in the cities as well as in the rural areas. Through their various programs and initiatives for self-help, therefore, the organizations significantly contributed towards women enfranchisement and impacted in societal development positively.

The World Health Organization recommends initiating breastfeeding in the first hour of life, exclusive breastfeeding for six months, and continued breastfeeding for at least two years. Aggressive marketing of breast milk substitutes (BMS) undermines breastfeeding and is linked to adverse child and maternal health outcomes. This is particularly problematic in the Global South, where socioeconomic conditions often amplify the risks associated with BMS. The adoption of national BMS legislation in line with the 1981 International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes is therefore crucial but difficult due to strong opposition from the transnational formula milk industry. Breastfeeding advocates in Kenya were able to overcome this powerful opposition when the country adopted a strict BMS Act in 2012, which has since facilitated and protected remarkable improvements in breastfeeding rates. We conduct a qualitative case study to identify the political enablers of the successful adoption of this important law.

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