As part of the Cluster's Annual Conference on "Spatialities" Christine Vogt-Williams and Epifania Amoo-Adare talked about Amoo-Adare's book "Spatial Literacy - Contemporary Asante Women's Place-Making".
A central premise informing the concept of Critical Spatial Literacy is the decryption of specific codes found in the built environment so as to understand how these affect people’s social lives, cultural practices and sense of place. The conversation addresses how Critical Spatial Literacy might work as a conceptual frame to explore how the social and economic lives of women of (continental and diasporic) African descent have been constituted, situated and enacted in contemporary spatialities. One salient point concerns how the concept might allow for African feminist and womanist responses to uneven development.
Epifania Amoo-Adare is an independent scholar, who is interested in (un)thinking science through art and other radical approaches. She is currently based in Accra, where she is seeding Biraa Creative Initiative (BCI). Epifania has a Ph.D. in Education from UCLA and is a RIBA Part II qualified architect. Born in London, and raised in Nairobi, Cape Coast and Accra, Epifania also has over 25 years of experience working in various flelds, including education and international development, within locations like Afghanistan, Georgia, Germany, Ghana, Qatar, the United Kingdom and the United States. Her post-disciplinary interests span diverse topics such as creative writing, critical pedagogy, decolonial thinking, epistemology, feminism(s), spirituality, spatial theories, and urbanization.
"A Black Sense of Place": An ICDL Keynote Conversation with Prof. Katherine McKittrick
This keynote conversation with renowned Black feminist geographer Katherine McKittrick, that took place at the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence's Annual Conference 2023, considers knowledge production processes and research practices from specifically Black spatializing vantage points, which are relevant to the transdisciplinary field of African Studies. The term 'field' is itself a spatial term concerning the conceptualisation of African Studies as a plethora of knowledge production sites which encompass epistemic perspectives from geopolitical and geophysical locations on the continent and the diverse African diasporas.
McKittrick's "Dear Science and Other Stories" (2021) combines poetic approaches with an erudite Black epistemic politics concerned with Black histories and how these have contributed to the intersectional spatialization of bodies read as Black. Here the term 'Black' transports more nuanced political, poetic and intellectual aggregates of being - rather than a mere racial category built on colonial logics. Thus this conversation is meant to sound and map distinct Black epistemic values through intersectional readings of power relations in structural, cultural and disciplinary sites of knowledge production. Notably the concept of the intersection and its accompanying socio-political and epistemic identity vectors are in and of themselves spatialising metaphors.
https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/news/2023/2023-10-31-Cluster-conference/index.html
As part of the Cluster's international conference on "Spatialities" Patricia Daley gave this keynote speech titled: "Learning Disobedience in African Studies: Producing Defiant Scholarship on Migration and Refugees".
Patricia Daley is a Professor of Human Geography of Africa at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Jesus College. Her research interests focus on forced migration in Eastern and Central Africa. In the School of Geography and the Environment, she is a member of the Political Worlds: Place, Power, Politics research cluster, which seeks to develop novel and critical understandings of the relationship(s) between regimes of discipline and violence, geographies of the South, and postcolonial, feminist, decolonial and anti-racist work. She co-edited, with Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, "The Routledge Handbook on South-South Relations", and her most recent publication is co-authored with Amber Murrey (2023) and is entitled "Learning Disobedience, Decolonizing Development Studies" (Pluto Press).
As part of the Cluster's international conference on "Spatialities" Tendayi Sithole held a keynote lecture titled: "Azania: Extended Notes on Black Radical Thought - in Dialogue with Bruce Janz (UC Florida)".
Tendayi Sithole is Professor in the Department of Political Sciences, University of South Africa. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the Institue for Pan-African Thought and Conversation, University of Johannesburg. Sithole's scholarly books are "Refiguring in Black" (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2023), "The Letter in Black Radical Thought" (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023), "Mabogo P. More: Philosophical Anthropology in Azania" (New York: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2022), "The Black Register" (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), and "Steve Biko: Decolonial Meditations of Black Consciousness (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). His book "Black X: Liberatory Thought in Azania" is forthcoming with Wits University Press in 2024. Currently, Sithole is conducting research for a biography provisionally titled "Vinny da Vinci: A Portrait".
Bruce Janz is Professor in the Department of Philosophy, co-director of the Center for Humanities and Digital Research, and core faculty in the Texts and Technology program, all at the University of Central Florida. He teaches and writes on African philosophy, cultural philosophy, contemporary European philosophy, digital humanities, and questions of place and space across many disciplines. He has taught in Canada, Kenya, South Africa, and the US. His most recent book is "African Philosophy and Enactivist Cognition: The Space of Thoght" (Bloomsbury, 2023).
