African Studies Workshop Call for Papers
University of Chicago
The Age of Infrastructure and the Infrastructure of Age:
Politics, Technology, and Citizenship in Africa
Wilder House
May 15, 2015
Africanists have long been interested in studies of age and generational relations. They have also
long examined the way roads, bridges and other forms of physical infrastructure simultaneously
embody and shape sociality. Of late, however, work on globalization, as well as perspectives
emerging from studies of science and technology, have enabled scholars working in Africa to
explore age and infrastructure in new ways. Indeed, some of the most important work to come
out of African studies in recent years has explored, for instance, how transnational forms of
youth culture have become the objects of intense political contestation in Kenya and Uganda, or
how waste, water, and communications infrastructure enable new modes of citizenship in
Nigeria, Ghana, and South Africa. Only rarely, however, have age and infrastructure been
studied in tandem with one another, despite the fact that the two concepts potentially intersect
and overlap in numerous ways. Very often, youth as a category is defined in relation to
particular kinds of infrastructure like schools, cell phones or the Internet. At the same time, these
various examples of infrastructure are often re-imagined, repurposed, and transformed in the
context of generational change, a point that became particularly visible during the Arab Spring in
2011, when young people across the Middle East began to use Facebook for political organizing.
The African Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago invites papers exploring the
complexities of age and infrastructure in African studies, with a particular interest in examining
the points of intersection between the two. In what way do age and the conflicts that emerge
around it structure social forms in African societies? How do such forms and conflicts intersect
with the infrastructures of African life? And how does attention to the intersections of age and
infrastructure in Africa shed new light on the meaning of citizenship in African societies, the
consequences of neoliberal globalization, and the ways in which ordinary people struggle to
forge meaningful modes of sociality across the continent?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
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Technology
Biopolitics
Youth cultures
Education, NGOs, and development
African ecologies
The infrastructure of citizenship
Generational change
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to Brady Smith (bradysmith@uchicago.edu)
and Kate McHarry (kmcharry@uchicago.edu) by January 15, 2015.