African Studies (AFR)

A seminar to review leading issues in African Studies and African development.

This course is an interdisciplinary research seminar in African Studies for graduate students in the humanities. In the seminar, students will explore key debates and issues in the field while examining the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches that scholars of African Studies have used to approach these debates. Through research articles that each employ a different set of methodological tools to examine questions of modernity and tradition, development, gender, ethnicity, conflict, and transnationalism, students will understand the possible approaches that can be employed to identify a research questions, gather evidence, and analyze it. Through reading and discussing such research articles, and discussing with scholars who visit class to present their research, students will gain conceptual tools to advance a research project in methodologically-grounded ways. While some topics will apply more directly to the student's individual research project, the themes studied are those that all scholars of African Studies should have some knowledge and mastery over, and each module will give students an opportunity to experiment by applying the theory and methods referenced in the scholarly literature to primary sources relevant to the student's own research. See syllabus in supplementary materials for more information.

This course examines the dynamics of migration and urbanization processes, as well as their policy implications, in non-industrialized regions of the world.

An enquiry into the relationships between the environment, resource control, resource conservation, rurual livelihood systems and poverty in Africa. AFR 532 Environment and Livelihoods in Africa (3) The seminar examines the relationships among the environment, resource control, conservation and rural livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa. Readings will allow students to develop a critical understanding of the ideology and epistemology of environmental management, resource control, rural development and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Students will be encouraged to interrogate modernist doctrines such as population-environment narratives, poverty-stewardship narratives and related environmental ideologies/narratives that embody sustainability and rural (under)development in sub-Saharan Africa. Through case study examples, students will use these conceptual foundations to trace the relationships between sustainability and poverty in a number of livelihood systems and resource control regimes. Some examples are resource (land/water) management between the state and nomadic pastoral systems; land reform and rural peasant livelihood systems; mining and rural livelihood systems; and national parks, trans-frontier parks and rural livelihood systems.

Given the rising global demand for energy and resources, Africa's production of oil and solid minerals has already produced very significant positive as well as negative impacts on the continent's political, economic, and social conditions. This seminar examines the extractive industry-driven changes in Africa's political economy, as well as in the continent's foreign relations. Students will examine the institutional basis under which the expansion of the industry is taking place in Africa. This will involve discussions of the institutional characteristics of Africa, including issues of land tenure and property rights laws, how institutional systems are changing in order to facilitate the industry's expansion, and the repercussions of these changes upon society. The course also interrogates the relevance of international efforts to mitigate some of the adverse impacts of the industry. Among such efforts is the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights. Overall this seminar examines the industry's impact on Africa's socioeconomic development and global relations, and concludes with how African countries might deal with the adverse impact of the Oil and Mining industry.

A course about discourses of sexuality and gender in studies of Islam in Africa, with South Africa as a case study.

This course critically examines the broad contemporary issues and interdisciplinary trends of literacy education with an international and comparative framework. CI ED (ADTED/AFR) 543 Comparative and International Trends in Adult Literacy Education (3) This course provides a comparative synthesis of what is known about literacy education and adult learning and what it will mean for the 21st century: the context in which literacy takes place; who participates; what they learn and why; the nature of the learning processes; new approaches to adult learning; social media and mobile devices; development theory in adult learning; and other issues relevant to understanding literacy education and adult learning in sociocultural, political, and international contexts. It also examines the newer approaches to adult learning: embodied, spiritual and narrative learning; learning and knowing in non-western perspectives; and cultural theory, poststructural and feminist perspectives. This course investigates questions such as: What does it mean to be literate in the 21st century? Why are teachers experiencing difficulty teaching students skills needed to understand and produce written work? Can schools in the 21st century inundated with digital technologies help students navigate the new literacies? How should adult literacy participants deal with the reality of new media and new literacies? What is the role of non-governmental organizations in this crisis? Overall, this course challenges graduate students to engage other international and non-western frameworks of learning and knowing to think about the purpose of education and learning as well as question the nature of knowledge production itself.

African feminisms are deeply rooted in the continent's rich historical traditions and diverse cultural contexts. In this interdisciplinary graduate seminar, students will become familiar with the theoretical frameworks that guide African feminist scholarship, as well as the activist histories from which they emerged. This course will consider the epistemological foundations of African feminist thought and how they differ from feminisms in other parts of the world. This course will also examine key areas of conjuncture - how African feminisms map on to larger transnational movements. Particular emphasis will be placed on the fluidity of African gender systems, the ways in which African women have negotiated politics, religion, militarism, sexuality, and violence, and the role of creativity, art, and beauty in nurturing and sustaining activist momentum. Students in the course can expect to engage with a number of different types of texts: documentaries, feature films, memoirs, novels, newspapers, scholarly books, and articles.

Creative projects, including nonthesis research, that are supervised on an individual basis and which fall outside the scope of formal courses.

Formal courses given on a topical or special interest subject which may be offered infrequently; several different topics may be taught in one year or semester.