Call for Applications: Archives Workshop in Nairobi (Deadline: 7 June)

By Africa in Words on 1 June , 2019 • ( 0 )

‘Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s’

Week-Long Collaborative Archives Workshop

Nairobi, 17-23 October 2019

‘Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s’ is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and will run from 1 September 2018 to 31 August 2022.

The project seeks to understand and explain how East Africa’s global connections systematically broke down after independence, opening up a set of new and unpredictable paths forward.

The organizers are seeking applications from current postgraduate students (MA or PhD) studying in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to participate in a week-long collaborative archives workshop in Nairobi, Kenya from 17-23 October 2019.

The aim of the workshop is for each participant to research and write a c. 800-1000 word single-authored biography of an individual to be published online as part of a new website intended as a resource for teaching to be called ‘East Africa’s Global Lives’ to be launched in Spring 2020. The website will initially bring together around 20 short biographies of individuals, with further contributions by other members of the project team.

The objectives:

To broaden understanding of how East Africans imagined the world and their place in it by excavating networks of global affinity between authors and readers spread across the world.
To assess the implications of the implosion of cosmopolitan, internationalized utopian visions of Africa’s place in the world for the period of economic and political crisis that followed.
To emphasise the importance of the African experience for studies of globalization from across the humanities and social sciences.

Participants should be engaged in postgraduate research on an aspect of East African history in the twentieth century, and the individual chosen to be the focus of the biography should in some way be linked to participants’ current or past research.

Participants will spend 4 days researching in a library or archive in Nairobi with members of the project team (Emma Hunter, Daniel Branch, Gerard McCann and Ismay Milford), and two UK-based PhD students linked to the project, Daniel Heathcote and Anna Adima, then on the final day will present a first draft of the biography as part of a public workshop in Nairobi. After the workshop, participants will correspond with the project team to discuss the final versions of their biographies and how the publications may be useful to their future research.

There are provisions for return travel expenses to Nairobi, and accommodation and food expenses while in Nairobi for six participants.

The deadline for applications is 7 June. Please arrange to send a CV, one-page letter outlining your motivations for applying, and a short reference from your postgraduate supervisor to Dr Emma Hunter (Emma.Hunter@ed.ac.uk) by that date.

Further details about the project are available below and on this webpage: https://www.ed.ac.uk/history-classics-archaeology/research/research-projects/another-world-east-africa-and-the-global-1960s

If you have any questions about the collaborative archives workshop or about the wider project of which it is a part, please get in touch: Ismay.Milford@ed.ac.uk