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Alumnus John Agbonifo Organizes Panel for ASAA Conference

Call for Papers on Environmental Humanities in Africa

11.06.2015

Together with the African Network of Environmental Humanities (ANEH), RCC Alumnus John Agbonifo is organizing a panel on “Discovering Environmental Humanities: Recovering the Environment in the African and the African in the Environment” at the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) International Conference.

The conference will take place 13–17 October 2015 at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan, Nigeria.

Abstracts are invited from scholars in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences on the interconnection between human societies and the nonhuman world, including the environment broadly defined. The panel is interested in enquiries that probe into how human beings have shaped the environment and how the latter, in turn, impacted on the societies with the attendant consequences.

How have humans modified the natural world both materially and discursively? What cultural and historical understanding and relations with nature have been altered in that process? How has the use of both discursive and material practices transformed African societies? What historically and culturally rooted ethics, meanings, worldviews, beliefs, and practices have been utilized by the poor in their struggles against projects of environmental destruction or development? Thematically, what are:

  1. The political relevance of environmental humanities in contemporary Africa?
  2. The value-based ideas for defending nature against the destructive violence of capital exist in local communities across Africa?
  3. The environment in African poetry, folklore, taboos, myth, oral traditions, songs, dirges, festivals, totems, ghosts, gods, masquerades, and dances?
  4. The roles prestigious institutions, such as CODESRIA, can play in an effort to vitalize and domesticate environmental humanities scholarship in African universities?

Interested scholars are invited to submit abstract on any of the above or related issues. Abstracts, which should be no longer than 300 words, may be submitted at the latest 10 July 2015 and 28 August 2015 for full paper, to either John Agbonifo agbonifo1@gmail.com or Noah Echa Attah neattah@gmail.com.