Monthly Archives: July 2016

British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship Success

Congratulations to the Centre’s Dr Andy Cohen and Dr Rory Pilossof (University of the Free State) who have won a British Academy Newton Advanced Fellowship Grant of £94,000 to study labour migration in Southern Africa. The project, titled: Labour Migration and Labour Relations in South and Southern Africa, c. 1900-2000 will run for three years. Its primary focus is to make Cna5pJ2WEAEVfErlabour data from South and southern Africa more accessible to researchers, academics and other interested parties. In doing so,  it will offer hitherto unprecedented opportunities for comparative and collaborative work. Labour migration has been of crucial importance in southern Africa for centuries, with large numbers of people having moved across the region to mines, farms and urban centres in South Africa. This continues to this day. We will, therefore, analyse the long-term impact of labour migration in southern Africa; the changes in occupational structures over the course of the twentieth century; and processes and rates of proletarianisation and the legacies of labour surpluses across the region. The resulting outputs will include an edited collection of labour data from southern Africa and a number of research articles in leading international peer-reviewed journals.

Rory will join the Centre for the History of Colonialisms as a research associate and we look forward to welcoming him to Kent for his first visit in September.

Childhood in Africa Stream, African Studies Association of the United Kingdom Conference, University of Cambridge, 7-9 September 2016

 

burundi-734899_1920Temilola Alanamu, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of History, University of Kent and Prof Benjamin Lawrance, Hon. Barber B. Conable, Jr. Endowed Chair of International and Global Studies at the Rochester Institute of Technology will co-chair the Childhood in Africa Stream at the ASAUK conference in September 2016.

The stream is partly funded by the Department of History’s Internationalisation Award and will include sixteen participants from six countries across four panels.

The panels titled: The economy of childhood in African history, Representing the African Child in Postcolonial Africa, Evaluating Childhood, Youth and politics in colonial Africa, Child Rights and Reform in Africa will consider the histories of childhood in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial Africa. Contributors will examine the multiplicity of expectations, limits and experiences of childhood from the perspective of children, from the view of those with whom they came into contact, and those who contemplated their welfare on the local, national and international platform. Panels within this stream interrogate how concepts of childhoods have been defined, redefined, debated and negotiated across time, cultural and geo-political boundaries reflecting the concerns of those at the centre and margins of society. They also consider the effects of these definitions on children’s lives and their strategies for negotiating fluid boundaries in various historical contexts. Papers explore the gendered, racial and age limitations of childhood and both the changes in and resilience of childhood experiences during moments of stability, struggle, conquest and independence.