Lecture | Annual Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture
“Armez-vous des sciences”? The Creative Lives of African Universities
- Date
- Wednesday 4 December 2024
- Time
- Series
- Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.47
The 2024 Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture in Colonial and Global History
By Professor Ruth Bush, University of Bristol.
Comments by dr Anne-Isabelle Richard (Leiden University) and dr Walter Nwki Gam (Leiden University).
Pan-African thought, future-oriented pragmatism, and structural and historical inequalities have shaped francophone African higher education over the past sixty years. These universities remain marginalised in the metrics of global higher education, faced with challenges of under-resourcing and over-crowding. Many significant research activities take place on their campuses, yet research publications tend to remain invisible in unevenly globalised, anglocentric, circuits of academic knowledge production. This Terra Incognita lecture will share work from the ‘Creative Lives of African Universities: pedagogies of hope and despair’ project. This interdisciplinary project convenes a team of eleven people across four universities: Université Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar, Senegal; Université Félix Houphouët Boigny in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire; Université Abomey-Calavi in Calavi, Benin; and Université Yaoundé I, in Yaoundé, Cameroon. Together, we seek to explore representations and lived experiences of university life in order to better understand dynamics of africanisation and decolonisation. We use participatory and creative methodologies to centre students’ experiences and stories, alongside archival and ethnographic methods.
This lecture will include critical analysis and methodological reflection, alongside materials produced by student co-researchers. It draws on specific examples of how staff and students navigate and document everyday realities, such as scant library resources and poor-quality student housing, as well as underpinning, multilayered power imbalances (epistemic extraversion; dominance of Western languages etc). Fatoumata Seck (2018) has unpacked the Wolof term ‘goorgoorlu’ (‘doing one’s best’ or ‘to man up’) with reference to the Senegalese comic/television hero of that name. Goorgoorlu describes the need to devise strategies to get by and thrive within the informal economy. Selected forms of ‘goorgoorlu’ or débrouillardise (which might be translated as ‘resourcefulness’, ‘coping’ or ‘wily improvisation’) also characterise lived experience in these four multilingual, historically francophone, African universities. Without romanticising or decontextualising such endeavours, This lecture will ask how the creative lives of African universities express the ‘anticipatory politics’ (Simone, 2010) of university life in the majority world, and how this might lead us to reflect differently on the university as an idea and institution.
Masterclass
On Wednesday 4 December from 9h30-12h30 Professor Bush will also organize a Masterclass for graduate MA and PhD students. For more information, please contact: Sander van der Horst, at: s.p.van.der.horst@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Speaker
Ruth Bush is Professor of Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol, UK. Her research concerns literary and cultural production, with particular interests in material print cultures, translation, gender, and institutions. She currently convenes “AFRIUNI: Creative Lives of African Universities”, a collaborative ERC project about representations and lived experiences of universities in four multilingual, historically francophone, African cities (Dakar, Abidjan, Abomey-Calavi and Yaounde). Recent publications include: Translation Imperatives: African Literature and the Labour of Translators (CUP Elements, 2022) and a bilingual special issue of the Journal of African Cultural Studies: “Les universités africaines francophones: le campus sous toutes ses formes / African Universities: Translating Francophone Campus Forms”.
Registration
Registration is not needed for this lecture or location.
Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture
The annual Leiden Terra Incognita Lecture is organized by the research group Colonial and Global History (COGLO) of the Institute for History at Leiden University and has the aim to explore the historiographical frontiers of the field of colonial and global history. Previous Terra Incognita speakers were Pekka Hämäläinen (2019), Cyrus Schayegh (2021), Kapil Raj (2022) and Emma Flatt (2023).