search the africa institute site
In what seemed an endless health catastrophe all over the world, the outbreak of COVID 19 pandemic in March 2020 has imposed a global stillness and rethinking of the ethics of sharing the common world in an era of violence and racial reckoning, neoliberal extractive capitalism, climate vulnerability and mass refugees/migrants’ movements.
Throughout the COVID 19 pandemic to the present, the continent of Africa is still decrying vaccine inequity in the face of global north vaccine nationalism. However, since the outbreak, Africans are actively contributing to scientific and artistic innovations that need global highlighting against the under-reporting by hegemonic global north media broadcasting networks and significant contributions to the process of decolonizing fields of knowledge and their practical applications.
To discuss this, The Africa Institute hosts theoretical linguist, gender, and cultural critic Professor Ousseina D. Alidou to present her research titled “Pandemics, Epistemic Communities and African Futures in the World: Decolonizing the Disciplines” on Wednesday, September 28, 2022 (03:30 pm – 05:30 pm) at Khalid School – Auditorium.
The conversation will discuss how the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic imposed a global stillness and rethinking of the ethics of sharing the common world in an era of violence and racial reckoning, neoliberal extractive capitalism, climate vulnerability, and mass refugees/migrants’ movements. Through this dialogue, Professor Alidou aims to examine the ways in which global local African artists mobilize non-hegemonic epistemological reasonings to shape poetics of care and musical performances disseminated through digital mobile phones and other social media platforms during the COVID 19 pandemic period. These performances speak to marginalized rural and urban populations living in precarious material conditions because of the imposition of destructive neoliberal economic policies enabled by political elites.
Ousseina D. Alidou is a Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Professor Alidou is a theoretical linguist, gender, and cultural critic whose research focuses on women’s agency in African Muslim societies in the Sahel and East Africa (Kenya); gendered discourses of citizenship and rights; gender, education, politics, and leadership. She is the author of Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, a runner-up Aidoo-Schneider Book Prize of Women’s Caucus of the Association of African Studies) and Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, Political and Social Change (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); Alidou co-edited Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean with Renée Larrier (Kentucky: (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France) Lexington Book, 2015); Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africa with Ahmed Sikainga (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006) and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, Co-edited with Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000);. In addition, she has published over 50 book chapters and articles which appear in Research in African Literatures, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (SUGIA); Comparative Literature; and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; and Africa Today.
Alidou is Rutgers University Academic Director of the Mandela Washington Young Fellowship/YALI-Civic Leadership (2016-present); She serves as a Senior Faculty Advisor to UNESCO BREDA’s Gender and Transformative Leadership Curriculum Design for African Universities and Civil Society.
Jean Allman, Professor of History, The Africa Institute. She is also J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she directed the Center for the Humanities from 2014-2022. Read more.
In what seemed an endless health catastrophe all over the world, the outbreak of COVID 19 pandemic in March 2020 has imposed a global stillness and rethinking of the ethics of sharing the common world in an era of violence and racial reckoning, neoliberal extractive capitalism, climate vulnerability and mass refugees/migrants’ movements.
In what seemed an endless health catastrophe all over the world, the outbreak of COVID 19 pandemic in March 2020 has imposed a global stillness and rethinking of the ethics of sharing the common world in an era of violence and racial reckoning, neoliberal extractive capitalism, climate vulnerability and mass refugees/migrants’ movements.
Throughout the COVID 19 pandemic to the present, the continent of Africa is still decrying vaccine inequity in the face of global north vaccine nationalism. However, since the outbreak, Africans are actively contributing to scientific and artistic innovations that need global highlighting against the under-reporting by hegemonic global north media broadcasting networks and significant contributions to the process of decolonizing fields of knowledge and their practical applications.
To discuss this, The Africa Institute hosts theoretical linguist, gender, and cultural critic Professor Ousseina D. Alidou to present her research titled “Pandemics, Epistemic Communities and African Futures in the World: Decolonizing the Disciplines” on Wednesday, September 28, 2022 (03:30 pm – 05:30 pm) at Khalid School – Auditorium.
The conversation will discuss how the outbreak of the COVID 19 pandemic imposed a global stillness and rethinking of the ethics of sharing the common world in an era of violence and racial reckoning, neoliberal extractive capitalism, climate vulnerability, and mass refugees/migrants’ movements. Through this dialogue, Professor Alidou aims to examine the ways in which global local African artists mobilize non-hegemonic epistemological reasonings to shape poetics of care and musical performances disseminated through digital mobile phones and other social media platforms during the COVID 19 pandemic period. These performances speak to marginalized rural and urban populations living in precarious material conditions because of the imposition of destructive neoliberal economic policies enabled by political elites.
Ousseina D. Alidou is a Professor in the Department of African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian Languages and Literature and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Professor Alidou is a theoretical linguist, gender, and cultural critic whose research focuses on women’s agency in African Muslim societies in the Sahel and East Africa (Kenya); gendered discourses of citizenship and rights; gender, education, politics, and leadership. She is the author of Engaging Modernity: Muslim Women and the Politics of Agency in Postcolonial Niger (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, a runner-up Aidoo-Schneider Book Prize of Women’s Caucus of the Association of African Studies) and Muslim Women in Postcolonial Kenya: Leadership, Representation, Political and Social Change (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); Alidou co-edited Writing through the Visual and Virtual: Inscribing Language, Literature, and Culture in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean with Renée Larrier (Kentucky: (After the Empire: The Francophone World and Postcolonial France) Lexington Book, 2015); Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Africa with Ahmed Sikainga (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006) and A Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities, Co-edited with Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2000);. In addition, she has published over 50 book chapters and articles which appear in Research in African Literatures, Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika (SUGIA); Comparative Literature; and Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; and Africa Today.
Alidou is Rutgers University Academic Director of the Mandela Washington Young Fellowship/YALI-Civic Leadership (2016-present); She serves as a Senior Faculty Advisor to UNESCO BREDA’s Gender and Transformative Leadership Curriculum Design for African Universities and Civil Society.
Jean Allman, Professor of History, The Africa Institute. She is also J.H. Hexter Professor in the Humanities and professor of African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she directed the Center for the Humanities from 2014-2022. Read more.
Subscribe to our mailing list and get the latest news from The Africa Institute
