School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies is pleased to invite you to the following seminar as part of its series for 2023/2024:

Speaker: Professor Loren B. Landau, Professor of Migration and Development (University of Oxford) and Research Professor at the African Centre for Migration & Society (University of Witwatersrand)

Discussant: Dr Clayton Boeyink, Research Fellow, CAS, University of Edinburgh

Chair: Dr Barbara Bompani, Reader in Africa & International Development (CAS), and Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS) at the University of Witwatersrand

When: Wednesday 1st November 2023 (3:30pm-5pm GMT)

Where: Please join us at 40 George Square, Lecture Theatre A

To attend this event: Please register on Eventbrite

This exploratory paper explores a fundamental question: Given acute and self-evident forms of inequality, deprivation, and disenfranchisement (or non-enfranchisement) what forms of urban social mobilisation and politics are emerging across sub-Saharan Africa? More specifically, it asks if there are latent bases for solidarity and democratic demand making taking shape in the continent’s rapidly expanding cities. It draws on almost twenty years of research in small and medium sized cities and a more recent project in Accra (Ghana), Nairobi (Kenya), and Johannesburg (South Africa). It ultimately offers an ambiguous if unsettling set of conclusions: decades of political ‘departicipation’ (Kasfir 1976) and the associated informalisation of spatial regulation have combined with urban residents’ heterogenous socio-temporal trajectories to generate fragmented and fluid civic space. From this emerges multiple modes of politics. These exist almost kaleidoscopically and are reconfigured by ever-changing urban environments. While some conform to the space-based, temporal linearity informing democratic and ‘progressive’ political theory, others rest on less certain spatial and temporal foundations. These multiple ‘publics’ (to borrow Ekeh’s famous framing) at least partially share cities’ geographic space but remain situated within intersecting and often competing moral economies distinguished by their spatial and temporal parameters. 

Speaker Biography:

Loren B Landau is Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford and Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration & Society. His interdisciplinary scholarship explores mobility, multi-scale governance, and the transformation of socio-political community across the global south. A frequent media resource, he has also published widely in the academic and popular press.

Publications include, Forging African Communities: Mobility, Integration, and Belonging (Palgrave); I Want to Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in South Africa’s Great Metropolis (Wits Press); Contemporary Migration to South Africa (World Bank); The Humanitarian Hangover: Displacement, Aid, and Transformation in Western Tanzania (Wits Press); and Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa (UN University Press/Wits Press).

As chair of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (2004-2012) he served on the South African Immigration Advisory Board. He holds an MSc in Development Studies (LSE) and a PhD in Political Science (Berkeley). Together with Jean Pierre Misago, he co-founded and co-directs the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab (MGL). 

Discussant Biography:

Dr Clayton Boeyink is a Research Fellow funded by Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) based at the University of Edinburgh, which aims to improve healthcare at the intersection of gender and protracted displacement amongst Somali and Congolese refugees and IDPs in Somalia, Eastern DRC, Nairobi, and Johannesburg.

He completed PhD research at the Centre of African Studies Edinburgh which explores the shrinking space of asylum in Tanzania.