Research group on Identity (Religion as Critique) – convened by Dr. Andrea Cassatella & Dr. Yahya Sseremba
Influential social studies scholarship on Africa has devoted much attention to the colonial logic of the nation-state persisting in contemporary politics, as in the work of Mahmood Mamdani, and to imperial features of capitalism, as in the writings of Samir Amin and Samuel Moyo. In general, this scholarship has been characterised by a secular approach in both method and content: social studies as a secular epistemic endeavour, with the political and the economic domain as essentially non- religious phenomena. Thus, little attention has been paid to religion as a way of life that exceeds questions of conscience and identity as in traditional secularism, and is implicated in the foundation of knowledge and political authority, as well as the organization of economic and communal life as such African thinkers as John Mbiti, Abdulkader Tayob, Farid Esack, Laila Ahmed and Isabel Phiri, among others, have shown. Indeed, despite the extension of formal processes of secularization to Africa since colonial times, religion remains today central to socio-cultural, political and economic processes. Throughout the continent, many are the examples of religious movements within Christianity, Islam and traditional religions that articulate critical discourses about political liberation, gender, ecology, and economy. These discourses are drawn from sources, frameworks and values rooted in spiritual traditions that often question the patriarchal, capitalist and secular models of communal life dominating Africa. This research group aims to explore interdisciplinary social studies literature on key methodological and topical debates that involve, concentrate on, or draw from religion, broadly construed across traditions and across time. The goal is not simply to push the scope of decolonisation to critically focus on the secular understandings of modern knowledge, politics and economy, and thus to question modern methods and sources about what counts as ‘scientific’ knowledge. It is also to expand and deepen theoretical frameworks and methodologies in social studies through a comparative understanding of non-secular epistemic frames that take moral economy, relationality, community and spirituality as central to what it means to live together.
Research group on Political Identity – convened by Dr. Yahya Sseremba
This research group focuses on political identity and the intersection of political identities like race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender and sex. In the age of the nation state, liberalism and capitalism, such identities are central in political organization, resource distribution and social mobilization. They constitute the basis for political and socioeconomic inclusion and exclusion and define political violence. Scholarship has surely examined these identities and even studied the ways in which they intersect. Much of this scholarship, however, is either universalist or particularistic, and thus unable to explain the ways in which these varied identities form and intersect in the postcolonial African context. Postcolonial Africa presents particular though by no means peculiar experiences of state-society relations that call for rethinking political identity from the African vantage point. Sections of scholarship have recently attempted to privilege the African historical experience. Unfortunately, much of such scholarship still approaches political identities in a disjointed manner, paying disproportionate attention to one form of identity with little consideration of how identities relate to each other. For example, limited effort has so far been made to include gender in the conceptualizations of political identity, which (conceptualizations) largely privilege race, ethnicity and religion. Second, if political identities intersect, so do the historical processes that shape them— political, economic, cultural, etc. Even when these connections are sometimes appreciated, there is still little theorization of how the connections materialize in postcolonial Africa. For instance, how can Africa’s multiple minority puzzles—racial, ethnic, religious, gender, etc.—spread over Africa’s two publics (the civil and customary spheres) be understood as one multi-layered minority puzzle approachable as a whole rather than in a piecemeal manner? If patriarchy cuts across the civil sphere, the customary domain and the Muslim domain, can there be a universal feminist approach toward this phenomenon? Would such feminist efforts focus on each of these entities or would they target the structure of power that produces these entities as one multi-layered phenomenon? Much work, both in fields of activism and scholarly inquiry, continues to be conceptually and practically handicapped because of its limited ability to see the interconnectedness of these seemingly distinct spaces. To make sense of the interconnection is to avoid the trap of producing derivative solutions that reproduce the logic of the problem being addressed.
Research group on Labour Migration – convened by Prof. Lyn Ossome and Dr. Grace-Edward Galabuzi
The proposed research project aims to address the contemporary phenomenon of labour migration from a global south vantage point, and with a specific focus on the migration of domestic workers from two labour sending countries in East Africa: Kenya and Uganda, that are mainly exporting to the Middle East/ Gulf States (labour receiving countries). The key problem we are addressing is that of labour externalization, with a specific focus on the underlying conditions that are both necessitating and driving labour migration in the local contexts of Uganda and Kenya. Our unique contribution is to shift from the predominantly human rights lens through which this trend has been studied, towards a counternarrative that is grounded in a political economy analysis of the labour sending countries and conditions of labour therein. This is an important shift from human rights approaches that tend to abstract workers from the social contexts producing their precarization, and therefore end up addressing the effects rather than root causes of labour externalization. Human rights approaches also normatively tend to assume the effectiveness of rights in postcolonial societies marked by historical inequalities precisely because they leave the historical structure of inequality unattended. The overall objective of the project is to explore the dimensions and implications of labour migration as a response to the crisis of social reproduction and precarity in labour markets through a comparative examination of labour migration in Uganda and Kenya, two key labour sending countries in East Africa. To do this, we shall centre the analytical lenses of Political Studies and Feminist Political Economy. We explore the social, economic, and political conditions and circumstances that structure the pursuit of employment across borders, with a specific focus on domestic workers. The proposed project seeks to better understand migrant labour as an individual and structural mode of response to the economic challenges and income insecurities in the East African context, and its relationship to the unfolding crisis of social reproduction in select East African countries. The project will examine the social histories and historical conditions of migrant labour, and propose novel research and policy frameworks for understanding the contemporary problem of labour migration.
Research group on Gender (Gendered bodies and Postcolonial African Politics) – convened by Dr. Florence Ebila & Dr. Andrea Cassatella
What is the relationship between modern politics and gendered bodies in postcolonial Africa? Much of the intellectual tradition informing African postcolonial politics is marked by the white bourgeois male as the salient historical subject undergirding abstract conceptualizations of the human that privileges the mind. This tradition has been challenged by internal critics of modernity such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault, who have insisted on the importance of the body, but also by anticolonial authors such as Fanon, who theorizes the self from the embodied lived experienced of the colonised subject. This tradition has also been criticised by the feminist camp, from such authors such as Judith Butler, Elisabeth Grosz, Sarah Ahmed, Silvia Federici but also Oyeronke Oyewumi, Sylvia Tamale, Saidiya Hartman, and Audre Lorde, who have emphasized that the theorisation of the body remains male, racial, and insufficiently material. Further, recent scholarship on masculinities by Amon Mwiine Ashaba, Kopano Ratele, R.W. Connell advance the feminist debate on the body by troubling patriarchy and gender further though questioning contextual, individual, and historically specific masculinities and femininities. Centring the racial, gender and materialist dimensions, this research group seeks to equip researchers with a solid knowledge about theories and approaches to the body. This is pursued by reading sources from cultural studies, anthropology, psychology, religion and political economy as the fields from which to explore the body as an object and method of investigation. The focus will be not simply on how the body is understood, experienced and constituted across contexts, but also what it offers in terms of epistemic sources to approach and understand social realities. The overall goal is for the group’s members to develop a broad and solid basis from which to advance interdisciplinary methodological lenses to engage in critical analyses of various social, political, cultural and economic realities across Africa.
Research group on Land, Social Reproduction & Food Sovereignty – convened by Prof. Lyn Ossome & Dr. Theresa Auma
The land question and by extension, the agrarian question continue to be central to African countries in general, and Uganda to be specific. Numerous studies have attempted to engage this question both in Uganda and globally. The age of (neoliberal) capitalist development has foregrounded land enclosures and land acquisitions as the most fundamental principles that support capitalist development, coupled with the unbridled and endless exploitation of the peasantry and working-class people to the detriment of their societies. These have not only alienated the peasantry from their land and labour (by turning it into property worth owning and trading in the land market) but also, reminiscing the earlier colonial practice, they have alienated the peasantry from their conceptions of what constitutes “productive” use of land. For the most part, the people of Uganda and especially the peasantry have continued to see land as a means of subsistence and survival and this preoccupation still informs their relentless efforts to fight against alienation and dispossession. As such, the exploitation and dispossession of the masses is viewed as a dispossession of their means of survival since it conditions them into not being able to produce food and by extension, undermines their ability to reproduce themselves and their societies. Yet, this is not a concern for the neoliberal capitalist and imperial market and states since it contradicts the circuits of capitalist accumulation. These issues constitute part of the many issues that form the land and agrarian questions both in Uganda and in the larger global South. This research group seeks to explore the intersection/nexus between land – specifically, land enclosures, evictions and dispossession – food sovereignty and social reproduction. The research is informed by an understanding that just as it cannot be disentangled from the postcolonial political context within which it unfolds, the land question today cannot be divorced from discussions around food sovereignty and social reproduction which are core aspects to the material well-being of the peasantry. By locating these questions in the material and concrete conditions of the masses, especially the peasantry, the research seeks to understand the contemporary land question and contribute to scholarship by theorizing from the objective living conditions of the subject masses, and inform policy from the vantage point of the marginalized. A key objective is to contribute to the ongoing scholarly debate from the vantage point of the marginalized, based on concrete realities of the subaltern. The research is undertaken through a loose collaboration between MISR and the newly established LEMU working group on land and agrarian questions.