Eastern Africa in the World, A BIEA seminar series
The first event in this online series will be on Monday 20th April (20th April, 12-1.30pm BST and 2-3.30pm EAT) “Urbanities and global circuits: Place and place-making in the world”. Please sign up for the meeting link and updates at https://biea.ac.uk/eafriwo.
This event is part of the BIEA’s “Eastern Africa in the World” seminar series. It invites scholars to think about Eastern Africa, broadly defined, as a distinctive yet plurally constituted area-in-the-world. A region too frequently essentialised or fragmented in outsiders’ contradictory and entwined narratives, Eastern Africa lurches between being synonymous with historical absence, calamity and failure and redemptive visions of a techno-optimist ‘Silicon Savannah’ and ever ‘emerging’ promise. Too often, the region’s remarkability is penned reductively from perspectives elsewhere. Yet in its histories, imaginaries, agencies, and connectedness Eastern Africa is a region that has as often written the elsewheres of the world as been shaped by them. This is an intellectual space to think the world from Eastern Africa, and center the scholarly significance of Eastern Africa as world-making through time and across multiple domains.
Future events on the series:
- 21st May, 12-1.30pm BST and 2-3.30pm EAT (TBC): “The new geopolitics of eastern Africa: Emerging regional responses” (online and in person, at BIEA Nairobi)
