Eastern Africa in the World, A BIEA seminar series

The 4th event in this series is Hybrid and will be on Thursday 21st May (9:00am -10.30am BST and 11:00am- 12.30pm EAT) “The new geopolitics of eastern Africa: Emerging regional responses” (online and in person, at BIEA Nairobi). 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.