The Creative Lives of African Universities: Pedagogies of Hope and Despair
- Date: 7 September 2023, 13:15–15:00
- Location: Gunnar Johansson, Blåsenhus, von Kraemers Allé 1A, Uppsala/Zoom
- Type: Lecture
- Lecturer: Ruth Bush, professor, University of Bristol
- Web page
- Organiser: Democracy and Higher Education
- Contact person: Christina Kullberg
Professor Ruth Bush will present the conceptualisation and initial findings in her ERC project evolving around cultural representations and lived experiences of students in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Benin from the 1960 to the present.
In the last three decades, during Africa’s industrialisation, higher education has made big steps in development. Life in academia and the diverse cultural production within its context have multiple influences on the external perception of education. The EU-funded AFRIUNI project is studying the cases of universities to explore the cultural representations and lived experiences of university life on the African continent. The project will focus on the forms that structural and epistemic violence, physical discomfort and individual and collective self-realisation obtain within these contested institutions in material, affective and aesthetic terms.
Ruth Bush is professor of Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bristol. Her research and teaching concern African and Diasporic literary and cultural production, with a particular interests in material print cultures (i.e. histories of publishing and reading), translation, gender, institutions, and decolonial thought and practice. Her books include Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945–67 (LUP, 2016), and which received the First Book Award (Scholarship) from the African Literature Association, Translation Imperatives: African Literature and the Labour of Translators (CUP, 2022).
Join the lecture live from Zoom