UC African Studies MRG

SPOTLIGHT AFRICA, in conjunction with the AFRICAN ACTIVIST ASSOCIATION,

Presents Dr. Gilbert Maoundonodji from Chad

Tuesday, May 19th @ 1:30 pm

Bunche 11377  –  please note room

11377 is on the 11^th floor of Bunche Hall

Dr. Gilbert Maoundonodji is president of the Association for the Promotion of Fundamental Liberties in Chad (APLFT), a human rights organization based in the Chadian capital of N’Djamena. As APLFT president, he has established the Independent National Observatory for Election Processes and Democracy (ONIPED) and has overseen the selection and deployment of hundreds of election observers during Chad’s national elections in 2001. An active member of Chad’s civil society, Dr. Maoundonodji has served as vice president of the executive board of Radio FM Liberty and as editor of the magazine Tchad et Culture. He is an expert on oil extraction in Chad and currently sits on the international board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative. He recently completed his doctoral dissertation in political science entitled, “Geopolitical and Geostrategic Stakes of Oil Exploitation in Chad” and holds a PhD from the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium). During his fellowship, Dr. Maoundonodji is studying the relationship between oil exploitation and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular focus on the case of Chad.

Declarations of Dependence: Labor, Personhood, and Welfare in South Africa and Beyond
James Ferguson (Anthropology, Stanford University)
Tuesday, May 19 / 11:00 AM
McCune Conference Room

South Africa has in recent decades gone through a wrenching transformation from a labor-scarce society to a labor-surplus one.  Labor scarcity through most of the 19th and 20th centuries led to forms of social solidarity and social personhood that had significant  continuities with the pre-colonial past (continuities that are obscured by conventional narratives that emphasize the rise of  capitalism as a complete and comprehensive break with the past).  It is suggested that the South African experience reveals, in an extreme  and clarifying form, a set of processes that are occurring in many  other parts of the world.  Better understanding such processes may help us to find our way past some of the current impasses in progressive politics.  James Ferguson is Professor and Chair of the Department of  Anthropology at Stanford University. Ferguson’s most recent book,  Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, was published  by Duke University Press in 2006. He is now beginning a new research  project in South Africa, exploring the emergence of new problematics of poverty and social policy under conditions of neoliberalism.

Sponsored by the IHC’s African Studies RFG, the Department of History, and the Department of Anthropology.