Current Research Units and Collaborative Research Centers
Adaptation and Creativity in Africa – Technologies and Significations in the Production of Order and Disorder
Project Director: Prof Richard Rottenburg
Priority Programme 1448 of German Research Foundation (DFG), University of Leipzig, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg
2010 - 2016
The African continent and its role in the world are changing again. Political and economic liberalisation, changing state-society relations, new local and translocal dynamics as well as accelerated processes of globalisation are posing wide-ranging challenges. Africa is witnessing one of the most precarious periods in its post-colonial time: new distributions of sovereignty and forms of ordering are (re-)negotiated at various levels. The capacities of African societies to navigate these changes are crucial, yet the determinants of these capacities are heavily under-researched. The Priority Programme addresses the key question of how actors in post-colonial Africa deal with the multiple challenges they are facing by mobilising and transforming their institutional capacities of adaptation and creativity. Particular attention is being paid to the role of technologies and systems of signification. Furthermore the programme intends to strengthen as well as support the collaborative potential of African Studies in Germany, not at least to increase its international visibility.
The programme is designed as an interdisciplinary undertaking that aims at transdisciplinary theory construction. It is designed as a contribution towards the strengthening of area studies in Germany, in this case African Studies by bringing together regional expertise with expertise from the systematic disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. The main disciplines involved are: social and cultural anthropology, economics, geography, history, comparative literature, political science, and sociology. Much of the progress achieved by these disciplines during the last sixty years was based on developing their own vocabularies, theories, and epistemic regimes to explain social realities. In the meantime, this specialisation and professionalisation has reached a point at which the analytical terms and models are no longer easily compatible. Area studies offer a challenge to overcome this disparity. The Priority Programme intends to rethink these different epistemological regimes and bring them together through a number of bridging concepts, such as adaptation, creativity, technology, signification, and ordering. A truly transdisciplinary orientation of the programme is regarded a necessary precondition for understanding African responses to wide-ranging new challenges.
There are four overall aims to the Priority Programme:
- to contribute to the understanding of what determines the capacity for adaptation and creativity in Africa in view of fundamental new challenges in various arenas
- to promote cooperation between academics from different disciplines in African Studies in Germany and across different institutions of teaching and/or research in the humanities and social sciences
- based on the common research agenda, to create an enabling framework for the development of a common vocabulary among representatives of different disciplines in African Studies in Germany
- to increase the visibility of Germany-based African Studies throughout Africa and in countries with an established tradition of African Studies (such as France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Portugal), but also in those countries of the Global South, which play an increasing role in Africa (such as Brazil, China, India and Russia)
E-Mail: richard.rottenburg@ethnologie.uni-halle.de
Homepage: http://www.spp1448.de/