The Jackson School’s Winter 2021 Lecture Series, “Protest, Race and Citizenship across African Worlds,” invited emerging scholars to trace Horn of Africa connections to today’s global trends in popular politics, racial formation, and new forms of belonging. Watch the recordings of past talks below.
Each lecture was moderated by Jackson School Director Leela Fernandes followed by a Q&A session.
Whose Struggle for What? Sexual Minorities and Social Movements in Africa
Serawit Debele, postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany, discusses whether popular political protests in Tunisia, Ethiopia, and Sudan in the past decade allowed sexual minorities to imagine cultivating a world beyond the violence and injustices to which they have been subjected. The 30-minute lecture is followed by a Q&A with Amanda Swarr, an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.
Recorded on Jan. 22, 2021.
Reconstruction, Reconsidered: Belonging and Urban Contestation in Mogadishu’s ‘Building Boom.’
Surer Mohamed, Scholar and Fellow, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge discusses why despite a remarkable post-war building boom and returning diaspora, Somalia’s capital city remains contested. Ballooning property values and the refurbishment of public and private spaces continue to embody the politics of urban belonging, memory and violence of the past three decades.
Recorded on Feb. 3, 2021.
Rethinking Israeli Citizenship: The Case of Ethiopian Jews and Their Struggle for Naturalization Between 1955-1975
Efrat Yerday, Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology at Tel Aviv University, Israel’s Chairperson of the Association of Ethiopian Jews, and the 2020 recipient of the New Israel Fund’s “Guardian of Democracy” Gallanter Prize, presents a talk on Ethiopian Jews’ struggle for naturalization between 1955-1975. The story of Ethiopian Jewish immigration to Israel typically begins after 1975. But foregrounding the pre-1975 years offers a unique case study for understanding the Israeli-Jewish citizenship regime and immigrants who do not conform to the normative and racialized national character of citizenship.
Recorded on Feb. 10, 2021.
Policing Somali Refugees: Somali Refugee Resistance to State Violence
In this talk, Dr. Mohamed Abumaye, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State University, San Marcos, examines how for Somali refugees in San Diego’s City Heights neighborhood and the camp at Dadaab, Kenya are connected carceral spaces. Both are governed by militarized techniques and technologies of surveillance and militarism, and both demand counter-technologies through which refugees survive and even thrive.
Recorded March 3, 2021.
Ethiopia in Theory, Theory as Memoir
In this public talk, Elleni Centime Zeleke, Assistant Professor, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University, analyzes whether Tizita, the Amharic term for memory and nostalgia as well as a musical form of lament, can serve as a tool for capturing the untimely interference of the past in stories of the Ethiopian revolution.
Recorded March 17, 2021.
This series was sponsored by the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and African Studies Program, in partnership with the Center for Global Studies, Comparative History of Ideas, Near Eastern Languages & Civilization and Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation. Other co-sponsors of individual talks are noted in the session descriptions.