Update project proceedings (July 2013)-CTD’s

This quarterly newsletter of the research programme ‘Connecting in Times of Duress’ gives updates about the whereabouts of the team members, the organised events and the attended meetings and publications.

Website

The first to notice is that our web site is now completely updated!  Please have a look at www.connecting-in-times-of-duress.nl and find the links to our new facebook page and twitter account (@CTDuress). We hope that you will join us on these page and exchange ideas, announcements on issues concerning social media, conflict and migration. The idea is that these social media work in our project as an exchange platform. We have also included a vimeo page where films made by the team will be posted. Feel free to send us comments.

News from the PhD projects:

Inge Ligtvoet returned from a first field visit on July 19. This period of three months was meant to explore her research ideas as developed in her research proposal:  ‘Youth Confronting Political Repression: Political Mobilization through (Online) Social and Religious Networks in Post-Independence Nigeria and Cameroon’. As expected this period helped her to discover more about  ‘travelling churches’. She will soon share some of her pictures, vimeos and ‘stories’ from the field online.

Souleymane Adoum finalized his research proposal mid-May and left for Southern Chad to start his first fieldwork period in the third week of July. His research is entitled: ‘Communication et violences en Afrique central: le cas du Tchad et de la République Centrafricaine (1940-2010). Apart from consulting local archives, he will be interviewing former rebels and focus on their life histories.

Catherina Wilson’s planned trip to Bangui could not take place due to the ‘coup’ in Central African Republic and the violence that went with it. Considering all this, she now started doing her fieldwork among CAR refuges in Northern Congo, notably in the towns of Gemena, Libenge and Zongo. Since there is only a river separating both countries, many Bangui-people found refuge after the violence broke out in CAR last January. Catherina left on June 21, and is now exploring her ‘field’. You can follow her on her blog http://rumoursontheubangui.tumblr.com/. Her research project is entitled: ‘Popular journalism and Rumour in and from Bangui’

Adamou Ahmadou is in the Netherlands since last February. His project is entitled; ‘Nomads confronting duress and (de)connections: the case of the Mbororo in Central Africa’.  He started his research in 2011 in the programme ‘Mobile Africa revisited’ that provided him with research money. His 6 months stay in the Netherlands allows him to organise these data (including visual material) and start writing his thesis. Next to this laborious work he has been very active in following several courses, attending a summer school in Basel, visiting a workshop on ‘mobility’ in Norway and exploring the archives in Aix-en-Provence, where he also attended a workshop on witchcraft organised by the Anthropology Department of the University of Aix En Provence.[1] He has been refining his mastery of English. Apart from writing, he hopes to have a good film scenario before leaving. Adamou’s PhD will result in a book and documentary.

Inge Butter’s project is entitled: ‘Navigating socio-political change in Central Africa and networks as points of connection: nomadic Arabs of the Batha, Chad’. Inge returned from fieldwork in June 2013 and has since been working with her data. A short film with first impressions of the Batha traders she worked with, was posted on our Facebook page and can also be found under Visual Data/Vodcasts on our website.

Jonna Both’s thesis on ‘Crisis and post-conflict in Yumbe, Uganda’ is advancing (she works at AISSR, Amsterdam, Mirjam is promotor). She has been back from the field for about a year now. Her juggling with data resulted in the first articles that are ready to be sent in for publication. She writes these articles around her intriguing observations in the post-conflict area Yumbe that has been for long a neglected area in the research in Northern Uganda (in contrast to other parts).

News from MA projects

Leonie Meester is a research master student (African Studies, Leiden) who did research on online and offline politics in Cameroon. She is currently busy writing her MA thesis.

Eefje Gilbert is a research master student (African Studies, Leiden). Her project is entitled: ‘Whose voice exactly? Contemporary Central African Hunter-gatherers Translating the Global discourse on Themselves’. She left for Cameroon on July 14 and will stay for a period of 4 months.

Boukary Sangare took part in the ECAS conference where he shared his findings on the use of facebook in the context of the Mali conflict. He started an MA in Sociology at Cheickh Anta Diop University (Senegal) under the supervision of Prof. Abdou Salam Fall.

In August he will be in Douentza for one more month of fieldwork on the role of media in the current Mali crisis. This fieldwork will be used for the writing of his master thesis.

News from Post-doc project

The postdoc project, conducted by Lotte Pelckmans, will look into how different groups of migrants and people in the diaspora are engaging with family and friends back home in times of conflict and duress. More concretely, the way in which migrants are not only active, but outrightly activist online in order to engage with conflict situations back home are at the heart of this project, which will compare Cameroonian and Malian migrants in Belgium, The Netherlands and France (Paris).

Visuals

In order to get the team trained in conducting research through visuals, our cameraman Sjoerd Sijsma organised a workshop in which the making of a short vimeo film (see website), was central. The team is now equipped with photo cameras and apart from written field reports, some vimeo films have been uploaded on our website by Inge and Catherina. We invite you to have a look.

Visit to conferences

Those teammembers who were in Europe, have visited the ECAS conference. We participated in a panel on digipolitics, organised by Stroecken of Gent University, and another one on social media in research on Africa, organised by Thomas Guy (Mission archive Basel), Jos Damen (ASC Leiden), and Mirjam de Bruijn. Lisbon has been great and feedback will help us refine the ideas presented.

Manchester -ICHSTM, International Congress of History, Science, Technology and Medicine-

Mirjam will visit this conference on the history of technology.. She is part of a panel organised by the Science Museum London where she will present work from the previous research project ‘Mobile Africa Revisited’, related to the forthcoming exhibition of the museum on communication technology. The Mobile Africa Revisited worked with the museum on part of the exhibition ‘mobile telephony in Cameroon’.

PACSA (Peace and conflict Studies in Anthropology)

Mirjam and Lotte will participate in a forthcoming conference ‘Crisis and Conflict’ at Copenhagen University, end of August 2013. They are now working on a conceptual paper about the notion of ‘duress’, the emic experience of conflict by commoners and people who are not main actors in conflict areas. Jonna Both will also visit this conference and present a paper based on her work in Uganda.

Seminar series:

Our second seminar will take place in Leiden on September 17^th. To give more weight to the historical aspects of media use, we invited South African scholar Shamil Jeppie, who is well known for his publications on Timbuktu manuscripts and archives. He will also organise a masterclass on history and literacy for research master students.

The next seminar will be in November and we will invite Louisa Lombard to talk about her experiences with rebels in Northern CAR.

Workshops in Africa.

We decided to fix the first workshop in Africa at the Langaa research centre in Bamenda, Cameroon, mid-March 2014.

We look forward to any of you readers being around in the area at that time in order to participate. The workshop will mainly focus on methodology in relation to conflict research. Please let us know if you have an interest in and the possibilities to participate.

In conclusion, our team is expanding and research is ongoing. We hope to present you some of our first data in the next newsletter and for now we look forward to your comments and suggestions (of any nature). Please do have a look and feel free to be active in the social media of our project. Looking forward to meet in cyberspace! Finally, we wish you an inspiring summer, with lots of book reading under a warm sun.

With sunny summer regards,

Prof. Dr. Mirjam de Bruijn

Dr. Lotte Pelckmans