Civic Agency in Africa PDF Download

Author: Ebenezer Obadare
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 1847010865
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

View

Book Description
Examines the variety of mostly unorganized and informal ways in which Africans exercise agency and resist state power in the 21st century, through citizen action and popular culture, and how the relationship between ruler and ruled is being reframed.

Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004356363
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 367

View

Book Description
What Politics? Youth and Political Engagement in Africa examines the diverse experiences of being young in today’s Africa. It offers new perspectives to the roles and positions young people take to change their life conditions both within and beyond the formal political structures and institutions. The contributors represent several social science disciplines, and provide well-grounded qualitative analyses of young people’s everyday engagements by critically examining dominant discourses of youth, politics and ideology. Despite focusing on Africa, the book is a collective effort to better understand what it is like to be young today, and what the making of tomorrow’s yesterday means for them in personal and political terms. Contributors are: Ehaab Abdou, Abebaw Yirga Adamu, Henni Alava, Päivi Armila, Randi Rønning Balsvik, Jesper Bjarnesen, Þóra Björnsdóttir, Jónína Einarsdóttir, Tilo Grätz, Nanna Jordt Jørgensen, Marko Kananen, Sofia Laine, Naydene de Lange, Afifa Ltifi, Ivo Mhike, Claudia Mitchell, Relebohile Moletsane, Danai S. Mupotsa, Elina Oinas, Henri Onodera, Eija Ranta, Mounir Saidani, Mariko Sato, Loubna H. Skalli, Tiina Sotkasiira, Abdoulaye Sounaye, Leena Suurpää, and Mulumebet Zenebe. What Politics? Youth and Political Engagement in Africa is now available in paperback for individual customers.

Author: Mawere, Munyaradzi
Publisher: Langaa RPCIG
ISBN: 9956763004
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 422

View

Book Description
Questions surrounding democracy, governance, and development especially in the view of Africa have provoked acrimonious debates in the past few years. It remains a perennial question why some decades after political independence in Africa the continent continues experiencing bad governance, lagging behind socioeconomically, and its democracy questionable. We admit that a plethora of theories and reasons, including iniquitous and malicious ones, have been conjured in an attempt to explain and answer the questions as to why Africa seems to be lagging behind other continents in issues pertaining to good governance, democracy and socio-economic development. Yet, none of the theories and reasons proffered so far seems to have provided enduring solutions to Africa’s diverse complex problems and predicaments. This book dissects and critically examines the matrix of Africa’s multifaceted problems on governance, democracy and development in an attempt to proffer enduring solutions to the continent’s long-standing political and socio-economic dilemmas and setbacks.

Author: Wale Adebanwi
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1847011659
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 386

View

Book Description
Multi-disciplinary examination of the role of ordinary African people as agents in the generation and distribution of well-being in modern Africa. What are the fundamental issues, processes, agency and dynamics that shape the political economy of life in modern Africa? In this book, the contributors - experts in anthropology, history, political science, economics, conflict and peace studies, philosophy and language - examine the opportunities and constraints placed on living, livelihoods and sustainable life on the continent. Reflecting on why and how the political economy of life approach is essential for understanding the social process in modern Africa, they engage with the intellectual oeuvre of the influential Africanist economic anthropologist Jane Guyer, who provides an Afterword. The contributors analyse the politicaleconomy of everyday life as it relates to money and currency; migrant labour forces and informal and formal economies; dispossession of land; debt and indebtedness; socio-economic marginality; and the entrenchment of colonial andapartheid pasts. Wale Adebanwi is the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford. He is author of Nation as Grand Narrative: The Nigerian Press and the Politics of Meaning (University of Rochester Press).

Author: Chris Atton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317509412
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 615

View

Book Description
The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media provides an authoritative and comprehensive examination of the diverse forms, practices and philosophies of alternative and community media across the world. The volume offers a multiplicity of perspectives to examine the reasons why alternative and community media arise, how they develop in particular ways and in particular places, and how they can enrich our understanding of the broader media landscape and its place in society. The 50 chapters present a range of theoretical and methodological positions, and arguments to demonstrate the dynamic, challenging and innovative thinking around the subject; locating media theory and practice within the broader concerns of democracy, citizenship, social exclusion, race, class and gender. In addition to research from the UK, the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, the Companion also includes studies from Colombia, Haiti, India, South Korea and Zimbabwe, enabling international comparisons to be made and also allowing for the problematisation of traditional - often Western - approaches to media studies. By considering media practices across a range of cultures and communities, this collection is an ideal companion to the key issues and debates within alternative and community media.

Author: David Horton Smith
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137263172
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1505

View

Book Description
Written by over 200 leading experts from over seventy countries, this handbook provides a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of the latest theory and research on volunteering, civic participation and nonprofit membership associations. The first handbook on the subject to be truly multinational and interdisciplinary in its authorship, it represents a major milestone for the discipline. Each chapter follows a rigorous theoretical structure examining definitions, historical background, key analytical issues, usable knowledge, and future trends and required research. The nine parts of the handbook cover the historical and conceptual background of the discipline; special types of volunteering; the major activity areas of volunteering and associations; influences on volunteering and association participation; the internal structures of associations; the internal processes of associations; the external environments of associations; the scope and impacts of volunteering and associations; and conclusions and future prospects. This handbook provides an essential reference work for third-sector research and practice, including a valuable glossary of terms defining over eighty key concepts. Sponsored by the International Council of Voluntarism, Civil Society, and Social Economy Researcher Associations (ICSERA; www.icsera.org), it will appeal to scholars, policymakers and practitioners, and helps to define the emergent academic discipline of voluntaristics.

Author: Amy S. Patterson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009235168
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 283

View

Book Description
Making up 65 percent of Africa's population, young people between the ages of 18 and 35 play a key role in politics, yet they live in an environment of rapid urbanization, high unemployment rates and poor state services. Drawing from extensive fieldwork in Ghana, Uganda and Tanzania, this book investigates how Africa's urban youth cultivate a sense of citizenship in this challenging environment, and what it means to them to be a 'good citizen'. In interviews and focus group discussions, African youth, activists, and community leaders vividly explain how income, religion, and gender intertwine with their sense of citizenship and belonging. Though Africa's urban youth face economic and political marginalization as well as generational tensions, they craft a creative citizenship identity that is rooted in their relationships and obligations both to each other and the state. Privileging above all the voice and agency of Africa's young people, this is a vital, systematic examination of youth and youth citizenship in urban environments across Africa.

Author: Kevin Ward
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317495012
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 845

View

Book Description
The Routledge Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics provides a comprehensive statement and reference point for urban politics. The scope of this handbook’s coverage and contributions engages with and reflects upon the most important, innovative and recent critical developments to the interdisciplinary field of urban politics, drawing upon a range of examples from within and across the Global North and Global South. This handbook is organized into nine interrelated sections, with an introductory chapter setting out the rationale, aims and structure of the Handbook, and short introductory commentaries at the beginning of each part. It questions the eliding of ‘urban politics’ into the ‘politics of the city’, reconsidering the usefulness of the distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ urban politics, considering issues of ‘class’, ‘gender’, ‘race’ and the ways in which they intersect, appear and reappear in matters of urban politics, how best to theorize the roles of capital, the state and other actors, such as social movements, in the production of the city and, finally, issues of doing urban political research. The various chapters explore the issues of urban politics of economic development, environment and nature in the city, governance and planning, the politics of labour as well as living spaces. The concluding sections of the Handbook examine the politics over alternative visions of cities of the future and provide concluding discussions and reflections, particularly on the futures for urban politics in an increasingly ‘global’ and multidisciplinary context. With over forty-five contributions from leading international scholars in the field, this handbook provides critical reviews and appraisals of current conceptual and theoretical approaches and future developments in urban politics. It is a key reference to all researchers and policy-makers with an interest in urban politics.

Author: Sharath Srinivasan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000433536
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

View

Book Description
Across Africa, digital media are providing scholars with a reason and opportunity for revisiting the question, and the analytical lens, of publics with new vigour and less normative baggage. This book brings together a rich set of empirically grounded analyses of the diverse digital spaces and networks of communication springing up across the Eastern African region. The contributions offer a plural set of reflections on whether and how we can usefully think about these spaces and networks as convening publics, where citizens come together to discuss matters of common interest. The authors make clear the need to unshackle such studies from slavish acceptance of outsiders’ prescriptions on what constitutes desirable publics. They highlight the importance of being attentive to rapidly changing everyday realities across Africa in which people are coming together around the circulation of ideas in ways that include digital means of communications. In so doing, the contributions bring forward new ways of thinking about, through and with publics, alongside other heritages in Africanist scholarship that have continued salience. Looking outwards from the region, such different perspectives on our digitally mediated world offer theoretical novelty that advances how we think about the notion of publics and their political significance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

Author: Emma Hunter
Publisher: Ohio University Press
ISBN: 0821445936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 405

View

Book Description
Africa, it is often said, is suffering from a crisis of citizenship. At the heart of the contemporary debates this apparent crisis has provoked lie dynamic relations between the present and the past, between political theory and political practice, and between legal categories and lived experience. Yet studies of citizenship in Africa have often tended to foreshorten historical time and privilege the present at the expense of the deeper past. Citizenship, Belonging, and Political Community in Africa provides a critical reflection on citizenship in Africa by bringing together scholars working with very different case studies and with very different understandings of what is meant by citizenship. By bringing historians and social scientists into dialogue within the same volume, it argues that a revised reading of the past can offer powerful new perspectives on the present, in ways that might also indicate new paths for the future. The project collects the works of up-and-coming and established scholars from around the globe. Presenting case studies from such wide-ranging countries as Sudan, Mauritius, South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ethiopia, the essays delve into the many facets of citizenship and agency as they have been expressed in the colonial and postcolonial eras. In so doing, they engage in exciting ways with the watershed book in the field, Mahmood Mamdani’s Citizen and Subject. Contributors: Samantha Balaton-Chrimes, Frederick Cooper, Solomon M. Gofie, V. Adefemi Isumonah, Cherry Leonardi, John Lonsdale, Eghosa E.Osaghae, Ramola Ramtohul, Aidan Russell, Nicole Ulrich, Chris Vaughan, and Henri-Michel Yéré.