Seminars

This talk will outline ongoing work on African urbanism developed through research platforms such as Where Is Africa, tapestries and installations that study quotidian spaces in Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam, and a book project in process, tentatively titled Animist Urbanism. By exploring notions of non-human aliveness, practices that frame inseparable relations between people and the environments they inhabit, this talk articulates how African cities make critical interventions on the global study of urbanism.

This talk is part of a larger project that imagines a history of space exploration centering Africa as a crucial site for humanity’s first steps off the planet. During the Cold War, when the United States, the Soviet Union, and many Western European nations first began to explore space, they stationed considerable ground infrastructure on African soil to track, communicate with, and launch satellites into orbit. Largely invisible in popular accounts of space exploration, these technoscientific stations, strewn across the African continent, produced a wide range of entanglements with local populations and environments, usually in the form of displacements of local populations or damage to the local ecologies. The talk offers a (re)reading of the imprint of this enormous infrastructure through the voices of Africans, many of whom viewed the siting of such technology in their countries as extensions of older forms of extractive colonial violence but rendered now under the cloak of scientific 'progress.'