TAFAAAE15U Optional course: Alternative Approaches to Economies in Africa

Using a range of disciplinary perspectives and theoretical entry points, this course aims to explore the different elements, meanings and implications of what constitute ‘economic’ ideas, spaces and practices within diverse African contexts, paying attention to both their material and symbolic dimensions.  As one of its key starting points, the course will explore the interconnectedness of social, spatial, political, cultural and economic relations, challenging our often-held assumptions about what constitutes an ‘economic’ sphere and ‘economic’ life, and in turn pluralising the notion of ‘economy’ to one of multiple, inter-related economies. Some of the spheres and themes the course will investigate include: historical trends in thinking about African economies, including more recent notions of ‘Africa Rising’; rethinking formal and informal economies; diverse understandings of wealth and regimes of value; the workings of moral economies; the paradoxes of displacement economies; the flow of gifts and commodities; labour and production processes; the dynamics of property; questions of class and accumulation; and the meanings, making and manipulations of money.